Welcome to another round of racism fixation, courtesy of the politically transparent liberal media.
When Rick Santorum dared to allude to the dehumanization of black Americans in our country’s flawed history, liberals went into full attack mode. What is it about the documented past that causes such a visceral adverse reaction from liberals? Santorum, in a January 2011 CNS interview about President Obama’s denial of personhood to the unborn, found it remarkable for a “black man to say no, we’re going to decide who are people and who are not people.”
Many others, including me (as black as Obama) do, too. Considering black people, mixed or not, were considered less than human and subjected to dehumanization since stepping foot on American soil, Santorum’s remarks were a powerful and legitimate commentary on the question and history of personhood.
Liberal pundits fumed. How dare Santorum use…HISTORY…to call liberal ideology to task?!
This week the Huffington Post and The Washington Post’s “black media” outlet, The Root, go to great lengths in articles to mine for racism where it doesn’t exist (Santorum’s remarks) while ignoring the racism that caused personhood to be stripped from black people under government-sanctioned slavery. It is about race, when the reference is about the denial of black people’s humanity throughout American history. It doesn’t matter whether one is Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or any other political stripe. You are not immune to the challenges of history. You are not immune to the scrutiny that is necessary to understand why certain social policies are destructive. You are not immune to the appropriate application of race when it is invoked in every other instance in American life, often unnecessarily.
It took the Reconstruction Amendments to begin to rectify more than a century of the barbaric practice of slavery and the systematic degradation of black people in this country. (These history-making acts of Congress were used to show the undeniable correlation between Roe v. Wade and slavery in our Juneteenth TooManyAborted.com billboard campaign.) The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were passed by the party of abolition–the Republicans. Without them, Obama simply wouldn’t even be able to be President, today, let alone a “pro-choice” one.
Flash forward to 2011, and the party of Lincoln still believes, contrary to the institutions of media, public education and most urban governments, that another group of people deserve the same personhood ascribed to us all. In fact, even the crucial importance of our unborn children (“…secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”) was firmly recognized in the Preamble to our Constitution.
Yet, many are content with repeating history again, allowing a billion dollar abortion industry, that relentlessly lobbies Congress with our tax dollars, to decide who is worthy of personhood and who is not.
Our founders (many of whom were not slaveholders, but abolitionists themselves) emphatically stated in our Declaration of Independence, that our equality comes from our Creator, not institutions of man or woman. Our Constitution was the tool future generations could use to enshrine this equality. The inimitable abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was initially highly critical of the founding document, came to realize it would be invaluable to the abolition of slavery. And the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments proved him to be right.
We need another Emancipation, this time not one from physical shackles, but from those forged with bondage more insidious because captives often don’t realize they’re enslaved ideologically and spiritually. Santorum’s words struck a nerve, revealing to us all that there are still those, particularly in the media, who want people to remain on the plantation.
Harriet Tubman’s words still ring painfully true: “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
