- Jan 2021
-
trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov
-
a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of “social justice,” demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into “protected classes” based on race and other demographic categories.
...privileges "protected classes" (legally, racial minorities, women, religious minorities, etc--a definition that's used to identify harassment and discrimination). The last step is left unsaid, but is clear: the privileging of protected identities victimizes people who are not part of these "protected classes"--that is, White people, and especially White men.
I'm gonna call this the Calhoun move, and it brings us right back around to a White victim complex, the 21st century version of White supremacy.
-
Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court
And now the move is complete: racist group rights become antiracism, which in turn becomes preferential treatment that...wait for it...
-
Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of “group rights” not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers.
Here's the rest of that jaw-dropping rhetorical move from back on page 12 wherein antiracism becomes the same as Calhoun's racism. This may be the most outrageous lie in the document, and that's a hard title to achieve.
-
composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions
As with the passage on abolitionism, again we have downplaying of Black leadership.
-
Yet the damage done by the denial of core American principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place proved widespread and long-lasting. These, indeed, are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country.
Keep an eye on this, the beginning of a truly remarkable rhetorical pivot that will equate, somehow, the evils of John C Calhoun and pseudoscientific racism with "identity politics" (or to put it more generally, anti-racism with racism).
-
that first began in the United States
Oh. Hell. No.
Aside from the British example above, the authors seem to have forgotten that "movements to abolish slavery" included movements not run by White abolitionists, such as rebellions by enslaved people. One modest example roughly contemporaneous with the creation of the Bill of Rights: the Haitian Revolution. Or if you're hung up on White people abolitionists, Bartolome de las Casas (late in life). Who the hell even thinks the US invented abolitionism? WTF?
-
at which time Congress immediately outlawed the slave trade
No. Congress outlawed the Transatlantic slave trade at the end of the 20-year period. It didn't actually end the transatlantic trade, and it didn't even attempt to end domestic slave trading.
-
Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil.
We're about to have a whole paragraph diminishing American chattel slavery's evils, aren't we.
(Spoiler: yes, we are.)
-
Thomas Jefferson also held slaves
Let me fix that for you: "Thomas Jefferson owned, bought, sold, and traded human beings, including a woman he kept as a sex slave and his own biracial enslaved children."
I sure hope divine justice doesn't sleep for Jefferson.
-
The three-fifths compromise was proposed by an antislavery delegate to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons for purposes of increasing their congressional representation.
This page had my jaw on the floor so I can't be sure (sarcasm; I am sure), but this sure does sound like a little logical twist that actually excuses the three-fifths compromise.
-