Enough with black history month

Stop teaching that criminals are heroes and white people are the devil.

On Wednesday, America will kick off another black history month. This year’s theme is black resistance. Among the 9 people featured in the official poster are Angela Davis and Malcolm X — not Martin Luther King or Clarence Thomas, men who made America better, but a pair of thugs.

Davis is the communist who in August 1970 surreptitiously armed three murder defendants which led to a shootout with the police that left the judge and the three gunmen dead.

Malcolm X was an ex-convict who once was the face of the Nation of Islam, a black supremacist church. When he left it, the church sent assassins who killed him. A biopic on him in 1992. He was played by Denzel Washington. The NAACP gave the film an Image Award. Malcolm X is the face of the NAACP, not Dr. King.

I have a problem with that because Malcolm X was as big a bigot as Bull Connor, Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Wallace. He was a black supremacist who supported segregation. Louis Lomax, a black journalist of the era, confronted Malcolm X about his racism in a 1963 interview.

Malcolm X said, “The white devil’s time is up; it has been up for almost 50 years now. It has taken us that long to get the deaf, dumb, and blind black men in the wilderness of North America to wake up and understand who they are. You see, sir, when a man understands who he is, who God is, who the devil is… then he can pick himself up out of the gutter; he can clean himself up and stand up like a man should before his God. This is why we teach that in order for a man to really understand himself he must be part of a nation; he must have some land of his own, a God of his own, a language of his own. Most of all he must have love and devotion for his own kind.”

His words are toxic and do not deserve to be raised on the altar of education to be worshipped for a month. Those who promote him as a hero do so to promote racial division. They are indoctrinating children into a hatred of America and have been doing so for 50 years. None dare call them out.

Well I do. Malcolm X hated America. In that interview, he said, “Sir, how can a Negro say America is his nation? He was brought here in chains; he was put in slavery an worked like a mule for three hundred years; he was separated from his land, his culture, his God, his language!

“The Negro was taught to speak the white man’s tongue, worship the white God, and accept the white man as his superior.

“This is a white man’s country. And the Negro is nothing but an ex-slave who is now trying to get himself integrated into the slave master’s house.

“And the slave master doesn’t want you! You fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won’t give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won’t give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won’t give you equality. Now, you integration-minded Negroes are trying to force yourselves on your former slave master, trying to make him accept you in his drawing room; you want to hang out with his women rather than the women of your own kind.”

Decades later, I am sad to report, most black people must agree because Peter Moore reported on February 15, 2015, “Malcolm X remembered favorably by blacks but not by whites.”

This was based on a YouGov poll.

Moore wrote, “Whites tend to have an unfavorable (41%) rather than favorable (26%) opinion of Malcolm X. Among black Americans, however, the vast majority (67% to 6%) have a favorable rather than unfavorable opinion of him.”

Well, when a man calls you a devil, it is difficult to cotton up to him.

Unfortunately, the annual monthlong anti-American indoctrination works. A Pew Research poll in July 2021 found only 23% believe America is the greatest land of all. Among those under 30, only 10% believe that.

The problem with black history is it tells only part of one side of the story. Slavery is an important part of black history, true, but the idea that white men went to Africa and hunted down black people to enslave is a lunacy imagined by Alex Haley. West African nations — chiefly Ghana — engaged in a lucrative slave market for centuries before Columbus ventured west. Africans enslaved their enemies to be — in the words of Malcolm X — “worked like a mule for three hundred years” and “separated from his land, his culture, his God, his language!”

My purpose is not to mitigate the evil of slavery but to share the blame. If slavery makes the white man a devil, then it also makes the black man one. Ghana’s role in exporting slaves to the Americas gets scant mention in black history month because it does not fit in well with the narrative.

KSHB in Kansas City reported on September 28, 2022, “Delegates from African countries visit Kansas City to offer apologies for role in slave trade.”

The story said officials with “the United Nations Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization, alongside delegates from African countries, read apology letters from chiefs and tribal leaders for their ancestors hand in enslaving and trading fellow Africans across the world.”

It quoted Anita Dixon, executive director at UNESCO, who said, “This is the healing that I begged for as a black woman in America.”

Apologizing for something you did do to people it was not done to is a rather silly exercise. But just because it was silly virtue signaling does not make it any less newsworthy. I could not find a national news outlet report on this event.

Black history is a big business. Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer for the New York Times with her 1619 Project, which promotes the discredited conspiracy theory that America was founded on slavery. That would be a surprise to my Pilgrim ancestors who came to America to escape religious persecution in England. My ancestors were not slaves but they worked hard to clear the land, build the houses and develop the land.

Her mother, Cheryl Novotny Hannah, told Mark Weitzmann of the Tablet, “We were a biracial family, and as such we had all met racial issues one way or another. But after Nikole took Mr. Dial’s black history class at West High School at 16, she was talking about black stuff all the time.”

She grew up in Iowa in a very poor section of town.

Weitzmann wrote, “I had spent the previous two days visiting Waterloo’s East Side, the poorest part of this neglected city of some 67,000, where the black residents used to live. I’d seen the half-decrepit wooden houses lining empty streets, the two grocery stores, the abandoned churches, and the city’s last bordello, which closed in the late 1940s, but whose three little blue houses still stand in a vacant weed-covered lot, 10 minutes away from the Hannah home, where Hannah-Jones grew up and where Cheryl still lives today. There was a sign warning people against committing suicide in front of the railroad tracks, near the remains of the Illinois Central line.”

Born in the affirmative action era in 1976, Hannah-Jones lifted herself up from poverty. She availed herself of the opportunities presented. In addition to a job at the New York Times and a Pulitzer, she also earned a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. She is no slouch.

She also is no victim.

But that is where the money is. Black history month promotes a myth that black people are victims of a systemic racism, which serves as a convenient excuse for the failures of black people as individuals and as a community. Racism is not why a million black men are incarcerated. Crime is. When 13% of the nation commit half the murders, the problem is not with the rest of the nation.

Her 1619 Project came under sharp criticism. Weitzmann pointed to a letter by three prominent historians who took her to task.

He wrote, “The historians’ letter objected to three of the 1619 Project’s historical claims that it said were factually incorrect (as distinct from matters of historical interpretation): that the Revolutionary War was largely fought to protect slavery from English abolitionists, that Abraham Lincoln maintained a consistent opposition to racial equality, and that African Americans have fought for their rights ‘for the most part’ alone.”

That the Revolutionary War predated Britain’s abolitionist movement by a half-century did not seem to faze her. She has the Juneteenth fantasy, which holds that the civil war was between white people over white people problems and the black people used it as an opportunity to sneak out of slavery.

Teaching the toxic lies in black history must end. If black history is American history then teach it as part of American history — the same with women’s history, Hispanic history, LGBT history and whatever other history liberals dream up. Life in America was rough for [fill in the blank] in the 19th century? Life was rough for everybody. The Homesteaders who settled the West face drought, flood, scorching heat, terrific blizzards and Indian attacks.

The reverence for black history may be fading. NBC reported on January 24, “The College Board said on Tuesday it would release a new framework for the Advanced Placement course in African American Studies that the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis blocked from being offered in Florida high schools.

“The nonprofit organization, which oversees the nationwide Advanced Placement program, announced that on Feb. 1 it would release the official framework for an AP African American Studies course, which it said has been under development since March.

“The DeSantis administration sent a letter to the College Board rejecting the course this month, saying, ‘As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.’

“A spokesperson for the College Board did not respond to questions about whether the change was a direct result of Florida's rejection of the course.”

Earlier, Daniel Greenfield went over what was in the course and he was alarmed.

He wrote, “Topic 4.29 focuses on the Black Lives Matter movement and 4.30 includes a call for reparations from racist author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

“Topic 4:26 pushes police and prison defunding. Topic 4:24 promotes liberation theology. Topic 4:15 includes a text from the writings of domestic terrorist Angela Davis.

“The media doesn’t want to discuss any of this. And, as usual, it tries to smuggle in hate, bigotry and anti-Americanism under the guise of teaching black history. Much of this is not dealing with black history, but with radical leftist activism. And that’s inappropriate in an educational environment.”

Spot on.

But what is really ugly — almost as ugly as championing Malcolm X — is promoting the writings of Amiri Baraka, nee Leroi Jones. Greenfield quote a passage from his work, which read, “We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of shit). Come up, black dada / nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.”

In its revision of its black history course, I hope the College Board includes Clarence Thomas, Dr. Ben Carson and Tony Dungy — all men who endured hardship and withstood public pressure to stand up for their beliefs.

I hope it does because right now, black history is not about history. It is about dividing people by races and turning people against their own nation, which would better enable a totalitarian government.

Tomorrow’s column is “Why conservatives oppose the war.”

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