Call them the 1619 riots
By Charles Kesler
America is burning. Rioters set fire to police stations and restaurants. Looters have ravaged shops from coast to coast. And now they’re coming for the statues — not just of Confederate generals, but the republic’s Founders, including George Washington, whose statue was torn down in Portland, Ore.
Call them the 1619 riots.
The justified indignation over George Floyd’s killing has led to calls for policing reform and for the country to do better at fulfilling its principles. But the reaction hasn’t stopped with those worthy and noble objectives. It has surged well beyond to an attack on the principles themselves, which allegedly give rise to “systemic racism.”
But what is “the system” that generates and supports systemic racism? A considered answer is rarely given. Black Lives Matter (the organization, not the slogan) and its academic and media supporters do have some answers, however.
One is that “whiteness” itself is to blame, or at least “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” That is the explanation offered by the Black Power movement of the 1960s and by the likes of Louis Farrakhan and campus identity hucksters today. But the cruel thesis that the white race is “the cancer of human history,” as Susan Sontag once put it, is belied by history and reason.
So who else can they get at? Well, an easier target is one particular set of privileged, white males: the American Founders. The system at the root of systemic racism, the radicals argue, is the American one, beginning with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America, they claim, was born a racist nation and remains one today....
