Me too. Do we deserve medals? Let me guess: We succeeded where others failed because we were hard workers who didn't slack off like other folks do. We certainly didn't experience any white privilege in our lifetimes, right amigo?
As long as you wax-poetic about 'how different' you are from the western civilization of white males who established and have led this country for over 200 years, you don't 'get it.'
Racism is a human condition of ones heart and our DNA programmed for survival to distrust others who are not like us. It's a tribal thing left over from thousands of years.
I think Knight in TN misses something when he says we have nothing in common other than skin color. I also take issue with this white men ruled for 200 years thing too.
I value liberty,the individual and limited government just as the founders did. I have that in common with them. If you love the Bill of Rights and the Constitution then their ideas are timeless regardless of these men's flaws or moral lapses. There is not a single perfect soul on this earth and using the lefts standards we need to toss out the Constitution and Bill of Rights because they owned slaves or women couldn't vote simply because they didn't live up to 21st standards is ridiculous. It's called context people.
In 1776 globally women had no rights and to this day in many Arab and African nations women have no rights. Back then slavery was a global industry. It was the norm and today slavery still exist in our world. Slavery was bad and still is.
So, when , yes , some white dudes say the king is oppressive , tyranny sucks and they do something about it, they made a huge change . They in 1787 when they realized the Articles of Confederation weren't working the states headed down the road to drafting the first ever Constitutional Republic. We ARE NOT a democracy.
For the first time in the history of mankind we put it on paper that Government would be there to serve the people and we put limits on the government to respect the individual and ensure liberty. We for the first time said the individual matters more . You only saw this in the Bible until the American Constitution.
So, our founders were radical white dudes and they knew slavery was morally reprehensible. Thomas Jefferson said as much in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. They also knew politics and politics of the day ,like now , you can't make gigantic shifts you make incremental ones and so yes, they did not solve slavery nor did they give women the right to vote, but they created a document that could be amended to address the big issues down the road. Our western way of life is truly rooted in the American Constitution and our ability to keep individual liberty both personal and economic secure, which also included property rights.
point is it takes time to change culturally for some things ,so you start where you can and that's what our founders did. Seventy years later our nation would engage in a bloody war to finally address slavery issue the hard way. Had they tried to solve it in 1791 the United States doesn't happen in my opinion. For the record my great great uncle a Sgt in union blues died at Gettysburg to end the scurge of slavery. Was he a racist ? I don't know. But he died for something bigger than he was as an individual. He died for liberty for all of us black or white.
So, in my opinion the left doesn't get it. They ignore context and they ignore the genocide and bondage that exists today. People are people , some of people are racist but many are not. Our founders were brilliant men and their good ideas live on today in our country and the norms of their time are a bygone era. I reject the notion that their ideas are flawed because of the time they lived in. Truth is truth be it 2000 years ago or today . it's timeless.