Foundational... And Aspirational

The great civil rights leaders understood the beauty of the Constitution

Today marks the 38th national commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who stood at the fore of the civil rights movement, who gave us the seminal "I Have A Dream" speech, who dreamt of a day when his "four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

And who would be derided and cancelled by those among us today who consider themselves better than him for the temerity of suggesting that it would be a Good Thing for people not to judge each other by skin color.

Those same people have formed an industry devoted not only to insisting we judge by skin color, but also to the rejection of the principles of liberty and equality that King and others advanced.

For they seek, via their Critical Race Theory, to undermine "the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law."

In his speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, Dr. King told us that,

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

One of King's ideological forerunners, Frederick Douglass, told the world 111 years earlier that,

[T]he Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? it is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.

These great thinkers of civil rights recognized that the Declaration and Constitution are as much aspirational as they are foundational - that the great and free society they and we desire are right there, in plain language and glorious brevity. If only we can to the words therein.

The Big Lie overlaying all this is that of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, which asserts that America was founded to preserve the institution of slavery. Hers, and that of her cohorts, acolytes, and Orwellian sheep, is not only a lie, but a message of hate, of divisiveness, of unrest, and ultimately of the destruction of our society.

Dr. King's, on the other hand, was one of peace, love-thy-neighbor, comity, harmony... and at the risk of repeating myself, aspiration. Rather than tear down what's been imperfectly realized, we should be striving to fulfill the ‘promissory note’ and achieve the goal.

We should aspire to the society that the Constitution and Declaration describe.

We should treat each other equally, without regard to skin color, or gender, or orientation, or ethnicity, or any of the other ‘identity’ labels used to divide us.

We should judge people by the content of their character.

Unfortunately for those who sow division and perpetuate racism in the guise of curing it, our judgment won't be a good one.