Representative Jasmine Crockett recently spoke on racism during a Congressional session. Her words were typical of so many regarding race today. Nothing shocks any longer; still, I am bothered to hear an elected official speak such nonsense.
I will assume Representative Crockett believes she and her party represent truth and goodness. She speaks passionately, after all. Unfortunately, like so many others issues today, she makes a blanket condemnation for those belonging to the “wrong” party. I myself have labeled Democrat ideology as demonic; however, my label applies to the ideology not its advocates. Crockett instead targets entire groups of people. Belonging to a particular party (gender, race, etc.) does not make her morally superior. Racists, bigots, haters, etc. come in all races, nationalities, genders, and parties. None of us overcome our sinful nature by membership in a particular party. God judges us individually, not by our associations. We should not rest on the laurels (or be tainted with the sins) of our political party or its representatives.
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? Matthew 7:3
We can legitimately judge each other’s actions, things we can clearly discern, but we should steer clear of judging each other’s hearts as we can only guess at others’ motivations. Democrats and Republicans both seek purpose in their lives. Both believe as firmly in their party ideology. In fact, many think their political ideology will save us all. God love them. I do not know if Representative Crockett’s intent was selfish or altruistic, but I give her the benefit of the doubt for being sincere.
From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother, a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. Luke 12:52-53
On Oppression
Representative Crockett starts her tirade by laying claim to society’s vaunted victim status. She does not speak of being victimized herself, but rather of her race’s victimization.
You consistently said over and over the word ‘oppression,’ and every time that you said it, it was almost as if I was hearing nails on a chalkboard, because it seems like you don’t understand the definition of ‘oppression,’ And I’d ask you to just refer to Google to help you out. Oppression is the prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control. That is the definition of oppression.
How ironic. She came along at the right time. The costs were borne by others and she has benefitted from a more tolerant America in ways so many blacks before her never could. She cannot recognize this serendipity.
I am sure she has endured hardship or tragedy or been ill-treated at times, but her profile is not representative of prolonged, cruel or unjust treatment. It appears she grew up in a not-so-oppressive environment. She attended several private schools as a youth, obtained a BA from Rhoades College, and a law degree from the University of Houston. wikipedia-jasmine-crockett. She practiced law for almost 15 years and then was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020 and has served four years. These are distinguished accomplishments which past oppression never intruded upon. The path was cleared by others before her. Crockett also spoke at the 2024 Democratic National convention. Few of us have such an opportunity to share our views to such a wide audience.
Still, our warped culture elevates supposed victims like her and absolves them of responsibility. How nice when your problems are always someone else’s fault. Who wouldn’t want those benefits at today’s low cost?
Crockett next repeats an oft-stated claim, claim others want to erase the history of her people.
And so, as I sit here as a Black woman who practiced civil rights, let me tell you the reason that my colleagues wanted to make sure you understood the same Black history that your side of the aisle wants to delete out of classrooms is because you can then misuse words like ‘oppression.’
The ladies on the The View agree wholeheartedly, but I have never seen any evidence of black history deleted from classrooms. As a youth, I was educated in the South in the 1970s and 1980s. In the former epi-center of racist America, we learned about slavery, lynching, and the Civil Rights movement. I was introduced to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” along with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and other prominent black authors. I learned of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas and other notable and very accomplished black figures.
What is she talking about? Nobody expunged black history back then. Who is attempting to expunge it today? Who is ignoring the problems of the past? Who is downplaying the accomplishments of blacks in America? Quit speaking in generalities and give us specifics, please.
In both high school and college, I had black history teachers. Were they aware of this history censorship? Why didn’t they warn us? Perhaps, they didn’t see the problem she sees. Perhaps it is not an actual problem.
Limited Understanding of History
I was bussed across town as a fifth grader, so I could learn more about my fellow black citizens. This was a solution to fix America’s racism problem. Is Crockett saying bussing failed to solve our problems?
Or perhaps it did solve problems. The America I live in today is more of a melting pot than ever. At work, I interact with people with heritage from dozens of countries, people of varying races and creeds. I encounter people of all races and nationalities at the YMCA, the grocery store, my kids’ schools, my church, etc.. Nobody thinks twice about intermingling with people of so many different backgrounds. The 1965 Civil Rights legislation changed everything in America. In 1972, when I was bussed, attitudes had already shifted dramatically. Throughout my lifetime, America has become progressively more tolerant. Representative Crockett is twenty years younger than me. She hasn’t experienced this remarkable transition as many of us have.
Of course, if your expectations are too high, you will fail to see progress. Human nature is such that bigotry and hatred will always be with us, but during the last sixty years, America has done admirably in changing attitudes regarding race and opening up opportunity for all Americans.
Representative Crockett and her party continually focus on group identities. They have kept Martin Luther King as an icon, but they have abandoned the color blind principles he fought for. She is the one distorting history.
“I have a dream that my 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,” Martin Luther King.
Crockett judges by the color of our skin. Apparently, all of us fat, dumb, and happy white people know nothing about a hard life:
“There has been no oppression for the White man in this country. You tell me which White men were dragged out of their homes. You tell me which one of them got dragged all the way across an ocean and told that ‘You are going to go to work. We are going to steal your wives. We are going to rape your wives.’ That didn’t happen. That is oppression,”
Yes, ma’am that is oppression. Black Americans were indeed oppressed; that is our awful history. We do want to remember this sin and shame, so it will not be repeated.
However, there is much more to history. The slave trade was banned in the United States 216 years ago, fewer than twenty years after the nation’s inception. Was she unaware? Did someone choose not to teach it to her? Is it inconvenient to her narrative? Slavery itself was also banned in half the country well before 1865. Crockett condemns others erasing the history of her people, but what does she actually know of history? Did she deliberately exclude facts herself?
Glass is Half Empty
In any case, how much longer must we burden all whites for their long gone ancestors’ sins? The Democrat party in general appears to have difficulty with the concept of redemption.
Furthermore, she so callously dismisses the suffering of fellow Americans. Whites have never been oppressed, have never suffered? Really?
At some point in our lives, we all suffer tragedy. All feel pain, all suffer injustice, etc., some more than others, but still nobody is excluded. That is our human condition.
My parents were New Englanders, and many of their ancestors died in the Civil War fighting to free blacks. Their suffering for this cause is not so much a badge of honor for me (I don’t want to use this to claim victim status for myself), but the deaths of hundreds of thousands of white Americans fighting for black Americans freedom is worth noting. America, despite making mistakes regarding slavery and the intrinsic value of blacks, has made numerous attempts to rectify these original sins.
Others in my family tree immigrated around the turn of the 20th century. My Irish ancestors were not enslaved, but were treated very badly. Was their mistreatment prolonged, cruel, and unjust?
Conveniently, Representative Crockett presents only the parts of history supporting her narrative. Does she wish those other parts erased?
Still, Representative Crockett droned on regarding the injustice of the past:
We didn’t ask to be here. We’re not the same migrants that y’all constantly come up against. We didn’t run away from home. We were stolen.
We are all accidents of history. Who knows where any of us could have wound up if our personal history were only slightly altered? Nevertheless, bad experiences can still be turned to good in the end.
We know that all things work for good for those who love God,* who are called according to his purpose Romans 8:28
Coming to America was certainly not good for her ancestors, but is that a perpetual curse? Somehow, she cannot seem to find any good in the current situation:
“I can’t even tell you how many white men have served in this chamber. But I can tell you that I am only the 55th Black woman to be elected to Congress. And so when you want to talk about history and pretend as if it was so long ago, it wasn’t,” she said. “Because again, I am just No. 55.”
Must the glass always be half empty? Facts don’t support her pessimistic case:
The current meeting of Congress is one of the most racially diverse in history. About 11% of congressional members identify as Black.
President Trump recently selected former Congressman Scott Turner as HUD Secretary. An MSNBC panel later complained black cabinet members are always shuffled off to HUD: https://youtu.be/gtX9bZe1hNc?si=zPzwSJrWgmmAbVhq.
If this is the problem to highlight today, things are not going badly at all. MSNBC struggles to find a real problem to appease their audience demand for ever more racist examples. Furthermore, blacks have also been Secretary of State, Labor, Education, Transportation, and more, under both Republican and Democrat administrations. Other blacks have even been president, vice president, governor, senator, Supreme Court Justice, congressman, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_United_States_Cabinet_members. The glass ceiling was broken long ago.
What Defines Us?
The recent past has righted many prior wrongs, yet Crockett seems stuck in the distant past. Perhaps it is time she relinquishes her victim status obtained by the suffering of others:
So yeah, we are going to sit here and be offended when you want to sit here and act like… and don’t let it escape you that it is White men on this side of the aisle telling us, people-of-color on this side of the aisle that y’all are the ones being oppressed, that y’all are the ones that are being harmed. That’s not the definition of oppression. You tell me the prolonged, cruel or unjust treatment that you’ve had and we can have a conversation.”
Our group associations should not define us. Past injustices or even current injustices to our group should not confer extra rights upon us (i.e. special privileges or protections given only to your group and withheld from others).
We all have barriers to success: we are too short, too slow, not pretty enough, not smart enough, etc. We are all lacking somehow. We must find our way in the world given the limitations placed upon us. I knew two blind ladies who worked as computer programmers despite not seeing the keyboard or the screen. Frida Kahlo and Flannery O’Connor were famous artists who succeeded despite debilitating injury and disease. Hellen Keller was deaf and blind, yet became a prolific author. I have seen people without arms changing baby diapers or shopping with their feet. We all suffer slings and arrows of some sort and overcome as best we can.
Blacks sixty years ago had an unfair handicap as well, but it’s hardly noticeable today. With effort, we can all overcome our handicaps. Instead, Representative Crockett echoes Ibrahim Kendi who believes the solution to past discrimination is (increasingly more) future discrimination:
“Diversity works, and until you can show me data that says otherwise, I think that we need to go back to being a country that listens to experts and gets out of our feelings and recognizes again that racism is real in this country, and until we stop pretending that it’s not, we will not solve the problems that we are consistently facing. And that will bring real unity that we seek when we’re looking for a more perfect union,”
Yes, racism and hatred still exists today; they existed in the past, and they will be with us forever. Hatred takes different forms in different eras, but humanity never moves beyond it because of our sinful nature. In other words, injustice is with us always. What is her point?
Diversity works but only when nobody is excluded. In practice, today’s notion of diversity is a total failure. It means excluding less favored groups so parity can be achieved. For example, higher education institutions routinely set barriers for Asian students to keep their numbers proportional. harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sat-cutoff-scores-based-on-race
Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600, CNN reported.
Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.
Again, MLK’s dictate on judging by the content of character not the color of our skin is ignored.
In 2021, Senator Ted Cruz introduced a bill to protect Asians against such discrimination. The bill failed with every single Democrat voting against it. Are we opposed to injustice or not? https://www.congress.gov/amendment/117th-congress/senate-amendment/1456.
Can America have complete justice and a meritocracy when we demand equal results instead of equal opportunities? No group should claim a monopoly on being the victims of hatred. Other problems are overlooked when we focus only on injustices to one particular group.
What About Injustice Today?
Representative Crockett and her Democrat colleagues talk incessantly of racial injustices. They speak of reparations to correct the lingering effects of past injustices. In 2020, so much focus was placed on the death of one black man. One-channel media and opportunistic Democrat politicians argued his death represented race relations for all Americans, but neither George Floyd nor Officer Derek Chauvin, convicted of his murder, should be proxies for all of us.
Floyd’s death was elevated because of race. Race was the only factor for one-channel media. Yet, during Officer Chauvin’s trial, race was never alleged as a motivating factor.
These false race narratives alter people’s perception of reality. A 2021 poll showed Americans consistently overstate the actual number of unarmed black men killed by police; the correct number is 13. Nearly two-thirds of liberals incorrectly estimated the number between 100 and 1,000, off by a factor of between 8 and 80:
how-many-unarmed-black-men-are-killed-by-police-annually
Other current injustices are overlooked because America’s focus is on prior racial injustices. Anti-Semitism also exists in America today. Violent incidents or hateful speech targeted against Jews today exceeds those directed against blacks. Jews have been targeted openly on college campuses following the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/16/us/adl-antisemtism-2023-audit-reaj/index.html. In December 2022, College presidents at Harvard, MIT, and Penn refused to condemn calls for genocide of the Jews during Congressional testimony poison-ivy-league
Furthermore, Jews can also point to past injustices. Six million Jews were killed by Hitler in the 1940s, more than a third of the entire Jewish worldwide population then. Jews still number only 17 million worldwide today. 90% of Jews live in Israel or the United States because they have been persecuted and driven out of nearly every other country. Would Crockett call that oppression?
While Representative Crockett speaks of slavery more than 150 years ago, slavery is actually still a problem in the world today. Last year I wrote of sex trafficking, highlighting the movie Sound of Freedom: sound-of-freedom-what-controversy. Shouldn’t this be a concern for our legislators?
The International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation, in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), released Global Estimates of Modern Slavery in September 2022. This report estimates that, at any given time in 2021, approximately 27.6 million people were in forced labor.
The number enslaved today actually exceeds the number when slavery was legal in the 19th century.
Injustices abound throughout world history. Mao is said to have killed tens of millions of his own people, hardly any of them black. https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat2/sub6/item1081.html.
Yes, blacks have been historically oppressed, but they are not uniquely oppressed. Nor are they oppressed today as they were in the past. The measurement is not even close. We are distracted from today’s problems when we focus on unworkable solutions like reparations. We do not solve race problems when blaming whites or police for the deaths of black men like George Floyd.
Representative Crockett recognizes past injustices, but fails to see today’s injustices, even when her own righteous party is perpetuating injustice. Her awful rhetoric, commonplace today, needs to be exposed, mocked, and ended.
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