“Personal Responsibility in an Age of CRT” Sydney Williams
As we near our nation’s 245th birthday, celebrants could do worse than consider the consequences of an increase in government dependency and a decline in personal responsibility.
Among truths that underly my beliefs are two relevant to this essay: One, life is not fair. We are born into different circumstances, with different attributes and abilities. A brother was born with Prader-Willi Syndrome, a condition that adversely affected his physical, emotional and mental development. While he and I were born of the same parents, his life, in the challenges he faced, was far more difficult than mine. And two, we are not equal (and never can be) in looks, physical prowess, emotional and social skills, or mental acuity. It is unlikely Michael Jordan could have developed the theory of relativity, and it is equally unimaginable that Albert Einstein could have played shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls. The attempt to mandate equity, a dream of Progressives, is a Utopian nightmare. In his novel He Knew He was Right, Anthony Trollope put it like this: “Each created animal must live and get its food by the gifts which the Creator has given it…” No amount of government coercion will make life completely fair and make us equal. We must each work with who and what we are. In his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: “Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know you trust him.”
Politicians love to compartmentalize the electorate. It is easier to serve up government offerings to a group than to argue the benefits of a particular political philosophy. Thus, we drift toward the comfort of government dependency and away from the more difficult adherence of personal responsibility. A Washington Post article from September 18, 2012, reported: “In 2011, about 49% of the population lived in a household where at least one member received a direct benefit from the federal government.” According to an op-ed in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by John Cogan and Daniel Bell of the Hoover Institute, the American Families Plan, if it were adopted, would add another 21 million Americans to the roles of government assistance programs. Forget what it does to our debt; think of the effect on our national character.
Ironically, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is racist, in that it teaches that one race is inherently superior to another, and in its assumption that blacks are incapable of succeeding without government assistance. It promotes victimization rather than encouraging self-reliance. It ignores individual successes of modern black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Senator Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, Jason Riley, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and thousands more. As Martin Luther King taught us, people should be judged by who they are, not the color of their skin. Freedom depends on a responsible individual. Consider the autocracies that demand dependence and obedience and compare that to the Republic whose founding we celebrate Sunday. The Civil Rights activist and founder of the Woodson Institute, Robert Woodson in response to the 1619 Project, created an organization called 1776 Unites, which is designed to highlight “what is best in our national character and what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances.” Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), both believed in personal responsibility. They were born into slavery, yet both became advisors to U.S. Presidents. In what other country would that have been possible?
There is no question that a study of American history should include chapters on slavery and the women’s suffrage movement. But that can be accomplished by reading what has already been written. In 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When President Lincoln met her at the White House nine years later, he is reputed to have said: “So this is the little woman that started this great war.” Keep in mind, Ms. Stowe, as a woman, was never able to vote. Yet she wrote a novel that spoke to the curse of slavery and helped bring about its abolition. Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (1884) has been removed from many library shelves because some of its words are seen as threatening. Yet it provides modern readers a realistic look at the horrors of slavery, the dignity of the run-away slave Jim, and of the empathy of the uneducated Huck Finn. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886) did much the same for the cause of women.
It is a desire for power that causes politicians to place us within the confines of race, religion and gender. They ignore how far we have come in the past 250 years. Man has been around for 160,000 years, but civilization as we know it dates back only about 2,500 years. Progress has been steady, but uneven with two steps forward and one back. The founding of the United States, with all its obvious and known faults, was a giant leap forward in the liberation of men and women from the yoke of authoritarian governments. Slavery has been around as long as man, and it has existed on every continent and involved every race and creed. While it was largely abolished in the West in the 19th Century, it still exists in parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Consider the plight today of China’s Uyghurs. They are real victims, under the Chinese Communist Party’s real oppressors.
Sixty years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in much of the United States. Today, one in seven marriages are couples of mixed races. In 1960, only 3.1% of adult black Americans had graduated from four-year colleges. Today the number is 20 percent. (The comparable numbers for whites were about 18% in 1960 and 35% today.) While much good came from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they were accompanied by a decline in personal responsibility, which led to a diminution of the family, an increase in out-of-wedlock births and a glut in absent fathers. We see its effects in other aspects of our lives. Universities select students, not on merit but on race or gender identification. We are told it is the weapon, not the behavior of the individual, that is responsible for a plethora of black-on-black shootings in inner cities.
As we prepare to celebrate the 4th, we should consider the costs to a free people of a nation that abjures personal responsibility for the Eloi-like comfort of dependency. As long as it survives, the mission of the United States will never be complete. It will always be a work-in-progress – “An Experiment in Self-Government,” as Senator J. William Fulbright titled a 1955 article. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title citizen.” It is a title that demands the rigors of personal responsibility.
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