Melina Mara for The Washington Post
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Consider presidential wannabe Robert Francis O’Rourke. He told New Hampshire Democrats earlier this month that America in 2019 is a veritable slave state.
“This is a country that has been defined by foundational, systemic, endemic racism since the very founding of this country,” O’Rourke shouted. “August 20th of 1619 — the first time that a kidnapped African was brought here against his will and made to serve as a slave to build the greatness and the success and the wealth of this country, which his descendants would never be able to fully participate in. This is the reality of the United States of America.”
The America that O’Rourke and too many Leftists hate was born not in 1619, but in 1776, conceived in liberty, not for all at first, but eventually so. This nation fought a war with itself that ended slavery in 1865. It then spent the latter part of the next 99 years inching toward full legal equality for blacks. America has tried to do the right thing by blacks and has gotten it more right than wrong.
This means nothing to the anti-American Left.
Even worse, liberals don brass knuckles and deck the very blacks they claim to champion. As O’Rourke said, the slave’s “descendants would never be able to fully participate in...the greatness and the success and the wealth of this country.”
Disgusting.
O’Rourke holistically assaults so much that makes America great, successful, and wealthy, which would not have arisen without the enormous contribution of black Americans. The notion that blacks weren’t and aren’t full participants in America’s triumphs denigrates our pivotal, priceless roles in this land’s past and present.
Thus, O’Rourke, in effect, sacks Harriet Tubman, who could have kept her head down and harvested crops. Instead, she escaped slavery, joined the Underground Railroad, and guided as many as 300 slaves north — to freedom.
O’Rourke slams Frederick Douglass, a former slave, whose elegant prose and eloquent oratory stirred abolitionists and snapped chains across Dixie.
O’Rourke slaps Booker T. Washington. Born in bondage, he wrote "Up from Slavery," launched the Tuskegee Institute, dined as President Theodore Roosevelt’s guest at the White House (the first black man so honored), and inspired blacks to rise through education and entrepreneurship.
O’Rourke slugs Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, widely regarded as the twin fathers of jazz, the most quintessentially American art form. Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, and Herbie Hancock are among the many artists who tower over this mighty foundation that O’Rourke neglects.
O’Rourke smacks Jesse Owens, whose track-and-field triumphs over his Aryan competitors humiliated Ă¼ber white nationalist Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Jackie Robinson, the man who broke baseball’s color barrier, and Hank Aaron, its home run king, are AWOL from O’Rourke’s list of American victories.
O’Rourke smashes Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan, just three of NASA’s black, female mathematicians whose "Hidden Figures" enabled John Glenn to orbit Earth and return safely home.
O’Rourke spanks American Express’ Kenneth Chenault, Time-Warner’s Richard Parsons, Merck’s Kenneth Frazier, multimedia tycoon Oprah Winfrey, and other black CEOs whose companies thrive.
O’Rourke Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, former secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, former attorneys general Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and President Barack Hussein Obama — all of whom have served at the commanding heights of America’s government.
For people like O’Rourke, these luminaries did not “fully participate” in “the greatness and the success and the wealth of this country.” The Left sees blacks as, essentially, latter-day slaves, still held down by the white man, as if it were 1619. If not the iron chains of the 17th Century, they moan, blacks are shackled by the institutional chains of the 21st.
O’Rourke’s racism springs not from hatred. He would lynch no one. Rather than loathe blacks, Robert Francis O’Rourke deigns to pity us.
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