I refuse to plead guilty

In the latest push to prove we are all racist,  the "media" including the NY Times and USAToday have started pushing the 1619 Project. The purpose is to highlight the arrival of the first slaves in what is now the US. The premise is that the nation was founded in the sin of slavery, built by slaves, and thus is an evil, racist, sinful Nation.

Let me get this out of he way, slavery was and is a horrible institution. Period. There are no "buts", "excepts", or defense for the buying and selling of humans. I refuse to bear the mantle of the modern White Man's Burden.

The whole premise behind the 1619 bandwagon is rooted in historical ignorance. Slavery has been
part of the human condition since Og came out of the cave and discovered he could force the smaller and weaker of his clan to do his work for him. Then he captured his neighbors and put them to work too.  And so it continued until about 170 years ago throughout the most of the world. I say most because slavery still exists in places. It is what the strong do to the weak.

As for the basis that slavery built this country, who was here to buy those first 50 Africans? BTW, most records indicate those Africans, who came by way of the West Indies, were treated as indentured servants, and freed after a period of time. A significant number of Europeans would arrive to the colonies as indentured servants.

It is rampant revisionism and fantasy to believe that European colonists did not settle and build what became America.  Slave holders were a minority, even in the antebellum South.

To maintain that the Founders were in total support of Slavery is fiction. One of the first major pieces of legislation was the formation of the Northwest Territory, which passed unanimously. One of the provisions of the ordinance was that slavery would be banned. The Northwest Ordinance language on slavery was the basis for the 13th Amendment.

Just a little research demonstrates one of the causes of the Civil War was the economic dominance of the industrial North over the agrarian-based Slave States. That very fact belies the entire notion that slavery "built" the United States.

That is not to say discrimination is not real now or in the past. It is.

To maintain that the country is flawed today because of slavery belies the hundreds of thousands who died and fought to end slavery. it ignores the millions who fought, who died, who are buried in unmarked graves to battle the wilderness and Mother Nature to carve a new life  on the New World.

If you want to argue a 1492 project and state that the land was taken from the aboriginal population, I could understand that position. It is at least based in bare historic fact.  Besides, the Natives were enslaved long before any Africans were brought over. Why are they ignored?

But hey, the Leftists can't run on their political positions, so they have gin up a phony race war.

* it would take entire volumes to go into the historical details of the founding. Settlers were in parts of what is now the US more than 200 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.