Shelby Steele Knows How We Got to Critical Race Theory

Boy with basketball

I recently glimpsed a TV exchange between Fox News host Mark Levin and Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. As I walked by, Levin was asking Steele to explain why critical race theory has been embraced on college campuses and in K-12 classes. Steele said that the cause goes back to the 1960s, when “social morality” was added to  American culture.

I didn’t quite get it, but I was intrigued—I had been around in the 1960s and a civil rights worker to boot—so I bought Steele’s 2006 book White Guilt. [1]

If you read White Guilt, I promise you that you will understand why it is possible for critical race theory to be so prominent.  Continue reading “Shelby Steele Knows How We Got to Critical Race Theory”

Can Historians Save Us from ‘Woke’ Culture?

New York Public Library

These days, many people are claiming that the United States is composed of two groups, oppressors and victims.

We see this in university  “whiteness studies,” which treat white people as inevitable oppressors and black people as inevitable victims. We see it in the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which claims that the true founding of the United States was not 1776 but 1619, when the first African slaves (or possibly indentured servants) arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. Much of “cancel culture” is based on the ideas that white people are guilty for the sins of their ancestors and people of color remain victimized today.

Yet academic historians, by and large, do not look at race this way. And I am not talking just about conservative historians. I mean historians of all perspectives, including historians on the Left.

Why? Because historians direct their attention to “agency.” Continue reading “Can Historians Save Us from ‘Woke’ Culture?”

A Magnificent Discovery and What It Means to Me

Statue of Abraham Lincoln and freed slave.

Last year, during the height of agitation over whether or not to tear down statues, the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park came under scrutiny. The statue, dedicated in 1876, shows Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave who is crouched below him.

The statue’s subordination of the slave to a white man has spurred calls for its removal. And those calls led to the discovery of a previously  unknown letter from  famed orator Frederick Douglass.

The debate over the statue continues, but my purpose here is to discuss the discovery of Douglass’s letter and how it reflects, if I may say so, a bias of historians. Continue reading “A Magnificent Discovery and What It Means to Me”

He Was ‘Wheat King of the World,’ But Is Mostly Forgotten

 

Thomas Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. For credit see below.

Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.

As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.

I doubt you have ever heard of him, however. Continue reading “He Was ‘Wheat King of the World,’ But Is Mostly Forgotten”

Should Southern Military Bases Be Renamed?  

Braxton Bragg and Leonidas Polk have military bases  named after them, Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Polk in Louisiana. 

Congress recently enacted (over President Trump’s veto) a defense funding law that calls for renaming military bases that honored Confederate generals.

Samuel R. Staley, writing for the Independent Institute, gives an intriguing argument in favor of the renaming.  His argument is not that Confederate generals were traitors, as some have claimed (and others have rejected). Rather, their names were used as a way of maintaining Jim Crow segregation. Continue reading “Should Southern Military Bases Be Renamed?  “