PBS Star Ken Burns Rants About Racist America, Where Cops Guns Down Blacks 'Almost Weekly'

“Today, there’s nothing new under the sun,” intoned hallowed PBS filmmaker Ken Burns as he lamented the persistence of racial inequality in the United States in a commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis. So reported USA Today College.

Recalling the lofty text of the Declaration of Independence, Burns reminded his audience that Jefferson, the declaration’s author, owned more than 100 slaves. Jefferson’s hypocrisy is alive and well today, opined Burns, in the form of “color-blindness” that he believes ignores the reality of structural racism.

Burns -- a dogmatic liberal who made a shameless Ted Kennedy-boosting Democratic convention film in 2008 (for that "strong old goat") despite (or because of) his PBS-subsidized wealth -- decried how America has "habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns; our certainty — about everything; our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism, blinding us to that which needs repair, our preoccupation with always making the other wrong, at an individual as well as global level."

Time magazine published the entire transcript, including this exploration of conservatives still pushing racism on the country with color-blindness:

Before the enormous strides in equality achieved in statutes and laws in the 150 years since the Civil War that Lincoln correctly predicted would come are in danger of being undone by our still imperfect human nature and by politicians who now insist on a hypocritical color-blindness — after four centuries of discrimination. That discrimination now takes on new, sometimes subtler, less obvious but still malevolent forms today. The chains of slavery have been broken, thank God, and so too has the feudal dependence of sharecroppers as the vengeful Jim Crow era recedes (sort of) into the distant past. But now in places like — but not limited to — your other neighbors a few miles as the crow flies from here in Ferguson, we see the ghastly remnants of our great shame emerging still, the shame Lincoln thought would lead to national suicide, our inability to see beyond the color of someone’s skin. It has been with us since our founding.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that immortal second sentence of the Declaration that begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” he owned more than a hundred human beings. He never saw the contradiction, never saw the hypocrisy, and more important never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of those human beings, ensuring as we went forward that the young United States — born with such glorious promise — would be bedeviled by race, that it would take a bloody, bloody Civil War to even begin to redress the imbalance.

But the shame continues: prison populations exploding with young black men, young black men killed almost weekly by policemen, whole communities of color burdened by corrupt municipalities that resemble more the predatory company store of a supposedly bygone era than a responsible local government. Our cities and towns and suburbs cannot become modern plantations.

It is unconscionable, as you emerge from this privileged sanctuary, that a few miles from here — and nearly everywhere else in America: Baltimore, New York City, North Charleston, Cleveland, Oklahoma, Sanford, Florida, nearly everywhere else — we are still playing out, sadly, an utterly American story, that the same stultifying conditions and sentiments that brought on our Civil War are still on such vivid and unpleasant display. Today, today. There’s nothing new under the sun.

Burns lamented that just as Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn out of disappointment that racial discrimination continued: "That civil war had not cleansed our original sin, a sin we continue to confront today, daily, in this supposedly enlightened 'post-racial' time."

Burns drafted the graduates into a “new Union army” to marshal against the “color blindness” types:

You’re joining a movement that must be dedicated above all else — career and personal advancement — to the preservation of this country’s most enduring ideals. You have to learn, and then re-teach the rest of us that equality — real equality — is the hallmark and birthright of ALL Americans. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against a new separatism that seems to have infected our ranks, a vanguard against those forces that, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it. Then, you can change human nature just a bit, to appeal, as Lincoln also implored us, to appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” That’s the objective. I know you can do it.

Then he ended with briefer pieces of advice like “Black lives matter. All lives matter.” (That drew big applause.) And vote for liberals:

Serve your country. By all means serve your country. But insist that we fight the right wars. Governments always forget that.

Convince your government that the real threat, as Lincoln knew, comes from within. Governments always forget that, too. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. [A Hillary slam? Don’t count on it.] Do not let your government outsource democracy.

Vote. Elect good leaders. When he was nominated in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” We all deserve the former. Insist on it.

Perhaps the silliest exhortation coming from Burns is the one about foregoing career advancement for political goals. Ken Burns has never suffered a lack of wealth, comfort, or celebrity for advancing his liberal bias. PBS only rewards him for it.

Ken Burns - See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2015/05/23/pbs-star-ken-burns-rants-about-racist-america-where-cops-guns-down#sthash.WrxTRHCL.dpuf

With all his celebrity for producing historical works, Burns has allowed us a view into his limited perspective on the history of America's founding and the larger historical context out of which it emerged. Such a limited view provides example of the limited understanding and vision of those who describe themselves as "progressive," or "liberal." The fact is that they are neither progressive nor liberal!

Did Burns never contemplate the world situation in which the Founders found themselves, as recorded in the the proliferate writings and speeches of the founders, or the written histories of the first 100 years?

Did his education and personal study not provide him with the following synopsis of the enormous contributions they made during their brief tenure on the earth toward eradicating slavery from these shores and creating a constitutional republic which could, ultimately, affirm and protect the rights of ALL people?

Burns should be re-reading Jefferson's Autobiography, especially that portion which states:

"The first establishment in Virginia which became permanent was made in 1607. I have found no mention of negroes in the colony until about 1650. The first brought here as slaves were by a Dutch ship; after which the English commenced the trade and continued it until the revolutionary war. That suspended...their future importation for the present, and the business of the war pressing constantly on the (Virginia) legislature, this subject was not acted on finally until the year 1778, when I brought a bill to prevent their further importation. This passed without opposition, leaving to future efforts its final eradication."

Jefferson also observed:

"Where the disease [slavery] is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the northern States, it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process."

He explained that, "In 1769, I became a member of the legislature by the choice of the county in which I live [Albemarle County, Virginia], and so continued until it was closed by the Revolution. I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected: and indeed, during the regal [crown] government, nothing [like this] could expect success."

One more quotation, cited in David Barton's work on the subject of the Founders and slavery, which also cites the fact that there were laws in the State of Virginia which prevented citizens from emancipating slaves, (can be found at Barton's web site (shown later herein) is this one from Jefferson:

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded who permits one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep for ever. . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. . . . [T]he way, I hope [is] preparing under the auspices of Heaven for a total emancipation."

For an excellent and factual record of the Founders' views on the matter of slavery (especially those of Washington and Jefferson} visit David Barton's site , Wallbuilders.com.

A review of the factual, written history of the period in order to understand the tremendous contributions of the Founders to the "extinction" of slavery in America is essential to any meaningful discussion. Barton has has utilized the record in writing that exists to inform any who wish to arm themselves with knowledge.

One source he does not quote, I believe, is the famous "Speech on Conciliation" by Edmund Burke before the British Parliament, wherein he admonished the Parliament for its Proposal to declare a general enfranchisement of the slaves in America.

Burke rather sarcastically observed that should the Parliament carry through with the proposed Proposal: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation (England) which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?" He continued: "An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the same instant to publish his proclamtion of liberty and to advertise his sale of slaves."

Ahhh, how knowledge of the facts can alter one's opinion of the revisionist history that has been taught for generations in American schools (including its so-called "law schools"!!!

Human beings are allotted ONLY A TINY SLIVER OF TIME ON THIS EARTH. Each finds the world and his/her own community/nation existing as it is. If lawyers and judges, as well as so-called "historians" like Burns, educated themselves (in this day of the Internet) on the history of civilization and America's real history, and if they used that knowledge and the resulting understanding, to do as much on behalf of liberty for ALL people as did Thomas Jefferson and America's other Founders, the world in the next century would be a better place. Remember, Thomas Jefferson was only 33 years old when he penned our Declaration of Independence which capsulized a truly revolutionary idea into a simple statement that survives to this day to inspire people all over the world to strive for liberty! Before he slams the Founders in his speeches, this judge should read the prolific writings on the founding period for a first-hand knowledge of their contributions. In his lifetime, he might then be qualified to speak about them.

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