Posted on 05/23/2015 11:35:47 AM PDT by drewh
“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
First was the endlessly whining fiddles...
actually, the music was the best part of the production, including the anachronistic theme song ‘Ashokan Farewell’, which while having nothing to do with the Civil War, was eerily evocative of the time period being examined...
Or the ninth.
I thought his documentary on Jazz was brilliant. I am saddened to find out where his head is really at.
I ain’t a fan of modern thug cops, but if you obey their instructions, don’t resist arrest, you have an extremely low chance of getting killed. Maybe it’s time for someone to call out Black kids for being criminals who resist arrest.
In addition, I am pretty sure that cops kill far more whites than blacks. But those stats would never see the light of day in a newscast designed to make America and cops look racist.
Baltimore city's murder rate has doubled to over a murder a day since the mayor and prosecutor declared war on their OWN city's cops.
All those dead blacks never existed to Al Sharpton, Holder, Obama, Lynch, Melissa Harris Perry, or anyone else on MSNBC...not only didn't their lives matter tbut they just as well never existed.
They will say nothing about it, because some of that blood is on THEIR hands,
Only if a cop kills a black do they suddenly recognize it.
But...
He sees everything through the lens of racism. He’s a johnny-one-note, no matter what subject he covers.
Without cops trying to contain the chaos, a lot more blacks would be getting gunned down than have ever been “gunned down” by officers.
Just look at the chaos in Baltimore with the police pulling back a little.
I wish the left wasn’t so evil and dumb.
Still, with the high abortions rates, high death rates of young blacks from violence and the highest rate of men incarcerated, their high birthrates still create high population growth rates.
“...but if you obey their instructions, don’t resist arrest, you have an extremely low chance of getting killed.”
“Maybe it’s time for someone to call out Black kids for being criminals who resist arrest.”
Getting killed, ok. But getting beaten or brutalized for effectively nothing? High probability.
Blacks as criminals: Agreed.
I see two different points here: Militant SS-wannabes who are just itching to injure and kill at the slightest “provocation” and the permanent underclass that doesn’t give a s**t anymore.
Honestly - let them kill each other off, like Germany and Russia, circa the early to mid 1940s. I’m developing the same disdain for both sides.
Racist America where blacks gun down each other and white folks.
No mention of the black-on-black murders that occur daily
in various cities.
Ken Burns never saw the contradiction - never saw the hypocrisy of forcing all free citizens to support PBS while only catering to the 5% who were white, liberal, and elite. Burns was born with ‘glorious promise’ but sold it out for advantage. May God curse his soul....
I have recently asked a few black men here in Maryland their opinion on this and got three different answers.
One had guns drawn on him when pulled over because he looked like a suspect that they were searching for, said this happened more than once(this guy is big, bald and a body builder, but a really nice guy, a born again Christian).
The one I thought was interesting was ex-cop, he told me what he tells his younger relatives (black naturally) EXACTLY what to do when pulled over:
Hands on wheel, windows open, stay quiet, answer questions politely, don't argue.
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