This Juneteenth, celebrate the exceptional America that fought to liberate slaves
The Civil War’s exact death toll is perpetually debated.
But this Juneteenth, what’s not debatable is that hundreds of thousands of white Union men died to free black slaves.
Whenever I ask a progressive if this happened in any other country around the globe, there is always deafening silence.
These crickets are inevitable because America is truly exceptional, regardless of false claims by those who would sow deep racial animus today.
Global slavery among all races (e.g., black enslaving black, indigenous brown enslaving brown) was the norm throughout most of human history, including in Africa and South America.
I am the descendant of a Native American woman enslaved as a child by another Native tribe and sold for the price of a quilt to white Utah Mormon frontier settlers, who liberated and adopted her as family.
The “original sin” of slavery was a deep, heinous stain on America’s founding, and whitewashing or censoring history lessons about its true nature (including the murder and suffering of many black Americans) is wrong and dangerous.
But so is failing to teach the full truth: American liberation was wrought by a majority-white coalition working in tandem with black Americans.
It was predominantly white, Western Judeo-Christian leaders in America and Great Britain (through the Clapham Saints) who launched the assault on the evil global norm of slavery.
Their warfare continues, as new films like “Sound of Freedom” illustrate; Christians lead the ongoing fight against human trafficking today.
White Northern Christians sacrificed their own lives to liberate black Americans and conquer America’s “original sin.”
They had nothing to personally gain and everything to lose.
Many of these devoted Union patriots begat today’s white, working-class, Rust Belt Trump voters, many of who also voted for Barack Obama — the nation’s first black president.
Juneteenth happened despite Southern white Christians.
No one should downplay the evil of these white supremacists — who censored Christian scripture, excising Bibles read by black slaves to remove Moses, a tale of brown people owning white slaves, who threw off their captors.
Their horrific deeds ought to be known, but initiatives like The New York Times’ 1619 Project fail miserably to tell the comprehensive truth.
Some Christians do behave in a wretched fashion. The most religious zealots used their political pressure to get Jesus killed, and the apostle Judas, one of the first Christians, lethally betrayed Jesus.
Human nature doesn’t change.
As slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
Indeed, there can be a cavernous difference between human-run religion and divine relationship.
But it was true Christian theology (e.g., readings of Moses, Jesus, Joseph, Paul, etc., all liberator/savior figures) that inspired America’s abolitionists.
It was the deeply, overtly Christian theology of Martin Luther King Jr., a pastor generations later — when the Civil War’s bloodshed didn’t prove cleansing enough — that helped fully secure black Americans’ civil rights.
The truth is no other Western country — for all Europe’s haranguing about America’s Neanderthalian culture — has elected a black man as president. America the Exceptional has.
This isn’t to diminish the suffering or plight of today’s black Americans — it’s real and urgent.
But empirically robust research by many, including black men like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Jason L. Riley, shows that despite centuries of systemic racism, current racism is far from the main reason for black-white disparities.
Brown and Asian Americans of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Japanese, Korean and other ethnicities outearn whites, with generally higher educational attainment, lower crime rates and more intact families than whites. This dispels the myth of systemic “white supremacy” in America.
That’s obviously not to say interpersonal racism doesn’t exist (including against Asian students, though the Supreme Court might remedy this soon), and we must vigorously fight to exterminate it, but policy and culture matter far more in America.
The nations of Singapore (predominantly Asian descent) and Jamaica (predominantly African descent) offer a compelling parable, as economist Stephen Moore notes: “Sixty years ago, Singapore and Jamaica were nearly equal in per capita income. Singapore went with free market capitalism. Jamaica went with democratic socialism. The chart explains the rest.”
This Juneteenth, it’s worth noting the most violent, impoverished and educationally decaying areas in black America are run by the same progressive, socialist ideology — which promotes the welfare state and rejects school choice and public safety — that keeps Jamaicans mired in poverty and crime.
The path toward liberation, wealth and safety for black Americans lies in strong faith, family, hard work and community. These fundamental, universal values uplift people of all colors.
Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice and a fellow at State Financial Officers Foundation.
