The Push Back

Copyright © 2022 Lawrence Clayton

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

ISBN 978-1-63985-749-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63985-750-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

Section One: Critical Race Theory, Other Bad Habits, Language, and History

The 1619 Project Debunked by Distinguished Historians

Relationships Ruin Racism

Slavery and Freedom

Everyone Did as They Saw Fit

Words

Language

The Degradation of Our Language

Guilt and Words

Section Two: The Failure of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Privilege and Equity

The Expansion of Diversity at the University of Alabama

Equity, What Is It?

The Broken Analysis of American Racism and White Fragility

The Costs of Diversity

Excellence and Equality

Defeating the Diversity Industry

Christianity and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

How Did We Get Here?

Section Three: The Economic Pushback

Reduce Astronomical Increases in Administrators and Costs at UA

Restore Excellence as the Standards for Hiring New Faculty

Section Four: Restoring History to Where It Belongs

Old and New History

My Dachau Moment

Out with the Old

Academic Freedom

Section Five: How to Get It Right in the Classroom

Purging History

Teaching, How to Do It Right

Welcome to College, New Style

Section Six: Pushback in the Colleges and Universities

Time, Once Again, for Alpha College

How to Fix the Schools: Take Politics Out of Schools and Classes at A

ll

Levels of Education

Section Seven: Immigration or How This Country Was Built

Why Mexicans Aren’t Coming to the United States

The Business of America Is Business

Section Eight: The World Doesn’t Owe You Anything

Work and Play

Sewing, Shop, and Cooking, or Some Alternates to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp

Section Nine: The Answers from Inside of Christianity

A Little Church History

Section Ten: What to Do?

To Change or Not to Change, Part 1

To Change or Not to Change, Part 2

What Are You Made Of?

When the State Trumps Religion

What Happened to Our Citizen Army

We All Need Heroes; Why David McCullough Can’t Sleep Well at Night

The Keys to Our Future

Commission for the 21st Century

Introduction

This is a book on the growing pushback among so many Americans, rejecting the contemporary fixation with politically correct issues, like the 1619 Project, equity, critical race theory, and white racism, for example, and reminding readers of the values and institutions that endowed this nation with the brightest lights in Western civilization. We are now on the brink of restoring that nation. Join us as we take it back.

When you read it, you, too, will be able to push back, not to recreate the past, but to recover and apply the principles of liberty, freedom, personal responsibility, truthful history, lessons from Scripture, and so many others that gave us so much strength and power in the past. Each chapter is a stand-alone piece.

You don’t have to read the whole book to get the whole message. Just read a section or a chapter or two at a sitting and see how your life fits into the general theme of restoring our country to the best of the past, from a past three hundred years ago, to one thirty hours ago. See sections for example on critical race theory, the failure of programs devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion and restoring the truth to history.

We look both ways in the book: one, to the past for the lessons, and two, to the future for the promise of a good and better life for our children and grandchildren. I wrote it for all ages, from those starting college, perhaps in their late teens, to you Boomers beginning life in your eighties or nineties.

I wrote it not for Republicans or Democrats, Independents or Libertarians, capitalists or communists, but for all Americans with a love of country. If you are a Christian, you will find the powerful thread of our faith woven into many chapters. See for example a piece on When the State Trumps Religion to see what happens when an overzealous state runs over the virtues inherent in Christianity, from love, faith, and hope to our eternal lives.

If you are of a different faith tradition, join me and the rest of your fellow countrymen in seeing our world through the same lens as a majority of Americans over the past three centuries, the prism of Christianity. As thoughtful and devoted Jews and Muslims know, we all came out of the same book, the Bible, and share much in common. We have our differences, especially in interpreting the life of Jesus Christ, but let’s lay them aside to concentrate of what unites rather than divides us.

One of the areas we emphasize is how much has changed in today’s modern culture. How do we decide if we want or need to change? Go to section 10 for example and follow the arguments in the first two chapters: were the old times always better as some old-timers like to say?

The chapters all appeared originally in The Port Rail, my weekly op-ed in The Tuscaloosa News or as independent essays in various newspapers such as the Washington Times, the Miami Herald, the Christian Science Monitor or letters to the editor in those papers and more, such as The Wall Street Journal in the ten years from about 2010 to 2021. So some of the references may be dated to the election of 2020, for example, and occasional references may mention the op-eds. Basically, however, these reference points and dates do not detract from the narrative or the message.

Section One: Critical Race Theory, Other Bad Habits, Language, and History

The 1619 Project Debunked by Distinguished Historians

Do You Know What Our Teachers Are Being Taught about American History?

Did you know that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history?

How can that be? What happened to all men are created equal with liberty and justice for all? Democracy? The vote? Liberty? Free enterprise?

Naw, forget all that claptrap. Here’s what our children need to be taught.

In 2019 The New York Times published its 1619 Project whose aim, noted a January 2020 article in The Atlantic, the New York Times announced, was to reinterpret the entirety of American history. Our democracy’s founding ideals, the Times noted, were false when they were written.

The 1619 Project (remember all the news that’s fit to print?) argues that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery, an interpretation judged by four historians with distinguished credentials as a striking claim built on three false assertions.

This is as close as thoughtful and—still—polite historians are likely to disagree in public. But in the recent article, A Matter of Facts, in The Atlantic by one of those historians, Sean Wilinetz of Princeton, the gloves came off, for at stake is not some recondite academic debate, but what our country has been about for virtually since its founding. And especially in an election year, it’s important to know the truth.

We can only point out some of the highlights of this argument in a short op-ed column, but maybe we will take it up later in more detail.

Wilinetz, of Jewish and Irish extraction, outlines it well. Basically, 1619 claims that our history as a nation rests on slavery and white supremacy, whose existence made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence’s ‘self-evident’ truth that all men are created equal.

So the nation’s birth came not in 1776 but in 1619, the year, the project stated, when slavery arrived in Britain’s North American colonies.

Read this way, America’s politics, economics, and culture have stemmed from efforts to subjugate African Americans—first under slavery, then under Jim Crow, and then under the abiding racial injustices that mark our own time—as well as from the struggles, undertaken for the most part by black people alone, to end that subjugation and redeem American democracy.

What about Henry Ford I thought, for example, when encountering this interpretation of American history? He transformed transportation history, started a new and vital industry, and increased wealth and opportunities across the nation. Was he just a White racist bent on subordinating African Americans as the authors of the 1619 would have you believe? If you believe that, you’ve just missed one of the key principles that has driven America to be what it is in world history.

Four historians took serious issue with some basic inaccuracies in the Project and asked The Times to correct or retract the errors. The Times responded flatly denying that the project contains significant factual errors and the jousters prepared for a third or fourth round.

The American Revolution, the Civil War, and the era of Jim Crow were the focus of Project 1619. Henry Ford or Bill Gates or John D. Rockefeller were not included.

Let’s examine the American Revolution; 1619 argues that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. Their evidence is buttressed by three false premises: One, that Britain in the 1770s was avidly devoted to abolishing the slave trade and slavery. It wasn’t. What 1619 described as a perceptible British threat to American slavery in 1776 in fact did not exist.

1619 claimed that Britain threatened to end the slave trade. In fact, most of the colonies had already taken steps between 1769 and 1774 to outlaw the slave trade. Britain was not taking the lead in this enterprise.

What arguments did 1619 historian Nikole Hannah-Jones bring to bear on Abraham Lincoln? She wrote, Lincoln not only opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals but he also opposed black equality, to which Wilinetz responded. That argument is built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts which combine to impart a fundamentally misleading impression.

Lincoln, like many abolitionists of those times, harbored the belief that white people were socially superior to black people. But he acted as he believed that in every other and legal way, they had, in Lincoln’s words, the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, [the Negro] is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.

To state flatly, as Hannah-Jones’s essay does, that Lincoln opposed black equality is to deny the very basis of his opposition to slavery.

Nor was Lincoln known to treat black people as inferior. After meeting with Lincoln at the White House, Sojourner Truth, the black abolitionist, said that he showed as much respect and kindness to the colored persons present as to the white and that she never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than by that great and good man.

And in his first meeting with Lincoln, Frederick Douglass wrote, the president greeted him ‘just as you have seen one gentleman receive another, with a hand and voice well-balanced between a kind cordiality and a respectful reserve.’ Lincoln addressed him as ‘Mr. Douglass’ as he encouraged his visitor to spread word in the South of the Emancipation Proclamation and to help recruit and organize black troops.

As president, moreover, Lincoln acted on his beliefs, taking enormous political and, as it turned out, personal risks. In March 1864, as he approached a difficult reelection campaign, Lincoln asked the Union war governor of Louisiana to establish the beginning of black suffrage in a new state constitution, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. A year later, in his final speech, Lincoln publicly broached the subject of enlarging black enfranchisement, which was the final incitement to a member of the crowd, John Wilkes Booth, to assassinate him.