As the nation marks Jesse Jackson’s death at age 84, I realize that the temptation will be either to canonize the man as an icon of civil rights sainthood or to dismiss him as a partisan relic. But both impulses function as modern ideological shortcuts. And they deny us the harder labor of moral memory, which requires gratitude, candor, and a clear hierarchy of goods.
This is because Jesse Jackson’s passing hits the American bloodstream and forces a reckoning with a chapter of public life that communicates genuine moral urgency alongside a trail of human complication. It exposes how quickly a movement for human dignity can be taken up by people who keep the slogans while misplacing the soul and dignity of the human person.
Ambition, witness, and tragic turnabout
Jackson’s story began under the social pressure of Southern segregation and the sting of immense childhood shame. His early ambition was a combustible mixture of aspiration and protest, which is why he learned to speak with the urgency of a man who had been told, in a thousand ways, that his future should remain small or non-existent.
In that context, his rise through the civil rights movement and his proximity to Martin Luther King Jr., were marked by a genuine attempt to translate biblical anthropology into public witness. Their most potent and powerful claim involved a vision of the human person grounded in the image of God and, therefore, it was capable of summoning a nation to repent of injustice through a conscience formed by Christian truth, transcending the narrative of perpetual retaliation.
Even his own rhetoric, when it soared the hearts of the masses, often carried the cadence of biblical hope and the discipline of moral exhortation, as when he insisted, “Both tears and sweat are salty, yet they render a different result,” because, to him, tears solicit sympathy but sweat produces real change. That line still rebukes our age, which wants therapeutic recognition in place of action that costs both effort and life. Likewise, his counsel, “Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up,” is a simple and powerful moral test, especially for a progressivist class that survives by elites spouting aggravating narratives while looking down on activists as a renewable resource who shed blood for the elite cause.
Nevertheless, we cannot pretend that Jackson’s career can be reduced to inspirational aphorisms. Power does strange things to men who began their public life with righteous motives. And politics tends to reward ambiguity when it can be marketed as compassion. His early advocacy for the unborn, followed by later aggressive support of abortion, is nothing short of a tragic case study in how a public figure can lose the moral plot when their moral vision becomes captive to political coalition maintenance. The modern party system always enforces its own liturgy, complete with its own rituals of belonging and punishments for even a hint of doctrinal deviation.
Consequently, if the civil rights movement appealed to the natural law and divine law written on the human heart, the later political apparatus often appealed to the law written by the media, donors, polling, crony funding, and the ever-shifting requirements of elite approval.
Even so, Jackson’s repeated engagement with Pope John Paul II during his lifetime reveals something important about how he understood the stage of world affairs. He seemed to have treated the papacy as a moral platform that was above administrative institutions. He saw how it could pressure regimes and awaken human conscience beyond the reach of a political campaign speech. When he called John Paul II a dominant moral authority, he was publicly recognizing an older truth that modernity keeps trying to bury: spiritual authority, when it remains anchored in God, can outlast presidents and tyrants, and comfort the afflicted in ways that bureaucratic governments will always fail to imitate.
In that sense, Jackson’s instinct to bring humanitarian crises before the Church’s global witness is honest, since it admits that politics alone cannot heal the human wound, and that a moral voice beyond the state remains necessary for any civilization that wants to remain humane.
From civil rights to perpetual grievances
At the same time, Jackson’s death has transpired during an era when the civil rights inheritance is being repackaged into something dishonest. An ugly ideological current has seized the global black public discourse with a secular dogma that treats all grievance as identity politics, declaring equity as real justice, treating merit as a disguised sin, and preaching the West as irredeemably corrupt.
I know this because I was raised in those waters. If Jackson and King fought actual segregation, a new class of cultural commissars fights an imagined universe where every single form of social disparity becomes proof of oppression, every achievement becomes suspect, and every institution becomes guilty until it submits to ideological equity reeducation. In that climate, the word “justice” gets stretched until it means whatever the loudest coalition requires. Then it gets used like a blunt instrument against families, churches, schools, institutions, and neighborhoods that still want to speak of virtue, duty, excellence, meritocracy, and repentance. I’ve seen firsthand the ugly damage this inflicts upon families, cultures, and nations.
This is precisely where King’s legacy, and even Jackson’s earlier instincts, can function as an uncomfortable mirror. King’s moral imagination depended upon natural law and biblical claims about human dignity. It required personal responsibility as much as social reform, and it demanded that people become more virtuous rather than merely become louder. King warned against the corrosive effects of hatred and called his people to disciplined fortitude. Although he himself had flaws that historians rightly record, his public theology assumed that man can be morally formed, that the human conscience can be awakened, and that the human person is more than a node in a political power struggle.
Consequently, the modern rhetoric that trains young black men across the world to see themselves as permanent victims of the system, while simultaneously excusing moral and social vice as a sociological inevitability, is simply a betrayal of the very freedom that these earlier leaders bled to secure. It is the new captivity of the mind as a substitute for Christ’s grace-driven liberation of the soul.
The civil rights era was a profound American paradox. A nation founded on equal dignity had tolerated practices that contradicted its own moral grammar. The movement’s triumph required appealing to the nation’s biblical conscience rather than dissolving the nation’s identity. The long arc of black advancement has always depended economically upon stable families, honest work, functional schools, safe streets, and the cultivation of collective virtue that can sustain delayed gratification. But the modern ideological narratives often sabotage those very conditions by celebrating chaos as authenticity and dependency on the government as compassion.
This kind of perpetual grievance identity invites a spiral of despair. It trains the mind to interpret life through injury, and then it acts surprised when hope disappears, marriages fracture, and young men drift into nihilism, all while disguising it as cool cultural detachment to banging hip-hop backing tracks. The current obsession with race categories inevitably turns communities into a marketplace of accusations. This is why friendships become fragile, humor becomes dangerous, and social forgiveness is intolerable, since forgiveness requires a shared moral and religious horizon rather than a permanent ledger of collective guilt.
The way forward
When a young person is taught to introduce himself as a racial category before he introduces himself as a child of the covenant, or a son, a brother, a student, a worker, a neighbor, a disciple, or a citizen, he is being trained to live as a fragment in a neo-Marxist framework, rather than as a whole person. Moreover, when institutions teach that a man’s moral agency is secondary to his demographic label, they rob him of the very dignity they claim to defend, because dignity includes responsibility, and responsibility includes the power to choose wisely even under pressure.
In that light, the modern fixation on equity is nothing but counterfeit compassion; it offers outcomes without formation and entitlement without excellence, and then it wonders why minority societies grow brittle and collapse.
Again, I write this personally as a man whose own family line carries the bruises of slavery within a few generations. And yet my life has also carried the grace of God’s providence in ways that have saved me from the heinous victimhood narrative I grew up in. Consequently, I refuse to be defined by ancestral crimes. I refuse to be defined by parental failure. And I refuse to be defined by my own sins, since I am defined by the love of God poured out in Jesus Christ. Therefore, my choices must flow from that core reality rather than from an identity politics of resentment that channels outrage to every person with paler skin than I.
When Jackson said, “Hold your head high, stick your chest out,” and then added, “It gets dark sometimes, yet morning comes,” he was pointing all of us toward a human resilience that depends upon hope, and hope depends upon a horizon much larger than the state, larger than a party, larger than a grievance, and larger than the self. That hope is grounded in Christ Jesus alone.
Accordingly, the proper fruition of the civil rights struggle requires a refusal to think in racial categories as ultimate categories. The human person is first and foremost a creature made by God and ordered toward God, and only then as a bearer of any secondary trait that history has weaponized. Don’t get me wrong—this does not erase history, and it does not deny injustice, and it does not excuse cruelty. I will be the first to admit that moral truth requires honest memory. However, it does insist that redemption is possible, and redemption begins when man receives his identity as a gift of God, rather than seizing the identity as a blind political cudgel.
In that sense, the future of global black flourishing, the future of American sanity, and the future of Western revival will depend less upon ideological training sessions and more upon the renewal of families, parishes, neighborhoods, schools, work ethics, and open social meritocracy. That will be where virtue is praised, where truth can be spoken, where hard work yields productive social fruit, where the common good is the shared goal of all, where forgiveness can be offered, and where excellence can be demanded in love.
The Church’s position, when she speaks from her perennial wisdom, is both sharper and more hopeful than the slogans of the age.
She insists that every human person possesses inviolable dignity from conception to natural death. She insists that injustice is real and must be confronted, and that sin is also real and must be confessed. She also insists that salvation comes through the covenant mercy of God rather than through political theater. If the world wants a program, the Church offers a Person: Jesus Christ gathers Jews and Gentiles into one covenant family, baptizes men into a new identity, heals the wounds of hatred through the Cross, and commands a love that overcomes the tribal and identity politics calculus.
Consequently, the final word over Jesse Jackson’s life, over America’s racial history, and over the modern ideological captivity of the mind belongs to the covenant Lord who makes all things new. In Christ, we are children of the Father, members of His household, and heirs of a Kingdom where dignity is secured by Christ’s grace, and where eternal hope remains alive because the risen Jesus still reigns.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Thanks. More helpful than reams of so-called mainstream media commentary.
The canonization of “the reverend” Jesse Jackson by Catholic bishops is not only a political act that is anathema but is also racist. Why racist? Because it insists on viewing people according to the color of their skin. Catholic bishops who want to canonize Jackson are just trying to ingratiate themselves with African-Americans and this is an insultingly patronizing act. If the bishops think that African-Americans don’t see through this, they are really more like dolts than I thought.
I don’t think an obsession with skin colour or ethnicity is a good thing nor something to perpetuate. But it really was the case not so long ago that we were viewed & treated according to that. It’s becoming more a generational issue, thankfully.
I thought this was becoming less of an issue until the Obama administration. 2020 was a disaster for race relations. Today … I don’t know. There are mixed signals. It’s been a long time since Colin Kaepernick was in the news — he has about the same likelihood of making a comeback as Barry Sanders at this point. But the NFL still insists on playing “the black national anthem”.
The main thing calming race relations is probably the fact that the Left is once again showing that they are much more interested in perverted sexual minorities than in racial minorities, and the latter cannot help but notice this.
Tanning isn’t good for you either.
Yes, Bob Marley died of melanoma.
My red headed neighbor has it from tanning bed days.
I’m so sorry to hear that, knowall. I have a family member who’s had 2 melanoma operations. Sadly it can come back after treatment.
I worked with a beautiful redhead who borrowed to put a tanning booth in their home so she could attempt tanning for her husband. He left her not long after for the 19 year old secretary where he
worked. Two kids then had a split
household. Raised Catholic but married on a Hawaian(sp) beach and then this.
Unfortunately, Jackson who started as a legitimate civil rights advocate, became a race hustler, making a living off various grievances. Too bad.
Wow!!! Such a wonderful piece! Clarity, gentleness and hope. At 83 I am bewildered by all the layers of passages through discussion and yet little light emerges. In the end only Christ is shows all of us the way through to truth.
Ever person is a “person of color”, except those of us who are somewhere in the vicinity of ecru are called “white” and white is treated as the absence of color, when white is actually the entirety of the visible spectrum.
Thanks for the science lesson….
I learned that in Art class. Our teacher spun a circle with every colour and while it spun we saw only white. When it stopped we saw the individual colours again.
Perhaps there’s a deeper meaning somewhere.
It depends if you’re overlapping light or mixing pigments.
At any rate, I remember Chesterton someplace writing about how white men aren’t really white, any more than white wine is white; how black men aren’t really black; but how coloured men really are not black but do indeed come in a wide range of colours. I could normally Google the key words to find the direct reference, but these days Google is much too woke to be of any use in such a search.
It depends if you’re overlapping light or mixing pigments.
Also, …
“We call wine ‘white wine’ which is as yellow as a Blue-coat boy’s legs. We call grapes ‘white grapes’ which are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a ‘white man’—a picture more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe.
“Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes, the waiter would think him mad. It is undoubtedly true that if a Government official, reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, ‘There are only two thousand pinkish men here’ he would be accused of cracking jokes, and kicked out of his post. But it is equally obvious that both men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth.”
— Chesterton, HERETICS
And knowing of the stupidity of His creatures, including inclinations towards racism, I subscribe to those ethnic theorists that Our Father had the complexion of Jesus as probably right in the middle of the spectrum, what we generally call olive.
It is pretty foolish when you think about it isn’t it? No one’s actually “Black “, “Yellow “, “Red”, or “White. ”
The wealthiest man in our state in the 19th century came as a poor, illiterate 13 year old Jewish boy. He began peddling goods door to door but was turned away from one community and told they only did business with “White” men.
Later on after he’d amassed his fortune he bought out most of the community and renamed it.
Back then Jews, Southern Europeans, and even Irish in some localities weren’t considered “White “.
Probably so Mr. Baker. Thank you.
About the only thing I learned in art class was that I could draw flies
….that must have been why they put me in the rear of the class by the empty desks, I figured out later. In all seriousness. I could not draw a circle and the special tutor the Dominicans had help me with some motor skills and speech etc..thought I was doing it on purpose. They would kind of look like a sloppy G. Making the capital Q like you’re supposed to, on the control paper was almost an impossibility.
I always enjoy your comments knowall.
🙂
Apparently it’s not taught.
Do you have anything edifying or substantive to offer, or are you limited to the the puerile?
This gets real when you sit in front of some HR Stasi and are told that you aren’t part of a “protected class”.
When young I raised a clenched fist along with a hearty “RIGHT ON!!” in agreement with him.
As maturity made its inevitable march, I came to disagree with him.
Now he is no more.
This being Lent – SHIRLEY it is not asking too much that we STOP for a few brief seconds, be silent, and then pray for him and the repose of his soul, perhaps even have a Mass offered for him – SHIRLEY that is not asking too much.
Lent is, among other things, a time for silence.
Amen Mr. Terence & thank you.
My pleasure Mrs. C & thanks for your kind words.
What’s with all the negativity? Bemoaning politicking while indulging in it is not a good look. Trotting out rightwing talking points in this context is inappropriate.
Do you have any idea who Jackson was and what he stood for? He was a racist and an antisemite. Why are you defending him?
Dave: You confuse “right wing talking points” with possessing common sense and speaking truth to lies.
There’s a difference between “politicking” and discussing a political personality.
Now I’m speaking truth to a lie. (The 60’s called, they want their hackneyed slogan back).
Why is that?
Shirley, you can’t be serious?
That movie was FUNNY 45+ years ago and it remains so!!
(OMT – skip the sequels)
Surely, you jest?
A wonderful assessment of that mans life, it explains a lot, and how power corrodes the person. My conscience is disturbed. It needs to be.
Thank you.
I participated in the first Pro-Life march in 1974. In DC. Jackson was slated to speak. He failed to show. Already apparent convictions gave way to political opportunism. And that was the script for most of the rest of his life. Sad.
I’ve always wondered if he ever preached the Gospel. Oh, he always was given the title “reverend”, but I do not recall him ever mentioning Jesus Christ, nor the need for all people — including himself and his congregation — to repent of their sins, to love their neighbors, and to pray for their enemies. It’s easy to preach that ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH ME must repent, and that people of a different color than me must be humble; it’s easy, but it’s not Christian.
Maybe he did preach the Gospel, but the media never covered it. I hope so.
Pretty common in those days; quite a few went to divinity school to get out of Nam
If we study the civil rights movement carefully and reflect on it– bearing in mind Catholic principles of justice and political prudence–the whole thing is a big fraud.
What it did was destroy the ordinary order and harmony that arises from:
a) the principle of freedom of association–and its equally important corollary–freedom of *dis-association.*
b) the normality of the role of commonalities and similarities in forming spontaneous natural voluntary communities and societies. Examples of such commonalities and similarities: race, ethnicity, language, culture, and religion.
c) the normality of such communities *protecting themselves* to maintain, e.g., their ethnic character. (This did not and does not imply hatred of other ethnicities)
d) the notion that good race/ethnic relations involve *respecting the space* of other races and ethnicities and not in some governmentally/institutionally/culturally mandated “integration”.
e) the ordinary common law liberty of doing what one wants with one’s own property and business provided that one is not aggressing on others (or selling corrupt products like, e.g., porn).
f) the common law liberty of attaching conditions before one agrees to sell one’s own property.
g) the normal and healthy presumption that corporations (esp. private corporations) and state governments can make rational and just decisions regarding their policies (including hiring) without being monitored and punished by the feds and their allegedly superior wisdom/justice.
h) the normal awareness that the market will punish bad hiring decisions.
The current institutionalized injustice of DEI hiring practices, that is, systemic discrimination against straight white Gentile males, *has its roots in the so-called civil rights movement.*
Both MLK and Jesse Jackson were examples of mere race hustlers, lifetime actors groomed by higher powers to play a (predictably) destructive role in the theater of American politics.
But yes, let us pray for the souls of both of them.
Nice try. You can find plenty of examples of individual Catholics — laymen and clergy alike — who were in favor of race-based drinking fountains, of stores, restaurants, and hotels with “no Negroes allowed”, and of “separate but equal” education, but you won’t find that in binding Teaching. If you think you can prove me wrong, go write a book about it; you would find that a market is there for such a book. Only your book had better have concrete references, not the vague arm-waving of your earlier comment.
Catholic social-political policy aims at the temporal Common Good, much (most?) of which involves free people and ethnicities trying to get along with other people/ethnicities while trying to raise decent families in peaceful neighborhoods consisting of people with which they are familiar and comfortable with. This did not and does not demand integration.
Social peace and harmony should be attained and secured as much as possible without the discipline of laws, that is through free association *and dis-association.*
A well-known Thomist principle of politics states that it is *often counterproductive* to have civic laws to forbid and punish every morally disordered act, *because these laws and policies often bring about worse evils or hinder the emergence of a greater good. *
Moreover, given human fallibility, it is often very difficult for the government to discern when a party is guilty of an unjust act, as, e.g., in the case of declining to hire someone who happens to be of a certain race. It is better to give companies the benefit of the doubt.
Civil rights legislation and public policy–in a pompous attempt to stamp out “unrighteousness” has led to the manifest injustices of the typical HR department–reverse discrimination and DEI.
There is also the ancient principle: “de minimis non curat lex”
the law does not concern itself with little things.
Much civil rights legislation deals with little injustices, injustices that can be easily avoided by the intelligent citizen. Some business wants to have separate (but equal as in 1960’s North Carolina) lunch counters based on race? So what? Don’t like it–Go to a different restaurant or eat at home. Why drag the civil law into this?
Yes. We still have separate colour-based churches here within the same parish. Ditto until recently for parochial schools. Unfortunately the schools built for African American Catholic children have mostly closed and those students have been absorbed into the public schools. Not the remaining parochial schools.
Anyone can attend either church in our parish of course, segregation is over with, but families still tend to belong to the same church their parents and grandparents attended.
“Freedom” to do intrinsic evil is not freedom.
Always had mixed feelings about Jackson, but I admired the way he came to the defense of Terry Schiavo when her bishop was effectively giving her a death sentence.
Thank you, Mr. Baker. I think that was very decent of Mr. Jackson, too. What a terrible ordeal that was for Terri Schiavo & her poor family. I remember hearing her death announced on the news. May she & Jesse Jackson rest in peace.
I was a fairly new to banking external auditor at now long gone (like so many) regional bank a couple decades ago. One day, I came to the bank for work and their staff was practically giddy.
When I asked my internal audit contact what was the cause for joy, she told me to stop by her office at a certain time. When I arrived, she had me close the door. She explained that the bank had received a good “CRA” score.
She then proceeded to tell me the mechanics of how the Community Reinvestment Act, passed in the Carter era, was dusted off by the corrupt Henry Cisneros who was HUD secretary under Clinton to ensure that color replaced character, creditworthiness and collateral as a lending criteria. The end of her explanation. “Jesse Jackson won’t be on our steps with a bullhorn” was instructive.
Of course this bank wasn’t retaining all of its loans. It would use “asymmetric knowledge” to keep the best quality loans and sell the others to the big money center banks, who packaged the loans using sophisticated, but fallacious math to produce synthetic assets that met default risk criteria. This is an extension of “Gresham’s Law” where, in an environment that uses commodity money, people retain the best and trade the inferior.
If that sounds familiar, yes, Jesse Jackson and other hustlers and their symbiotic patrons in government were players in the mortgage collapse.
His operations were well documented in
Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson
by Kenneth R. Timmerman
During the downturn, there was much discussion on why the huge mortgage losses. One guy who I believe was in banking or finance commented that when he came back from Vietnam and wanted a mortgage, the banker did some checking around first. Came to his place of work etc.. There was no guarantee of any sort that he would be approved.
I worked as a property manager during the mortgage collapse & we had mortgage companies approve home loans to some of our most unreliable tenants. People who were late paying rent virtually every month & had multiple dispossessories & evictions filed against them. Once a lender called & asked if we could attest that one of the most unreliable tenants paid their rent in a “timely manner.” I said, “No”. So they tried to pose the question in different ways to get an answer they could work with. I didn’t cooperate but our bad tenant was still approved for the mortgage & of course was foreclosed on not long afterwards.
Fees and quotas, perhaps
“Fees and quotas, perhaps”
Yes.
There’s several ways to make money on mortgages:
One of them is origination fees: This is the initial costs associated with creating a loan. Most “mortgage companies” exist only to initiate the loan and have no intention of holding a 15-30 year asset. If you go through “Rocket Mortgage”, they will almost certainly exercise the assignment clause the borrower agrees to as they blindly sign and initial tens and tens of pages and sell the loan to a bank, insurance company or other entity that wants to “hold the paper”. Some borrowers, such as me, get multiple assignments, One reason is “repayment risk”, in a period of falling interest rates, there’s an increasing risk that borrower will exercise the prepayment option and replace an existing loan with lower rate one.
Yes knowall, the mortgage companies seemed to be doing ok through that period. That couldn’t be said for the rest of our community. My nextdoor neighbors packed up & disappeared overnight without a word. Others left dogs & furniture behind. There was a suicide at another foreclosure.
“During the downturn, there was much discussion on why the huge mortgage losses.”
Most of it uniformed or confused.
“One guy who I believe was in banking or finance commented that when he came back from Vietnam and wanted a mortgage, the banker did some checking around first. Came to his place of work etc.. There was no guarantee of any sort that he would be approved.”
That would be the investigation of character.
His point was this was not going on much anymore, I believe.
Not at all anymore.
Apart from the time and effort involved, the inherent subjectivity of assessing something such as employment stability or “good character” is an invitation to a complaint of invidious discrimination.
I don’t know if you’ve seen it but PBS did a documentary on the 80s farm crisis. One farm wife told the story of her husband being injured or sick and she went to her local, trusted banker to handle getting a loan to replace their breeding boars. The banker, who sounded like a family friend, told her she could have the loan as long as she refinanced all the other ones. Okay, but didn’t explain in detail it was some type of variable rate product, which caused them to eventually lose the farm. She was really hurt for what she believed was both a business and personal betrayal. I remember getting my first mortgage in the late 80s and making sure it was a fixed rate and no prepayment penalty, so your comments below are educating me on some of the inner workings. These fees and such are often just dumped into the loan balance, from what I’ve seen. I guess that’s one way these mortgage companies get so rich. …and then there’s the deriatives….
Black History Month is February.
REVEREND Jackson appeared at a dark moment in American history. He joined MLK, John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and other Black dignitaries who crossed the Edmond Pettis Memorial Bridge in Selma, where they were attacked by redneck white police, under the command of arch segregationist, Bull Conner.
REVEREND Jackson’s advocacy helped raise awareness and support for Black History Month in communities nationwide. His goose-step allegiance to MLK left his mark on history.
MLK’s “I HAVE A DREAM” that my little children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” set his peaceful legacy. Then the Black World went dark. On April 4, 1968, seething with rebel hatred, James Earl Ray murdered King. Those little children who need his virtues were left fatherless.
REVEREND Jackson is known for his organization,”The Rainbow Coalition. “Our mission is to protect, defend, and gain civil rights by leveling the economic and educational playing fields, and to promote peace and justice around the world.”
Black history was stereotyped with Stephen Foster’s mournful song “Old Black Joe.” “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Uncle Remus said little.”
https://genius.com/Stephen-foster-old-black-joe-lyrics
There are calls here for comments with less volatile rhetoric. I agree. But there is a sinful political stunt in FEBRUARY, Black History Month, by President Trump on his Social Media account.
AP: Trump, weeks after backlash over his racist post, he hosts Black History Month reception. Many Black people in the audience applauded.
His immense hatred of the first Black President, Obama and his BLACK wife, Michelle, is displayed in an AI film that shows both as Black monkeys in the forest.
Yes, lower the temperature, but make your case.
INK low! Watch this space.
What exactly is “black history”? Will we be having “White History Month any time soon?
You want to to know how woefully attenuated and politized it is, ask any celebrant about Elijah McCoy or Oscar Daniels. I’ll wait why you look them up.
Pitchfork. You say… “You want to know how woefully attenuated and politicized it is, ask any celebrant about Elijah McCoy or Oscar Daniels. I’ll wait why you look them up.”
As a courtesy to us woeful old folks, will you provide the URLs?
During the forced removal of Black slaves, some babies from Africa by white overlords, it places them as unique in world history.
Columbus travelled the world with black slaves. Scribed by his younger brother Bartholomew Columbus. Interestingly, our founding fathers had similar possessions…
George Washington – Owned over 500 slaves during his lifetime at Mount Vernon.
Thomas Jefferson – Owned more than 600 slaves at Monticello.
James Madison – Owned around 100 slaves at Montpelier.
James Monroe – Owned several slaves and supported the institution of slavery.
Benjamin Franklin – Initially owned slaves but later became an abolitionist and freed them.
https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=E210US0G0&p=what+found+fathers+has+slaves%3F
https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=E210US0G0&p=what+found+fathers+has+slaves%3F
Sadly, Blacks were hated and demeaned by their White “brethren,” calling them the N word and isolating them. Unbelievable, or not, DEI needs to soothe Trump’s ire.
Out of Africa.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Africa
Godspeed.
“As a courtesy to us woeful old folks, will you provide the URLs?”
Do your own damn work. Specificity is all you get Oscar J. Daniels (1888-1925).
You can’t find the stories associated with these two men? That’s not a function of age, it’s a function of the indolence that is so much a presenting symptom leftist ideologues.
Pitchfork. I really enjoy jousting with you. However, your current shtick offers a challenge, especially the reference to “leftist ideology”.
You show fire in your belly. I will ignore “Do your own DAMN work”. Moreover, I am not a LEFTIST, I am an American Veteran who loves his country that is currently in a constitutional crisis, much of which was caused by the Trump administration.
My family and I have been lifelong Republicans. We voted for Trump in his first term. Not in 2020, largely because he became obsessed with his verified loss to Biden. He childishly refused to invite Biden to the WH for the traditional presidential transfer of power. His obsession continues when he unlawfully sends the FBI to raid Fulton County, Georgia, to confiscate their election records. You might remember when he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to get him 11,700 votes.
We are not RINOs, rather RINOPs… Republicans In Need Of a Party.
Be well.
I’m no Steven Jobs but I have definitely noticed internet searches vary based on what device you do the search on. Computers seem to be a better bet than phones, even my 20 yr old lap top held together with baling wire and with an ice pack to keep it from overheating is better than this wally world sourced phone.
Mr. morgan, colonial Americans who were not in some way involved with the slave trade were the exception.The norm was to either be a slave, a slave owner, or be involved in some other way with slavery through trade, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. It was a different world in the Americas back then.
I’ve heard people say their ancestors have been here since the 1600’s & none owned slaves. That’s quite difficult to know because you’re talking about hundreds to potentially thousands of direct ancestors. Slavery was found in every US colony & every part of the New World. It existed amongst the native tribal peoples, too & lasted in the Choctaw Nation until 1866.
We can’t go back & fix the past but hopefully we can learn from it.
mrscracker: let’s remember that the Northern States benefitted from slavery even if they didn’t own slaves. If anyone consumed goods produced by slave labor, they are complicit in slavery. Currently, many products produced by India and China are produced by slaves. The fact is we all participate in slavery today by consuming goods that originate in India and China. How many of us wear gold and diamond jewelry that was mined by what amounts to slave labor? Does everyone on this page know the origin of the gold and diamonds they are wearing?
The Northern colonies had quite a few slaves back then. Over 40% of colonial New York City households had at least one slave and Newport, RI was an important center of the slave trade. And of course we had the triangular trade route from New England of rum, slaves, & molasses/sugar.
Yes Deacon Edward, if we trace back the sources of some of the goods we buy, it can be very troubling.
Some were indentured for debts?
We are not jousting, I am exposing you. Jousting in the context you use it implies interlocution of relative equals and you are not my equal-it’s not even close. You can’t even do rudimentary internet biographical research when handed the search targets. If you disagree, you might want to consider appropriate intervention for Dunning Kruger.
As a matter of politics, you are a leftist, regardless of being a veteran. Mark Milley is a retired four star and his treason required an autopen/Presidential pardon, so a DD-214 is not immunity from criminality, much less criticism. I’m glad I’m not in his physical presence or yours for the same reason. Patriotism IS the last refuge of scoundrels.
There is no “constitutional crisis” caused by Trump. That you disagree with his policies or that I disagree with some or any other person disagrees with none, some or all does constitute a “crisis”.
Properly understood, a crisis is either there is an inability to meet the duties of office or failing to do them properly as required.
The Constitutional crisis was that duplicitous, loathsome Scranton shyster being put in office by the most dubious circumstances (I guess only 100% old white men can get 81M votes, since Obama, Clinton and Harris got no where near that total) and then retained until his mental lapses were impossible to conceal his senility with a chorus of lies from the Praetorian guard.
Once the charade was over, there was a weekend Coup D’état and Vice President kneepads as installed without a vote while the left chanted “precious democracy”). We know know he was not only incapable of the duties of his office, documents were routinely being signed by mechanical signature and without a clear indication he knew what was being done, going so far as to deny the issuance of an executive order to Mike Johnson.
Of course, politics is like marriage to you. What imperils your desires is unfair or a crisis. Frankly, I believe nothing you write, given your demonstrated propensity to delusion and hallucination. If you said the sky was blue, I’d hold up a color wheel to check it.
TPR: You summarize the hypocrisy of the Left (morganD included) most adequately. The Left violated the Constitution from Clinton on down through Obama, Biden and what’s her name from CA. And now they want to appeal to the Constitution. That’s the definition of hypocrisy. Let’s be specific: the Left tried to undermine Trump with their lies about “Russian collusion in the election” but now in 2026 they refuse to do anything to insure an honest ballot by requiring proof of identity. The Left are all frauds.
And actually, Barack Obama was the only bi-racial President. I can see how somebody might disregard his unfit mother, she still existed and contributed to his genome.
I’ve heard that Pres. Obama’s mother had distant African ancestry also. That’s a story for quite a few Americans with colonial roots.
Well, if the “out of Africa” theory is true, we all have distant African ancestry.
Other than that, I’ve never heard she had African (black) ancestry. I believe I heard her ancestors were slaveholders. If so, the people that voted for Obama as a symbolic expiation of a great national sin of slavery, voted for a bi-racial man who has no antebellum slave ancestor but some slaveholder.
From what I’ve read the first person in the British North American colonies to hold another in chattel slavery was a Virginua gentleman with African ancestry.
Slave owners came in all colours especially in non Anglo colonies. Some Creole people of colour were very wealthy plantation owners with many slaves.
The “ole black Joe” theory of Biden is what is totally wrong. I was working out west and a Black gentleman and I bumped into each other in the free breakfast line at the hotel. He said, “excuse me, sir.” I nodded at the tv news and replied, “those are the only sirs”, it was a Nov election day, after Trump was already president. We then ended up talking about Trump and he told me he never could find good work under Obomba and was planning on voting for Trump again, as he was now gainfully employed.
mrscracker: my guess is we all can trace our ancestry to Africa.
And some more recently than others.
🙂
Do you know who designed the Obama library? I’ve heard it’s way over budget and the pictures I’ve seen are not impressive.
Knowall. Seems most everything Trump does is over budget.
Reuters: “Massive fundraising projections — during a period while Trump is still in office — are almost 50 times as much as Barack Obama’s presidential library raised in its first three years.” Being a convicted criminal, they don’t know whether to put books on the shelves or bars on the windows. Ironically, it was said he reads very little. He has the PDB read to him by a staffer.
Trump asserts that the $300 million project for a 90,000-square-foot East wing structure with “glass walls” will be “entirely privately funded.” Will he calm the nerves of the taxpayers by revealing the donors’ names?
Naturally, he lies so much that you can’t take his word.
morganD: A dangerous flare-up of your TDS. Better take yourself in for a checkup before it gets out of control.
“Naturally, he lies so much that you can’t take his word.”
This is about as good an example of projection as it gets. The irony is obviously lost here.
MorganB, you say, “You might remember when he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to get him 11,700 votes.”
No, he did not ask to manufacture votes. Knowing of the undeniable corruption that did occur in Georgia, he recognized that a state recount could easily turn the tide of a relatively close vote.
Consider being less of a pawn to a culture whose anti-Christianity takes many forms. Trump is obviously not a saint, nor is he a devil, but his political reality is a concrete roadblock to leftism’s ultimate Marxist agenda. Support for a flawed man fighting a Christian battle, weakness in self-awareness for Christian soldiering notwithstanding, has implications that enable Christians to get off the floormat and achieve a stronger public voice.
Lower the temperature MorganD? Really? Would that include all your false accusations of Trump’s racism. The mega developer who broke through trade union resistance for decades to enable the hiring of more blacks.
Name the racist statements that Trump allegedly made. Specifics!
Neat trick to sandwich in a remark like, “It was said that he reads very little”. A man making an assertion doesn’t depend on sustaining what “others said.”
And you can’t be convicted of a crime when there is no crime. Setting a price for a property, which was underestimated, between two parties, is not a crime, unlike the mockery of justice performed by criminal decisions to prosecute a fictional crime.
The ideology where every single form of social disparity becomes proof of oppression is called Marxism, which is the ethos of the modern progressives.
It will probably be considered racist but I’m tired of Black History Month. Now here (Ontario, Canada) we have Muslim History Month (or maybe it’s Muslim Heritage Month). March has IWD and seems to be heading toward Women’s Month (a certain type of women, I’d say). June is Pride Month.
I’m waiting for Belgian (Flemish, if you want to be really precise) Heritage Month.
Cleo: No matter what you say they’ll call you a racist. That’s their offensive weapon. So you might as well speak the Truth.
Before you know it, we’ll have that time of the month month.
knowall, do you have a comedy side gig?
🙂
“I don’t know if you’ve seen it but PBS did a documentary on the 80s farm crisis.”
I have not, but have a personal perspective.
I had a great Uncle that moved from Pennsylvania to Iowa after World War II to sharecrop from his in-laws. He and his wife had many children, but only one remained in farming, a daughter that married a farmer.
When they visited a couple decades ago, her husband told me that he realized a lot of farmers were mortgaging their properties to finance the spring planting and that was bad risk management. If there’s a bad season, you might not have enough at harvest to cover the note even at high prices, if there’s a bumper crop, prices might crater.
He persisted because he became financially astute and sold futures against his harvest-and judiciously-not against the expectation of a bumper crop, since the harvest is uncertain and you don’t want to have the risk of closing a position because you can’t meet delivery and the thing you sold at 10 is now 20 to buy and close.
I learned as much in an hour conversation as I did in my speculative markets class that was long on the mathematics of those instruments and short on purpose practical application. The adage “beware of geeks bearing formulas” comes to mind.
When I had a tv the ag station used to run ads for speculation product firms, then a disclaimer,”There is always risk,in these types of products blah blah …” Most people don’t realize that investment funds are in the grains and livestock. Sometimes the futures and such help get the prices at the farm gate up other times they mess them up.
The same documentary I mentioned interviewed a farmer who told the story of while doing his chores on a Sunday night, the local banker suddenly showed up and offered to finance 240 acres up the road from him, that was for sale. He’d never had a banker visit him on a Sunday out of the blue, and he also figured he was working enough hours so he declined. He concluded with had he bought the property he likely would have gone broke. My former boss used to talk about the old days auditing the “rule of ’78 loans,” if I remember that moniker correctly.
If that farmer was a Mennonite or Amish the banker would have known better than to attempt business with them on a Sunday.
One of my children has frequent interactions with Anabapist people and they’ve said that farming with machinery didn’t pay off for them. Spiritually or financially. They only farm the acreage they can handle with simple machinery and horses and without debt.
The Amish will borrow only for land, is my understanding. They are simple loans, though, unlike the ones most of us are subject to, as noted by P Rebel. Your name reminded me of in our area they go to Aldis from time to time and buy up all the saltine crackers they have on premise. Now when I go in I get an extra box. Their eggs are just under 2 at this time.
My same child lived near an Amish grocery salvage store & would pick up random things that had fallen off a truck or not sold well in larger stores. The prices were amazing. They have a lifetime supply now of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. I don’t know if the British use that for pecan pies but it works great.
In our area they hire out for construction/carpentry @ 30/hr. They also sell farm stuff like produce and flowers, baked goods etc at stands along the road. Some have other skills they can make money at.
To all my kind responders, I will take your responses under advisement. I am saddened to see some evidence of open, vicious diatribe attacks. I used to be pretty good at deflecting such personal attacks. Could I hide behind my age? Anyway, I promise that I will not cast the first stone!
Tonight at 9 PM EST, President Trump will give the State of the Union speech. It is reported that he will focus on his policies related to affordability (the cost of living), and important staples like groceries, especially meat. Health insurance and immigration.
I saw on Yahoo that he will invite the Epstein victims. I hope that it’s true. I would suggest they be seated in the first row.
I will be watching; will you?
Have a blessed Lent.