By John Daniel Davidson
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
A recent profile of Rep. Illan Omar by the Washington
Post made waves because of its revelation that the congresswoman lied
to a group of high school students about witnessing racism and injustice in
a Minneapolis courtroom. In an anecdote lifted almost verbatim from the plot of
“Les Miserables,” Omar claimed she saw a “sweet, old… African American lady,”
who had spent the weekend in jail for stealing a $2 loaf of bread to feed her
“starving 5-year-old granddaughter,” handed an $80 fine. Omar, unable to
control her emotions, blurted out, “Bullsh—t!” in the courtroom.
But Omar’s lies aren’t nearly as revealing as when she
tells the truth. In that same speech to the high schoolers, she said “I grew up
in an extremely unjust society, and the only thing that made my family excited
about coming to the United States was that the United States was supposed to be
the country that guaranteed justice to all. So, I feel it necessary for me to
speak about that promise that’s not kept.”
The promise that’s not kept. Consider the disconnect
between that statement, the seething resentment behind it, and the reality of
Omar’s own life story. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an American success story
more demonstrative of America keeping its promise. Omar’s family fled civil war
in Somalia when she was a child and spent four poverty-stricken years in a
Kenyan refugee camp before the United States, in its generosity, granted them
admission to America as refugees.
Here, safe from the violence and chaos of their home
country, they flourished. Omar received a college education, started a family,
won election to the Minnesota State House at age 34, and two years later,
became a member of Congress.
The Left Has an
Inverted View of America
What, one wonders, does Omar have to say for the country
that has given her so much? Mostly, that it has failed to be the Hollywood
utopia she was promised as a child, that “the classless America that my father
talked about didn’t exist.” Of course it didn’t exist. There’s no such thing as
a classless society, anywhere. That’s something everyone learns, or should
learn, as they become an adult and encounter the real world.
Instead, Omar takes it as evidence that America is based
on a massive lie—a promise not kept, as if America actually promised a
classless society free from inequality, poverty, and the manifold trials of
human existence. According to this way of thinking, past mistakes and
injustices, whether in foreign policy or civil rights, simply reveal the
hypocrisy of America’s founding ideals. The United States was fatally flawed
from the beginning, conceived in sin, and deserves only damnation.
Such thinking is now commonplace and mainstream. Witness
the recent Fourth of July scrum of sports stars and media outlets quoting—and
utterly misunderstanding—Frederick Douglass’s famous speech, “What to the Slave
is the Fourth of July?”
The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and former NFL
quarterback Colin Kaepernick all cited the 1852 speech as a condemnation of
America for its hypocrisy, confirming their present-day animus toward their
country. WBUR Boston ran a commentary piece from a young black woman about why
she doesn’t celebrate the Fourth, citing Douglass’s speech and declaring the
holiday “a festivity with no substance, a celebration with no soul.”
They are of course wrong. Douglass concludes his
condemnation of American slavery with an appeal to America’s founding. The
Constitution, he writes (in all caps), “is a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” and
the principles of the Declaration of Independence are to him a source of hope.
He wrote and believed this in the face of American injustice and oppression
incomparably worse than anything we have today. So did Martin Luther King Jr.,
for whom the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were a “promissory
note to which every American was to fall heir.”
For Social Justice
Warriors, America’s Promise Is a Lie
This is not how elites in academia, media, entertainment,
and the Democratic Party see America today. That’s why corporations like Nike
repudiate American symbols like the Betsy Ross flag at the slightest
provocation. That’s why Democrats, including several major presidential
candidates, now support reparations for slavery (Sen. Elizabeth Warren even
claims America owes reparations for denying tax breaks to gay couples before
the legalization of same-sex marriage). That’s why NBC News thought fit to
publish a story about how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s
great-great-grandfather owned slaves, and how that fact was somehow relevant to
McConnell’s opposition to reparations.
For these people, America today isn’t much better than it
was in Douglass’s day. There’s a telling anecdote in the Post’s Omar profile
about a young political activist and fundraiser from Omar’s district named
Filsan Ibrahim. Like Omar, Ibrahim and her family fled war-torn Somalia and
were taken in by the United States. Like Omar, she and her sisters all went to
college. And Like Omar, she has a jaundiced view of the country that adopted
her:
‘All of America is focused on
people’s backgrounds,’ Filsan said. ‘It’s all anyone cares about. You can’t
come here and just be an American unless you are white. Otherwise you are a
Somali American, an African American, an Asian American.’
‘It’s bulls—,’ her sister agreed.
‘Hilarious,’ her other sister
added.
A few days later Filsan, her mother
and her sisters attended a fundraiser and rally for nine Somalis who had been
convicted in 2016 of trying to travel to Syria to fight on behalf of the
Islamic State.
The irony is that the hyper-focus on people’s backgrounds
is a feature of the left, not the right. Democrats and progressives are the ones
who push for hyphenation and separation according to ethnic and sexual
identities, while conservatives generally try to see people as individuals.
Ultimately, it’s both sad and frightening that Omar and
these young women, for whom America has been a lifeline, can’t see that social
justice culture and identity politics, which have seeped into the mainstream,
have betrayed them and turned what should have been to them a great blessing—a
home in America—into a curse.
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