Watching the progressive culture push black Americans to hate their country and dismiss its highest ideals has been a demoralizing experience, but there is some welcome pushback from Brown University’s Glenn Loury at City Journal. Loury picks up on the rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. to urge blacks to savor the rights supplied by the Founders, not forgetting that America has not always lived up to its promises. Loury writes:
A case can be made that the correct narrative to adopt today is one of unabashed black patriotism—a forthright embrace of American nationalism by black people. Black Americans’ birthright citizenship in what is arguably history’s greatest republic is an inheritance of immense value. My answer for black Americans to Frederick Douglass’s famous question—“Whose Fourth of July?”—is, “Ours!”
Yes, it took far too long for black Americans to receive their due. Loury adds:
It shouldn’t have taken 100 years; they shouldn’t have been slaves in the first place. True enough. But slavery had been a commonplace human experience since antiquity. Emancipation—the freeing of slaves en masse, the movement for abolition—that was a new idea. A Western idea. The fruit of Enlightenment. An idea that was brought to fruition over a century and a half ago here, in the United States of America, liberating millions of people and creating the world we now inhabit. . . . To those, like the influential writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who dismiss the American dream as irrelevant to blacks or worse, I would ask, “Have you noticed what has happened here in the United States in the last century?”
Read the whole thing at City Journal.