The Patriot Post® · For Black America: Patriotism, or Self-Imposed Exile?

It is a cruel and hateful thing the Left does to black Americans, working relentlessly to convince them that America hates and oppresses them, when in reality there is no place on Earth where someone of African descent is more blessed to live — including Africa.

Is America’s past regarding race unblemished? Of course not! America was founded in 1776 (not 1619), and it took nearly another 100 years, and a war costing 600,000 lives, to force Democrats to free their slaves.

And it took another 100 years after that before enough moral pressure was brought to bear on Democrats to the point where they finally relented and accepted the idea of civil rights and social equality for black Americans.

So, America’s past is not stainless. What makes America unique is not that we tolerated slavery but that, embracing the Western ideals of the Enlightenment, we broke with thousands of years of human history and declared the forced bondage of one man to another to be a moral evil.

Today, America’s race-baiting social arsonists declare that America’s past sins make her irredeemable. If so, where should black Americans go to escape such evil?

To Africa, where slavery is still practiced today, civil wars rage, and tribal warlords murder their fellow Africans by the tens of thousands? Where poverty is rampant, and individual and property rights are often nonexistent?

How about communist China, which America’s Left adores? It’s hard to imagine a country that not only casually produces overtly racist commercials but that imprisons, rapes, castrates, forces abortions on, and murders more than a million of Uyghur minorities would be a more hospitable locale for black Americans.

And for blacks, Europe seems no better.

Maybe that’s why Glenn Loury, professor of economics at the prestigious (and liberal) Brown University, argues there is no better place in the world for blacks than America.

In his recent article, “The Case for Black Patriotism,” Loury argues, “There is a fashionable standoffishness characteristic of much elite thinking about blacks’ relationship to America. … Does this posture serve the interests, rightly understood, of black Americans? I think that it does not.”

Loury continues, “Indeed, 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.”

Acknowledging America’s initial participation in the evil of slavery, he notes it was hardly unique in that regard. Slavery has been practiced among all cultures and races nearly as long as man has been on Earth.

Yet after the aforementioned war, and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (which Republicans passed and Democrats overturned), and later the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, black Americans became full citizens, integrated into the national fabric.

If the consequences were not so dire; it would be hilarious to hear the racial grievance-mongering Left act as if blacks have never had it so bad as they do in modern America.

Of course, no sane person would accept the idea that black slaves of 1860s America, or segregated blacks of 1950s America, were somehow better off than blacks in America today, where not only do they have every right enjoyed by white Americans, but they often enjoy preferential treatment by politicians and woke CEOs tripping over themselves to prove how not racist they are.

The race hucksters would have us believe that a nation where Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West, Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, and Tyler Perry are billionaires, where the overwhelming majority of multimillionaire athletes in the NBA and the NFL are black, and where black artists dominate music charts and grow extravagantly wealthy selling their music to white kids is a nation where blacks are still oppressed and second-class citizens.

But race-hustling is lucrative, and a few blacks are getting quite rich by coercing guilt-ridden white liberals and corporations into ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars to their racial extortion scheme.

For example, Black Lives Matter cofounder and self-proclaimed Marxist Patrice Khan-Cullors has been exposed for acquiring millions of dollars of real estate in predominately white, affluent areas of Los Angeles and Atlanta. This type of personal enrichment on their backs isn’t sitting well with many blacks, including the families of blacks killed by police who are the focus of BLM’s hustling.

And therein lies the problem. If you are a black American living in Democrat-run major cities and states, where crime is rampant, poverty is high, murder is common, and educational choice is denied to poor black children, it’s understandable that you would see America as racist and oppressive.

The rest of America is not these Democrat-run poverty plantations.

Professor Loury notes there are five times as many Nigerians as there are black Americans, yet black Americans have twice the accumulated wealth.

In closing, Loury states, “The central issue, then, is a question of narrative. Are we going to look through the dark lens of the U.S. as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or are we going to see it for what it has become over the course of the last three centuries: the greatest force for human liberty on the planet?”

For black Americans, the answer will determine which ones partake of America’s bounty and opportunity, and which ones remain in self-imposed exile.