Until two weeks ago, birthday bicentennials were recognized for Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, one the father of evolutionary theory, and the other the second father of our nation.  A year ago, the possible philosophical and political byproducts of the intertwined yet indirect relationship of these two great minds began simmering in my thoughts.  Rewriting something about their combined affect so many times that it debuts fully a year later reflects the challenge I faced.  Yet in its complexity lies the result’s simplicity.  To wit:

 

            Although these two thinkers occupied different spheres, politics and science, they influenced one another at one of modern history’s greatest turning points, a time of previously unimagined industrial production, material increase, more widely distributed wealth and greater opportunity, technological advances, including long-distance communication, and resulting philosophical and political debates among a wider audience than ever before.

 

            At a time when undefined “race” tightly described and largely circumscribed a person’s expected abilities and life experience, Darwin introduced the idea that living things could change to meet challenges.  Lincoln, who long harbored racist views, then popular and supposedly scientific, gradually came to see both Blacks and Indians differently, partially as a result of his discussions with their leaders and because of his participation in the debate about slavery.  One of them was the half-African, half-European Frederick Douglass, a slave turned influential philosopher and leader, who innocently advocated for freedoms that today are self-evident in the declarations of our nation’s founding documents.  Darwin was anti-slavery, an abolitionist who refused to accept the “truths” about “Blacks.”  He also innocently advocated for change in how people accounted the natural world around them, never believing that it would or could supplant religious belief. 

 

            Lincoln’s own thinking on race and individual abilities changed so much at this same time, that instead of bargaining a solution to the War of Secession with the South, as he initially intended to do, he instead issued the Emancipation Proclamation and led the nation through an excruciatingly painful reunion, exercised through the Civil War. 

 

            The long and short of this historic excursion here being that ideas are important, that people can and do change as a result of them, and that historic events and results do and should emanate from them.

 

            One terrible, unchanged, long-held belief today is that racism is endemic among “Whites,” and that as a race they simply cannot change their bad ways, as though somehow it is hard-wired into their atoms.  Despite Barack Hussein Obama being elected president with overwhelming White support, many Black leaders still cling to the charge that American society is largely a racist place.  As a person who inhabits the public and private areas supposedly reserved for “Whites” (whatever that really is, whoever that truly describes), I say outright that racism in any form has been almost completely banished from both polite society as well as that place occupied by people driving pickup trucks with gun racks (like me).  I am also the same man who once loved a Black woman, who once said to me “If my father could see us now, he would kill you.”  As someone who grew up with every color person sitting around my dining room table at some time or another, for whom skin color meant nothing but interesting discussion, I had never before been exposed to racism, and yet there it was, nakedly expressed.  Talk about bittersweet…

 

            Therefore, to charge Whites with endemic racism is the height of racist behavior itself, and it must end.  As other groups have done before them, American Blacks must evolve their own thinking about other people.  Their place in America is just as settled as that of every other group.  Blacks are just as welcome as anyone else, and as a result of their 400-year-long tenure here, they arguably are more Blue Blood than just about anyone else, more entitled to feel comfortable than any other group.  And yet it is that false charge of racism that artificially keeps Blacks on the self-inflicted sidelines, holed up politically and less widely influential on political thought than they should be.  The lessons of Darwin and Lincoln have been lost on most of today’s Black leadership.  It is difficult for me to accept the implied notion that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have advocated today that Blacks vote only for Democrats, or only for Blacks.  On this day of acknowledging America’s modern-day Moses, it is my hope that the African-American community, in all its hues and shades, locations and strata, will come out of its 40 years in the political desert and begin life anew with their European-American neighbors, who are good people, warm people, welcoming people, occasionally Republican, and who are most assuredly not racists.

 

Josh First is a business man and a candidate for the PA-17th Congressional District.