Changing Omaha Public Schools

What do you mean by "White Supremacy"?

Update: Keep Kids First has started (https://www.keepkidsfirstnebraska.com/) and is on Twitter (https://twitter.com/KeepKidsFirstNE).

Black people face lots of idiotic prejudices. Being White, you would think I don’t understand, but I do. A middle-aged White woman confessed to me, her parents told her to not be friends with Black people. A White man in his 60s talked about driving and being pulled over by a Black police officer. I was perplexed. What does the officer being Black have to do with you being pulled over by the police? Fear of Black people? A Black man told me how he saw police following him when he suddenly stopped into a store and took off his hat. With the removal of the hat, the police left as they realized they were not following the suspect they were seeking.

When I wrote a rebuttal of the Omaha Central High Register (https://andrewlsullivan.substack.com/p/central-high-school-register-on-race), I apparently hit people broadside as they could not fully see what I was getting at. You can see it in the comments of the article.

Many people often fail to understand cultural differences and why people do what they do. Unfortunately, people do not even know their own background and how it differs from others. For example, alcohol is in most cultures even when it is banned. However, there are very, very few Black brewers or distillers in the United States. Yes, some exist but in Nebraska, all of them are either German, Irish, Belgian, or a bit of English or a mix thereof. So if Blacks are convinced Whites are out to get them, why don’t they make their own alcohol instead of buying it from White people? It is legal to brew beer nowadays. Or how about stopping consuming alcohol altogether and investing it in education or stocks?

What stuns me is the use of the words “white supremacy” as a descriptive term. This type of talk might work in Mississippi, South Carolina, or Arkansas, or maybe New England, but not Nebraska. The differences are substantial. When the Civil War started, President Lincoln did not have enough troops and ended up soliciting Irish and German immigrants, from two regions which had nothing to do with African slavery. These immigrants, as Union veterans, are largely the people who settled in Nebraska. Blame the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese for African slavery but Irish and Germans had next to nothing to do with it, particularly those who came after the onset of the Civil War to the United States. When the term “white supremacy” is used, it is easy to dismiss it as mere pointless rhetoric.

Yes, the millions of immigrants who kept coming to the Americas displaced Native American Indians and came into conflict. The Native tribes of the Great Plains were largely nomads. The settlers were farmers who plotted land and raised hogs for food. Why chase around buffalo all day when you can have a few hogs in a pen? Horses and guns were tempting items and changed Native cultures but they could not overcome the ever-flowing tide of immigration caused by so many problems in inferior Europe.

Many people of all backgrounds have a strong sense of moral righteousness and think they would have done better compared to the people of the past such as slavery. Many people are hypersensitive as well. Such people have what I call Br'er rabbit syndrome. They are so easily offended, they get stuck in their own outrage, and they ruin their own dignity.

Understandably, slavery is wrong and evil, but there were no simple solutions to ending it, especially for a Republic, lacking a monarchy. If I could transport you to a large Mississippi plantation in the summer of 1840, you would be shocked. Yes, you would see 100 slaves, but no White master around. The master and their family would be up north, such as New York, avoiding the Mississippi heat. The plantation had house slaves, field slaves to pick cotton, farming slaves to raise food and livestock and the overseers who would likely be Black too. It operated like a factory.

You could offer freedom, but to the slaves, such freedom was fool's gold. On the large plantations, they had shelter, food, a job, and family. They had been so pressed into subservience, it became their culture, their way of life, a cradle-to-grave socialist system. This is why abolitionists were so upset over the whole institution. Some tried to stop it and others simply left the slave states. The slave system is similar to what exists in North Korea today.

But back to the Omaha Public School District, the cultural problems are embedded in decades of negligence, not just racism. People became comfortable with the way things are instead of seeing the problems within. The Opportunities Scholarships Act, as passed by the Unicameral, should change this, but the “Empire” is set to strike back with a bigoted, anti-Catholic, anti-Black petition drive. They even have a website selling t-shirts (https://supportourschoolsnebraska.org/)! I can only hope Nebraskans see this obnoxious overbearing hate for what it really is.

So are conservatives and Blacks ready to unite to fight the petition? Will Movement in Omaha for Racial Equity (https://moreomaha.org/) and the local chapter of Moms for Liberty (https://www.momsforliberty.org/chapters/douglas-county-ne/) join hands in fighting this petition? Can funds be raised for billboard ads saying “Our children are not your property” and “Our children are not your slaves” be posted in Nebraska? When freedom is presented, will people embrace it or just shrug it off as fool's gold as so many slaves did? Can people with very different backgrounds unite for a common cause or is democracy a myth? Is the idea of a republic, a government run by citizens, a pointless exercise? I can’t answer these questions for you. Only you can answer these questions, but not with words, but with action.