Black scholar predicts 30 years to erase 'big lie' of '1619' victimhood
Black scholar William Allen has seen a lot of change in his life, and what’s come recently isn’t very promising.
A champion of “black American patriotism,” he saw great hope in Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of unity — until the most famous African American leader ever tore it all up to declare America racist and black people as victims.
“He ended by declaring America hopelessly imbued with racism and could see no future for America other than capitulation on the part of the nonblack to that particular account,” Allen told Secrets.
Allen also saw hope when then-Sen. Barack Obama adopted his line of unity in the future president’s famous race speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. But as president, he fell back to the usual Democratic talking points about black people as victims needing a handout.
“He borrowed it without internalizing what it meant. He borrowed it as a rhetorical trope that could be used to leverage political advantage but not to begin the restorative working culture that was so necessary,” Allen said.
Now, the 78-year-old scholar is pressing his own campaign focusing on the highlights of black America, a positive and patriotic story he believes will eventually end with the acceptance that black people are every bit as equal to white people in the story of the nation’s creation.
“The real story of America is the story of American blacks, not American blacks exclusively, but American blacks as exemplary of what the American promise is,” said Allen, the editor of the new book of essays The State of Black America.
The book, he said, provides an “awakening” to the story not told in the legacy media or by liberal politicians, professors, and preachers. With old tales and up-to-date statistics, his goal is to tell “the true story of the accomplishments of black America” and “repel the great lie” spread in the media, especially the New York Times's 1619 Project.
“We have cultivated for a very long time, now for more than 50 years at least, a sense of attendant victimhood among American blacks. And that sense is perpetuated today by the poisonous injection of racism with a capital R as the base of our culture,” Allen said.
He compared those 50 years to a slow-growing cancer that can’t be cut out quickly but is targeted by “the chemotherapy of truth.”
His argument has largely been ignored by legacy media and book reviewers because his doesn't fall into the accepted view pushed by the Times and liberal scholars, though he won an interview on C-SPAN.
Allen told Secrets he sees hope for a change in the way scholars now look at America’s first president, George Washington. He helped lead the change with his 2004 book George Washington: America’s First Progressive, showing that the general was more than a guy with wooden teeth.
“I would like to think that is an indication of what is possible,” Allen said.
While the brilliance of Washington took 200 years to see, Allen said he believes the shift in how black people are viewed and view themselves will be shorter.
“I don't think we have 200 years, to be honest with you. I actually believe that we are now in a time where if we don't right the ship in 30 years, we can rightly begin to despair. But I don't despair because I think 30 years is long enough to get it done,” he said.
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