White Privilege is not the cause of the plague of racism.  Black Entitlement is not its cure.  Slavery was not its source.

Without identifying where racism comes from and where it resides still, we are doomed to forever suffer its ills.  The targeting of White Privilege at our universities and in the media for the perceived lack of sufficient guilt and recompense for the slavery of 150 years ago is a damaging misdirection of the truth.

Slavery is wrong.  We know that.  But slavery was never about race.

No matter the color of the finger that points, the slave owning European settlers did not introduce slavery to North America in 1619.  Those who lived here prior to the founding of Jamestown, Virginia warred against, dispossessed of their land, maimed, murdered, captured, and enslaved other Native Americans.  All before (White) Europeans arrived.

After they arrived, the system of slavery in our country had three components.  First was demand.  That came primarily from Southern plantations.  Second was the supply, made valuable by that demand.  The shipping industry provided the pipeline.  Third was the source, Africa.  But those slaves brought over from Africa were not the spoils of an army that invaded and captured.  Slave-trading middlemen bought them from other slave traders — from Africans who sold Africans — transported them across the Atlantic, and resold them back in the Americas.

As despicable as it was, it was not about race.

Nor was slavery new to the rest of the world when practiced on our continent before, during, and after 1619.  The great Giza pyramids of Egypt, built in part by slave labor, were constructed between 2589 BC and 2504 BC.  Egyptians (Africans) used slaves (other Africans) to build those wonders of the ancient world.  That was more than 4,000 years before the Europeans settled here.

Should we pull down those slave-built pyramids?

Nor did the Egyptians invent slavery.  It existed in the Near, Middle, and Far East as far back as history is known.  It is older than the world’s oldest profession and nearly as old as mankind’s oldest sins.  In the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers — brothers of the same father, the same skin, the same blood.  It wasn’t about race.

There exists for many an understanding of human self-awareness that includes not just what we do, but what we ought to do.  Does the fact of our outrage against racism identify humans as inherently moral creatures?  For if we are not living in a moral universe, this conversation need never happen.  Does our failure to achieve the moral standards to which the best of us aspire define us then not as amoral, but rather broken, fallen, as yet incomplete? 

For those of the Christian faith and countless others, Right and Wrong do exist.  That standard, what we ought to do, succinctly expressed 2000 years ago in the Second Great Commandment of Jesus, is we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Violation of that commandment shackles our hearts and chokes off our life’s blood; it is the root of evil across all the history of mankind.  The violation of that commandment, when based on race, is the source of racism.

Blaming slave owners long dead will not end racism in America.  Attacking some based on the color of their skin or entitling others based on the color of theirs, not only doesn’t end racism, it super-charges it.  We have no hope to end racism by switching goal posts and end zones like half time in a football game and to then continue the game, only using a different score card.

It is our rejection of the Second Great Commandment that condemns us to suffer racism, one of a myriad of evils which 40 years ago were called man’s inhumanity to man.  The only way to end racism is for each of us to embrace that great injunction and its source and to do so now, in this lifetime — for eternity is only a heartbeat away.

Mike Kirkwood has authored What if…, a collection of short works and Fathers, a novel.  Both are available at www.amazon.com.

When the Democratic anti-Trump mantra of “Russia, Russia, Russia” was in its infancy, House Intelligence Committee off ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff from the People’s Republic of California was in high dudgeon over Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes daring to report to the public and the press that, yes, members of Team Trump were in fact surveilled and the contents of their conversations and their names were recorded and disseminated.

Rep. Schiff had no problem with intel leaks to the New York Times, but an intelligence committee chairman giving the President a heads-up that his transition team was in fact caught up in surveillance by his own government is out of bounds? Schiff insisted it was, and claimed Nunes was not acting as a committee chair but as a surrogate of Team Trump:

At his own news conference later that afternoon, Schiff sharply criticized Nunes, given that his committee is in the middle of an active investigation that includes the question of whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia’s suspected attempts to meddle in last year’s election.

“The chairman will need to decide whether he is the chairman of an independent investigation into conduct which includes allegations of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House, because he cannot do both,” Schiff told reporters.

Schiff has no problem acting as a surrogate for Team Obama or Team Hillary. That deafening silence you hear is the outrage he has expressed over the leaking of classified information to the press designed to fatally wound the Trump transition. Schiff had no problem repeating claims without evidence that Team Trump was colluding with the Russians. But he was troubled by Nunes citing reports proving President Trump was right about his team being monitored, creating a kerfuffle that forced Nunes to recuse himself from active leadership of his committee.

Fast forward to Uranium One and Fusion GPS and evidence of actual collusion and coordination between the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the Russians, and we find ranking member Schiff once again acting as a surrogate for both President Barack Hussein Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. He cannot do both. Nor can he ignore evidence that Team Hillary conspired with the Russians to both influence our elections and to engage in arguably treasonous pay-for-play in exchanging control of 20 percent of our uranium supply, the raw material for nuclear weapons, for $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation.

Yet that is what Schiff is doing, whistling past his party’s political graveyard and ignoring evidence of crimes that, yes, make Watergate look like a third-rate burglary and the treason of the Rosenbergs look like a misdemeanor, He calls Uranium One a politically-motivated “distraction”, showing how unserious the Democrats are about real corruption and collusion and why these “bipartisan” investigations are a sham by definition:

Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, accused the Trump administration, Breitbart News and Fox News of promoting news first reported by The Hill last week regarding Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Uranium One deal.

The 2010 deal, covered extensively in Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” gave Russia control of a significant portion of U.S. uranium.

Schiff denounced the new attention as a “partisan effort to distract” and accused House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) of being a part of it given three House committees — Judiciary, Government Reform and Intelligence — were involved.

Schiff, as we know, is no stranger to partisan efforts to distract and is a veteran of using lies, false charges, and obfuscation to distract the American people from the crimes and corruption of Team Obama and Team Clinton. He shamelessly defended the incompetence and criminal negligence of Obama and Clinton in Benghazi

Schiff was the individual who called the heroes who fought off terrorists from the roof of the CIA annex in Benghazi liars for their account of the Obama/Clinton administration’s denying security improvements, ignoring warnings of the attack, and the issuance of a stand-down order for any rescue, an order they ignored. As Investor’s Business Daily recounted in 2014:

The California Democrat who suggested that his party boycott the Benghazi Select Committee as a waste of time now accuses those who fought on the CIA annex roof of lying “to promote a new book.”

The last we heard from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, was in May. That’s when he told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” he thought the planned select committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi attack was a “colossal waste of time.”

Calling the yet-to-be-approved committee a “tremendous red herring,” Schiff said: “I don’t think it makes sense, really, for Democrats to participate.”…

… Schiff apparently is still not happy about the hearing, which pointed out the State Department’s pre-Benghazi neglect of security, ignoring the security recommendations after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania….

The hearing came right after Kris Paronto, Mark Geist and John Tiegen, three CIA contractors who on that night fought terrorists from the roof of the CIA’s Benghazi annex building, confirmed that there was indeed a stand-down order given that caused a critical half-hour delay….

Schiff, who was not in Benghazi that night, says Paronto, Geist and Tiegen are making up a tale to sell their book, as if their story is less plausible than the proven lie that the Benghazi attack was caused by an inflammatory YouTube video, a myth promoted both by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama.

After seeing clips of Schiff saying the contractors were trying to sell their book and Smith claiming a stand-down order “was never given,” Geist said he “would like to invite Mr. Schiff to a debate… we can talk about it.” He wondered if Schiff wished to “say that to my face.”

Schiff thought the Benghazi heroes was making it up, and now he thinks Nunes and Team Trump are making up the fact that investigations into Team Trump and the Russians, and the creation of a Special Counsel, were prompted by a fake dossier put together by the Russians and paid for by Hilary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC. He claims it is a distraction to point out the truth that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration sold out American national security in exchange for more Clinton cash.

Rep. Adam Schiff, have you no shame?

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.