8/12/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with an article at RealClearHistory by Elliott Drago of the Jack Miller Center. Drago recounts Jesse Owens’s athletic accomplishments in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. “Owens’s incredible success destroyed Adolf Hitler’s myth of an ‘Aryan master race,’” Drago writes, “and stands as a testament to the American principle of universal equality.” An alum of The Ohio State University, “Owens broke three world records and tied another in one afternoon.” Owens ended up befriending his competitor in the long jump, Luz Long, who Hitler thought was a perfect specimen of the Aryan race. Long, meanwhile, did not share the Nazi Party’s malevolent views on race. Drago concludes that “Owens recognized that if Long, a human being living in Nazi Germany, could walk with him around the Olympic stadium, then all people could strive to recognize each other’s fundamental equality and ‘be a human being first and last, if not always.’”

At Law & Liberty, Wilfred Reilly reviews Jeremy Carl’s recent book, “The Unprotected Class.” Reilly breaks down the book’s arguments: white supremacy has not been a problem in America for decades, American elites deny that racism has declined in American society, and bias against whites is a growing and serious problem. As evidence for the latter claim, Reilly cites Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, who “is on record calling the white race ‘the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief in the modern world.’” Reilly forcefully argues that we should not “formally discriminate against Blacks” or “whites.” He contends that in order to get beyond race, we must focus on the world as it is now, not as it was in 1963: “Seventy years after Brown, we should most often center our national historical conversations on topics besides civil rights, reparations, and slavery. Carl’s book, which makes these points and valiantly attempts to start a new conversation, is well worth the read.”