[Vision2020] Way to go, Daily News!

[Melynda Huskey]

At the Credenda Agenda History Conference, on Friday, Feb. 6th, 3:30-4:30, 
Doug Wilson will present his thoughts on:

"R.L. DABNEY (1820-1898) One of the great American anti-revolutionary 
writers and thinkers of the 19th century. Blessed and cursed with a 
remarkable prescience, he diagnosed many of the cultural diseases of the 
20th century before they were fully manifest."

Here's the great thinker on the subject of education for former slaves:

"The negroes, as a body, are now glaringly unfit for the privilege of 
voting. What makes them unfit? Such things as these: The inexorable barrier 
of alien race, color, and natural character, between them and that other 
race which constitutes the bulk of Americans: a dense ignorance of the 
rights and duties of citizenship: an almost universal lack of that share in 
the property of the country, which alone can give responsibility, patriotic 
interest and independence to the voter: a general moral grade so deplorably 
low as to permit their being driven or bought like a herd of sheep by the 
demagogue: a parasitical servility and dependency of nature, which 
characterizes the race everywhere, and in all ages: an almost total lack of 
real persevering aspirations: and last, an obstinate set of false 
traditions, which bind him as a mere serf to a party, which is the born 
enemy of every righteous interest of our State."

And on the intervention of the state into the lives of black citizens:

"Instead, then, of giving any negro over five years old a pretext of any 
sort for evading his righteous and beneficent lot of manual labor, we should 
have bent every energy of statesmanship and government to the task of 
somehow keeping the grown negroes at their work, and making sure that the 
young ones were taught to work. To this end nearly all the practical talent 
and energy should have been bent. The police administration should have been 
so omnipotent and energetic as absolutely to cut off the possibility of a 
negro family's subsisting by plunder vagrancy should have been rendered 
impossible by stringent laws, apprenticing the loafer to an industrious 
citizen. The tolerance of idleness in children approaching adult age, by 
their parents, should have been made a misdemeanor, justifying the 
intervention of the magistrate. "

"Awho know the negro character are aware also of that infirmity of purpose 
which, almost universally renders them inefficient parents. They are either 
too weak or indulgent, or they are brutally and capriciously severe. Hence, 
the usual law of negro families is, a low state of parental and filial 
qualities, dissatisfied parents, and insubordinate children it was always so 
upon the plantations, except as the master or overseer guided and reinforced 
the father's rule; it is flagrantly so now. The ugliest feature of this 
coming day is, that the young negroes are evidently growing up with a 
restive, surly, insolent spirit towards the whites, in place of that close 
family affection, feudal loyalty, and humble pride in their superiors, which 
once united masters and servants."

There's much more to be found in Dabney. . .and the very fact of Dabney's 
inclusion in the conference renders disingenuous all the protestations that 
Doug and the C/A History Conference are being wronged.

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