When it comes to the conversation of slavery, mainstream culture only wants one kind of storyteller. They have to come from the radical left and there can be no allowances for nuance. The reigning narrative must be that America is an evil, racist country that instituted slavery from its very beginnings and that its white citizens still benefit from it today.
But Prager U, the conservative media company, isn’t going along with that nonsense. The company has been at the forefront of talking to America’s youth about various topics for some time, and it’s also invested its time in talking to younger and younger children about various topics as well.
While the left has always had a problem with Prager U and attempted to get it banned from schools everywhere, it recently found out that it has a cartoon for children that is being shown in various schools. This is a bridge too far for them. You can talk to kids about gender fluidity, you can talk to them about sex and sexuality, but don’t you dare talk to them about something like slavery from a non-leftist perspective.
That’s apparently too far.
Leftists on X began losing it over a clip circulating around featuring two kids from the future traveling back in time and talking to Fredrick Douglas. The famous abolitionist describes to the kids how the founding of America did involve slavery, but it was a necessary evil to begin the United States of America, an event that would lead to the eventual freeing of the slaves.
Funny enough, the cartoon takes obvious shots at BLM.
Leftists like Tariq Nasheed were naturally apoplectic, complaining that Prager U was “rewriting history” and that they were “taking jabs at modern Black activists.” He also complained that a white man was voicing a black man.
I don’t even know where to start with this “educational kids cartoon” from the anti-Black think-tank PragerU:
*the rewriting of history
*the jabs at modern Black activists
*the white man doing the voice of Frederick Douglas🤦🏿♂️ pic.twitter.com/GpDpzOmH8r
— Tariq Nasheed 🇺🇸 (@tariqnasheed) August 8, 2023
Leftists can get mad all they want about this but the one thing they should probably stop doing is saying that this is historically inaccurate. Prager U’s cartoon is telling the truth. The Founding Fathers did know that slavery was wrong but couldn’t make too many moves against it during the country’s founding. However, what they did do was plant the seeds for its gradual collapse, and its collapse began quickly as the depiction of Douglas describes in the cartoon.
This is something that President Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who completely abolished slavery in America, recognized himself and said so during a speech he gave in Peoria in 1854:
Necessity drove them so far, and farther, they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress, under the constitution, took the same view of slavery. They hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.
In 1794, they prohibited an out-going slave-trade—that is, the taking of slaves FROM the United States to sell.
In 1798, they prohibited the bringing of slaves from Africa, INTO the Mississippi Territory—this territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and Alabama. This was TEN YEARS before they had the authority to do the same thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the constitution.
In 1800 they prohibited AMERICAN CITIZENS from trading in slaves between foreign countries—as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they passed a law in aid of one or two State laws, in restraint of the internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law, nearly a year in advance to take effect the first day of 1808—the very first day the constitution would permit—prohibiting the African slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties.
In 1820, finding these provisions ineffectual, they declared the trade piracy, and annexed to it, the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in the general government, five or six of the original slave States had adopted systems of gradual emancipation; and by which the institution was rapidly becoming extinct within these limits.
The founding fathers, despite being bound by their time, set events in motion that would eventually lead to the realization of their declaration that all men are created equal.
The left has a serious problem with anyone considering the founding fathers as anything but evil white slave owners who founded an evil white country that still hates black people. If people truly understood that they lived in a country that poisoned the slave trade, a lot of narratives the left has would be lost and people might soften, or even begin to appreciate, their country again.
And what a disaster that would be for Democrats.
