Monday, July 20, 2020

Harriet Tubman Was a Hero for Individual Rights, Not ‘Social Justice’


In a New Jersey Star-Ledger “news” article, As statues come down around N.J., a new one rises of social justice hero Harriet Tubman, Tim Hawk “reports” on a statue of Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman being erected as part of the opening of the Harriet Tubman museum in Cape May, New Jersey.

Harriet Tubman arrived in Cape May in the early 1850s to earn money in her efforts to free enslaved people from the south. Her return last Friday morning — in the form of a 9-foot statue — has sparked excitement and anticipation in the community where she once worked as a cook and as a domestic laborer for hotels and families.

The statue of Tubman leading a slave girl to freedom, by Emmy and Academy Award winning sculptor Wesley Wofford, is the first installment of the soon-to-be open Harriet Tubman Museum which on June 29 took a step closer to becoming New Jersey’s official Harriet Tubman Museum after the state assembly unanimously passed a bill. The legislation will next go to the state Senate.

But the “report” evades the actual, true nature of Tubman’s heroism: She was a fighter for inalienable individual rights, but the term individual rights, the heart of her struggle to free slaves, is not mentioned once in the article. The only reference to individual rights is in a backdoor fashion, questioning whether Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, two Founding Fathers upon whose shoulders Tubman stood, are even heroes at all.

Instead, Tubman’s heroic legacy is demeaned and shattered by calling her a fighter for “social justice”, a collectivist term. Collectivism is applicable to Southern slavery, not freedom. Slavery’s defenders justified slavery by the notion that blacks are an inferior race, not suitable for freedom based upon individual rights promised as by the Founding Fathers, and are better off with guaranteed satisfaction of their needs, including work. 

Social justice is defined as “ the equal distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society” with the state as the distributor and groups as the sole focus of concern. It means, in practice, that no one is entitled to any personal achievement or virtue until everyone can have a piece of it, which means no one is safe from exploitation and oppression. Social justice basically means not ending slavery, but expanding it to the whole of society. There is no place for the individual, and no place for America in this idea, since America is the nation that liberated individual human beings from the tyranny of collective subjugation to the group, society, or tribe. 

Justice is fundamentally individual, not group, centered. If not, then the looting, enslavement, and even killing of any individual[s] for the sake of some balance of group concerns, claims, or measurements can be rationalized on the basis of some egalitarian “distribution” of wealth, opportunities, privileges, or [fill-in-the-blank]. But the group is an abstraction. You can’t see it, touch it, talk to it. You can only observe the actual individuals who comprise the group. But collectivism morally inverts that order, and identifies every individual by group characteristics, then judges the group regardless of any individual member’s character, ideas, or actions. When you deny the individual as the focus of moral, economic, political, or cultural concern, no freedom, and no justice, is possible.

Harriet Tubman was no Social Justice warrior. Like all Abolitionists—she also fought for women’s suffrage—Tubman stood with the Declaration of Independence. The freeing of Confederate slaves was a fight to recognize the rights of the slaves to join the cause of leaving every individual equally free to live by her own judgement, deal with others on the basis of equal rights to life, liberty, and earned property, in self-governed pursuit of her own personal values, not to re-enslave them to some other group goal. Tubman didn’t fight to end subjugation to white masters for the sake of subjugation to the state.

Social Justice is a perfect cover for criminal socialist dictators, not freedom fighters. Hawk’s article is propaganda, not news reporting. It is dishonest and derogatory and does no justice to Harriet Tubman..

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What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?--Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852







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