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.
Related Reading:
The
Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right
to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
How Heroes Improve Our Lives: An Interview with Andrew Bernstein ...--John Hersey for The Objective Standard
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