Welcome to the live sheet podcast. My name is Jeff This is the eighth episode of our bonus episodes on the 1776 report. If you haven't listened to introduction, I encouraged to do so because it explains a little bit about why we're doing this. This episode is entitled challenge to American's principles, racism, and identity politics. The 13th amendment of the con. passed after the civil war brought an end to legal slavery, blacks enjoyed a new quality and freedom voting for and holding elective office in States across the union. But it not bring an end to racism or to the unequal treatment of blacks everywhere. Despite the determined efforts of post-war reconstruction, Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves to postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery. The system in. In meshed Friedman in relationships to have extreme dependency and use poll taxes, literacy tests, and the violence of vigilante groups, like the KU Klux Klan to prevent them from exercising their civil rights, particularly the right to vote. Jim Crow law enforced a strict segregation of the races and gave legal standing in some States to a pervasive subordination of blacks. It would take a national movement com. Composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions, to bring about the American fully committed to an ending legal discrimination. The civil rights movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation. Voting and housing rights, it presented itself and was understood by the American people as consistent with the principles of the founding quote. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the declaration of independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. And quote, Martin Luther King said in his, I have a dream speech. Quote, this note was a promise that all men, yes, black men, as well as white men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unquote, it seemed finally that American, nearly two centuries effort to realize fully the principles of the declaration had reached a combination, but the hetty spirit of the original civil rights movement whose leaders forcely quoted the declaration of independence, the constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln proved to be short-lived. The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned to programs. That ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy and the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of non-discrimination and equal opportunity in favor in favor of group rights. Not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers. The justification for reversing the promise. Of colorblind civil rights. Was the past discrimination requires president effort or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment to overcome long crude inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time. First in administrative rulings, then executive orders later in congressionally passed laws. And finally, we're sanctified by the Supreme court. Today. Far from our regime of equal natural rights for equal citizens in force. By the equal application of law, we have moved toward a system of explicit group privilege that in the name of social justice. Demands, equal results and explicitly sorts citizens and to quote protective classes based on race and other demographic characteristics. Eventually this regime of formal inequality would be known as identity politics, the stepchild of other rejections of the founding identity politics. Was valued by characteristics like race. Sexual orientation. And sex and holds that the new times demand new rights to replace the old, this is opposite of King's hope that his children would live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, by the content of their character and deny that all endowed with unalienable rights. To life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness identity politics makes it less likely that racial reconciliation healing can be attained by pursuing Martin Luther King Jr's dream for America and upholding the highest ideals of our constitution and our declaration of independence. The next episode will be the task of national renewal.