About 7 years have passed since I first took your AP US History course at Midwood High School at Brooklyn College, and it continues to have a large and looming influence on my life to this day. I will keep my identity private on the interwebs, but since being a teenage girl at Midwood High School, I never acknowledged the weight and privilege of being the daughter of two immigrants from the People's Republic of China, and an American--first-generation and native-born.
I have bristled over the trends of Critical Race Theory, notions of "white privilege" and "white adjacency" in education. My own father was born in the city of Changsha, infamous for its association with the dictator Mao Zedong--whose Cultural Revolution my father is a survivor of, and whose economic campaigns led to my grandmother's sad demise. It was the United States's notion of freedom and equality, even in a country that had such a law as the Chinese Exclusion Act, that led my father to immigrate to the United States, to New York City, all by himself--divorcing his ex-wife and abandoning his daughter--in the 1990s. It was after the Tiananmen Square protests and during a time when there continued to exist a policy as cruel and as radical as the One-Child Policy--which ended in 2015, the year of my graduation from Midwood High School, and even more drastically in 2021, only several months ago. At the age of 17, when I received the Dr. Arthur I. & Gladys Bernstein Award for Achievement and Excellence in Advanced Placement U.S. History, I was only a teenage girl whose most pressing concerns were school and grades, and never understood the weight and gravity of receiving such an award in the context of the trauma related to my family's immigration histories. The only person in my family who knew how to read at a high level was my father, and he worked at a Chinese-language, Taiwanese-owned publication in Queens that was sympathetic to the Chinese pro-democracy movement, while taking English courses at the City University of New York. The rest of my family are from rural Canton, with my great-grandfather, of peasant stock, living in a cramped apartment in the Chinatown of the Lower East Side, when he first immigrated to the United States in the mid-1960s, during the height of Mao Zedong's campaigns against not only students and intellectuals from the cities, but farmers from the countryside who wanted to earn their daily bread, almost immediately after the immigration laws were liberalized under Lyndon Johnson. I still remember being a teenager who took the subway from Brooklyn all the way to Manhattan almost every week because I relished reading the publications the New Yorker and the New Criterion, and their articles greatly inspired my essays in your course. I never understood the gravity of it, with academic freedom and freedom of the press being nil in the country of my ancestry and parents' birth. At a time when relations between the United States, one of the world's oldest democracies, and the People's Republic of China, now the world's second-largest economy, are heightening, hate crimes related to the pandemic against Americans of Chinese ancestry and Asians generally are rising, and Beijing is invested in an ideological, woke-propaganda war against the United States, the time for reiterating patriotism and rejecting racial grievance from someone with a background as mine has never been more important. I will always remember, at only the age of 15, growing up in the Confucian culture and feeling like I had disappointed my Chinese immigrant father for not having been admitted to a Specialized High School in NYC, how much confidence and faith you had in me and how your pedagogy and enthusiasm for teaching inspired me to rigorously apply myself and helped me discover my passion for political theory when I was only a teenager from the outer borough of New York. I remember my father, born in 1955, inquiring about my studies and my relaying to him about my involvement in Amnesty International in high school, and my interest in human rights, and he gravely and bluntly told me, "In China, there are no human rights." I have felt like a fraud at times, but when I think about my father's journey from Changsha to New York, with its Statue of Liberty, and his reasons for immigrating to the United States--"because I wanted to have more children"--the love I have for my two younger brothers, the immigration history of my entire family, and the rigorous education I received at Midwood High School, my belief in my country has never been greater. Not all women, millennials, ethnic minorities, or the children of immigrants are prone to left-wing radicalism or the new politics of identitarianism, especially someone as I, whose ancestors--as proximate and immediate as my own father--are survivors of Maoism and the extremes of Marxist-Leninist thought. I have thought of you over the years and will always have immense gratitude for your dedication, commitment, and faith in your students. I hope you have been enjoying your retirement, and will continue to be a loyal reader!
Jeff, have you read Bernard Bailyn's book, "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution." Bailyn helped me finally truly see what I thought I saw even earlier in The Federalist Papers and in our Constitution. Before Bailyn, I was missing the forest for the trees. I saw the words but missed their deeper meaning.
Anybody who reads Bailyn's book should start pretty nearly at the end. The part near the ending of Bailyn's book (where readers should start) is the part that includes a poem that is at the ending of my piece "Of Minds and Men: Brown v. Board of Education"
Bailyn addressed principles that are essential to grasp when considering our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Long story short, John Locke's "right of revolution" grew into (was supplanted by) the power of citizens as sovereigns. Such sovereignty was implicit in the self-evident truths and explicit principles, powers and purposes of government articulated in paragraphs 1 and 2 of our Declaration of Independence (and expressed even earlier and even more clearly in May 1776 in John Adams's resolution and preamble). Those same principles permeated our Constitution in ways that are simultaneously simple and obvious and obscured and magical. For elaboration, please consider the following:
Watch out for Bailyn he was a conservative who actually had no respect for the revolutionaries. He thought that their analysis was wrong that the king was corrupt and that was how the system functioned effectively. He did not believe that rights extended to women or Blacks or that ordinary people should have the right to vote. He hated Paine.
Jeff, most of your concerns about Bailyn may be well founded and they may be relevant to other issues (but I cannot believe that he "no respect for the revolutionaries"). Yet, I haven't seen anything Bailyn wrote (or anything anyone wrote about his writing) that diminishes the truth or the importance of Bailyn's writing about the issues regarding which I invoked Bailyn. Better than anyone else I've seen, Bailyn wrote about the late 1700's views about such issues as power (and the crucial distinction between power and rights), and the development of political and social thoughts and the language necessary to express such thoughts. If you've seen better (or even comparable), please don't hesitate to let me know. I'd be happy to use other sources.
Yes. Bailyn had his uses in teaching there was a point of view but along with Pocock.he denied in was a new point of view. It was not the last act of the renaissance! The Amer Rev was a real step toward democracy. Pocock had an inflexible theory that ideology stayed the same for centuries. Bailyn hated paine who championed democracy.
Madison was brought kicking and screaming into small d democracy by ny and Virginia. It changed him from a Federalist to an anti-federalist.The system worked until the Senate obstructed the reforms along with the electoral college producing Trmph and the Federalist society destroying the Warren reforms. White supremacy came roaring back with the Dobbs, Chevron and Roberts’s fear of voting rts.
The lies in Plessy denying the 14th Amendment were repeated in Dobbs and continued to create immunity by turning Nixon vs Fitzgerald on its head and wishing that the Truman steel takeover was constitutional. Robert's lied to destroy voting rts AND affirmative action because there were no “students” who had standing.
Bailyn did not believe that All Men included women. There was no intellectual agency in Pocock or Bailyn.
The Amer Rev freed slaves who ran away. The Civil War was a majoritarian movement. Blacks voted in the South until they were disenfranchised in the 1890s. (V.O. Key)
Now we must take our country back from the corrupt Supremes and the unrepresentative senate.
Maybe "Bailyn did not believe that All Men included women." The phrase "all men" in 1776 excluded many people in the colonies in 1776, but why should that matter to anyone seeking to understand today who "the people" or "citizens" are in our Constitution?
From the outset in 1787, our Constitution expressly provided for to be amended. See Article V. And so it was (repeatedly). It was amended to outlaw prior exclusion of people "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (Amend. XV) or "on account of sex" (Amend. XIX) or "by reason of failure" (or inability) "to pay any poll tax or other tax" (Amend. XXIV) or "on account of age" (after 17 y.o.) (Amend. XXVI).
Outstanding! I wish I had taken your class (or seen this post) when I was in school. You're the only other person I've seen recognize that the Declaration of Independence was America's first military recruiting poster. I'd say it still is one of America's most effective recruiting posters. The principle that "all" are "created equal" with equal "unalienable rights" including the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" still inspires many to fight in more ways than one.
I just wrote something related to your excellent consideration of "all men are created equal." You might find it interesting, or better yet, useful:
Thanks. Watch out for Bailyn he is a conservative scold. All men are created equal does not include women or blacks. He was a follower of JGA Pocock who claimed that the Amer Rev was the last act of the Renaissance. He hated Tom Paine and the leaders of the Rev misunderstood English corruption which was a FEATURE of the successful monarchy. They were an ignorant group at the edge of the empire. He was anti Whig.
Mr. Schneider,
About 7 years have passed since I first took your AP US History course at Midwood High School at Brooklyn College, and it continues to have a large and looming influence on my life to this day. I will keep my identity private on the interwebs, but since being a teenage girl at Midwood High School, I never acknowledged the weight and privilege of being the daughter of two immigrants from the People's Republic of China, and an American--first-generation and native-born.
I have bristled over the trends of Critical Race Theory, notions of "white privilege" and "white adjacency" in education. My own father was born in the city of Changsha, infamous for its association with the dictator Mao Zedong--whose Cultural Revolution my father is a survivor of, and whose economic campaigns led to my grandmother's sad demise. It was the United States's notion of freedom and equality, even in a country that had such a law as the Chinese Exclusion Act, that led my father to immigrate to the United States, to New York City, all by himself--divorcing his ex-wife and abandoning his daughter--in the 1990s. It was after the Tiananmen Square protests and during a time when there continued to exist a policy as cruel and as radical as the One-Child Policy--which ended in 2015, the year of my graduation from Midwood High School, and even more drastically in 2021, only several months ago. At the age of 17, when I received the Dr. Arthur I. & Gladys Bernstein Award for Achievement and Excellence in Advanced Placement U.S. History, I was only a teenage girl whose most pressing concerns were school and grades, and never understood the weight and gravity of receiving such an award in the context of the trauma related to my family's immigration histories. The only person in my family who knew how to read at a high level was my father, and he worked at a Chinese-language, Taiwanese-owned publication in Queens that was sympathetic to the Chinese pro-democracy movement, while taking English courses at the City University of New York. The rest of my family are from rural Canton, with my great-grandfather, of peasant stock, living in a cramped apartment in the Chinatown of the Lower East Side, when he first immigrated to the United States in the mid-1960s, during the height of Mao Zedong's campaigns against not only students and intellectuals from the cities, but farmers from the countryside who wanted to earn their daily bread, almost immediately after the immigration laws were liberalized under Lyndon Johnson. I still remember being a teenager who took the subway from Brooklyn all the way to Manhattan almost every week because I relished reading the publications the New Yorker and the New Criterion, and their articles greatly inspired my essays in your course. I never understood the gravity of it, with academic freedom and freedom of the press being nil in the country of my ancestry and parents' birth. At a time when relations between the United States, one of the world's oldest democracies, and the People's Republic of China, now the world's second-largest economy, are heightening, hate crimes related to the pandemic against Americans of Chinese ancestry and Asians generally are rising, and Beijing is invested in an ideological, woke-propaganda war against the United States, the time for reiterating patriotism and rejecting racial grievance from someone with a background as mine has never been more important. I will always remember, at only the age of 15, growing up in the Confucian culture and feeling like I had disappointed my Chinese immigrant father for not having been admitted to a Specialized High School in NYC, how much confidence and faith you had in me and how your pedagogy and enthusiasm for teaching inspired me to rigorously apply myself and helped me discover my passion for political theory when I was only a teenager from the outer borough of New York. I remember my father, born in 1955, inquiring about my studies and my relaying to him about my involvement in Amnesty International in high school, and my interest in human rights, and he gravely and bluntly told me, "In China, there are no human rights." I have felt like a fraud at times, but when I think about my father's journey from Changsha to New York, with its Statue of Liberty, and his reasons for immigrating to the United States--"because I wanted to have more children"--the love I have for my two younger brothers, the immigration history of my entire family, and the rigorous education I received at Midwood High School, my belief in my country has never been greater. Not all women, millennials, ethnic minorities, or the children of immigrants are prone to left-wing radicalism or the new politics of identitarianism, especially someone as I, whose ancestors--as proximate and immediate as my own father--are survivors of Maoism and the extremes of Marxist-Leninist thought. I have thought of you over the years and will always have immense gratitude for your dedication, commitment, and faith in your students. I hope you have been enjoying your retirement, and will continue to be a loyal reader!
Sincerely,
A former pupil.
I do this Substack writing because I miss you all so much and want to share my ideas with others. Thanks for the generous and thoughtful comments.
Jeff, have you read Bernard Bailyn's book, "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution." Bailyn helped me finally truly see what I thought I saw even earlier in The Federalist Papers and in our Constitution. Before Bailyn, I was missing the forest for the trees. I saw the words but missed their deeper meaning.
Anybody who reads Bailyn's book should start pretty nearly at the end. The part near the ending of Bailyn's book (where readers should start) is the part that includes a poem that is at the ending of my piece "Of Minds and Men: Brown v. Board of Education"
https://blackcollarcrime.substack.com/p/of-minds-and-men-brown-v-board-of?r=30ufvh
Bailyn addressed principles that are essential to grasp when considering our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Long story short, John Locke's "right of revolution" grew into (was supplanted by) the power of citizens as sovereigns. Such sovereignty was implicit in the self-evident truths and explicit principles, powers and purposes of government articulated in paragraphs 1 and 2 of our Declaration of Independence (and expressed even earlier and even more clearly in May 1776 in John Adams's resolution and preamble). Those same principles permeated our Constitution in ways that are simultaneously simple and obvious and obscured and magical. For elaboration, please consider the following:
"Might Versus Right (Powers Versus Rights)" https://blackcollarcrime.substack.com/p/might-versus-right-powers-versus?r=30ufvh
"Why Are SCOTUS's Originalists Awful at Originalism?" See https://blackcollarcrime.substack.com/p/why-are-scotuss-originalists-awful?r=30ufvh
Watch out for Bailyn he was a conservative who actually had no respect for the revolutionaries. He thought that their analysis was wrong that the king was corrupt and that was how the system functioned effectively. He did not believe that rights extended to women or Blacks or that ordinary people should have the right to vote. He hated Paine.
Jeff, most of your concerns about Bailyn may be well founded and they may be relevant to other issues (but I cannot believe that he "no respect for the revolutionaries"). Yet, I haven't seen anything Bailyn wrote (or anything anyone wrote about his writing) that diminishes the truth or the importance of Bailyn's writing about the issues regarding which I invoked Bailyn. Better than anyone else I've seen, Bailyn wrote about the late 1700's views about such issues as power (and the crucial distinction between power and rights), and the development of political and social thoughts and the language necessary to express such thoughts. If you've seen better (or even comparable), please don't hesitate to let me know. I'd be happy to use other sources.
Yes. Bailyn had his uses in teaching there was a point of view but along with Pocock.he denied in was a new point of view. It was not the last act of the renaissance! The Amer Rev was a real step toward democracy. Pocock had an inflexible theory that ideology stayed the same for centuries. Bailyn hated paine who championed democracy.
Madison was brought kicking and screaming into small d democracy by ny and Virginia. It changed him from a Federalist to an anti-federalist.The system worked until the Senate obstructed the reforms along with the electoral college producing Trmph and the Federalist society destroying the Warren reforms. White supremacy came roaring back with the Dobbs, Chevron and Roberts’s fear of voting rts.
The lies in Plessy denying the 14th Amendment were repeated in Dobbs and continued to create immunity by turning Nixon vs Fitzgerald on its head and wishing that the Truman steel takeover was constitutional. Robert's lied to destroy voting rts AND affirmative action because there were no “students” who had standing.
Bailyn did not believe that All Men included women. There was no intellectual agency in Pocock or Bailyn.
The Amer Rev freed slaves who ran away. The Civil War was a majoritarian movement. Blacks voted in the South until they were disenfranchised in the 1890s. (V.O. Key)
Now we must take our country back from the corrupt Supremes and the unrepresentative senate.
Maybe "Bailyn did not believe that All Men included women." The phrase "all men" in 1776 excluded many people in the colonies in 1776, but why should that matter to anyone seeking to understand today who "the people" or "citizens" are in our Constitution?
From the outset in 1787, our Constitution expressly provided for to be amended. See Article V. And so it was (repeatedly). It was amended to outlaw prior exclusion of people "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (Amend. XV) or "on account of sex" (Amend. XIX) or "by reason of failure" (or inability) "to pay any poll tax or other tax" (Amend. XXIV) or "on account of age" (after 17 y.o.) (Amend. XXVI).
Outstanding! I wish I had taken your class (or seen this post) when I was in school. You're the only other person I've seen recognize that the Declaration of Independence was America's first military recruiting poster. I'd say it still is one of America's most effective recruiting posters. The principle that "all" are "created equal" with equal "unalienable rights" including the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" still inspires many to fight in more ways than one.
I just wrote something related to your excellent consideration of "all men are created equal." You might find it interesting, or better yet, useful:
https://blackcollarcrime.substack.com/p/american-sovereignty-is-not-as-limited?r=30ufvh
That piece was a sequel to another piece pertaining to our Declaration of Independence:
https://blackcollarcrime.substack.com/p/we-the-people-must-exercise-our-first?r=30ufvh
Thanks. Watch out for Bailyn he is a conservative scold. All men are created equal does not include women or blacks. He was a follower of JGA Pocock who claimed that the Amer Rev was the last act of the Renaissance. He hated Tom Paine and the leaders of the Rev misunderstood English corruption which was a FEATURE of the successful monarchy. They were an ignorant group at the edge of the empire. He was anti Whig.