About a week ago I answered a Facebook post looking for people who were willing to join a panel discussion on CRT. I’ve written a fair amount on the subject, so I said I was willing to participate.

A short time later I got an IM that led to a phone call. The caller was Carli Eli, Midwest Region Blexit Director, and instead of talking about panel discussions, she wanted me to join – and not just to join but to take an executive position: Director of City – Detroit.

I had a couple of concerns. One was that I have absolutely no experience in community organizing, and really that is what the role would entail. The other concern related to optics: how would it look for a white man to be the Director of Blexit for the city of Detroit?

I was not concerned about being accepted. Blexit is a conservative movement, so their approach to ending racism is to actually end racism, which means that being white (or any other color) is not an issue – people who are not racist don’t care. I was however a little concerned about the optics as they may relate to people in Detroit with who I would have to interact while representing Blexit, but then it occurred to me the more someone is apt to have a positive association with Blexit the less they will care what race I am. My concern was unwarranted.

Blexit was formed in Minnesota in 2016 as the product of community meetings after the police killing of Philando Castile in St. Paul. The term was coined by Me’Lea Connelly. Blexit foundation, a social media campaign launched in 2018 by Candace Owens to encourage Black people to leave the Democratic Party.

Being a conservative movement, Blexit is not about race, but about values. Blexit is about the fact that white liberals chastise any conservative voice who happens to be a member of a minority group with a level of vitriol that is, frankly, disgusting. Joy Reid’s take on Clarence Thomas – that is all you need to know about how white liberals view members of minority groups who do not believe what they are told to believe and/or are not offended by what they are told to be offended by.

The most important civil rights issue of our day is the right of people to think for themselves and to speak their convictions, irrespective of what they happen to look like. Blexit shares this concern.

Ironically, liberals are half correct when they say that conservatives are not for black people, gay people, Hispanic people, or any other specific group of people. Conservatives don’t think in those terms. Conservatives are for all people, irrespective of what they may look like, and we focus on policies that are designed to help all people pursue life, liberty, and happiness in their own lives, on their own terms. 

White liberals don’t concern themselves with what members of minority groups actually find offensive, and they CERTAINLY don’t concern themselves with the fact that there can sometimes be DISAGREEMENT with regard to what is considered offensive. White liberals, rather, take it upon themselves to decide for members of minority groups what they SHOULD be offended by, and then to attack anyone who disagrees, starting with members of minority groups who are not offended.

What offends me is the constant Woke need to find new things to decide other people should be offended by, and then to call anyone not offended by those things traitors to their group.

Joy Reid attacked Clarence Thomas as ‘not a real representative for African Americans,’ and when I heard it I noted how Joy Reid is conflating the opinions and beliefs of all black people as if they are the same. Joe Biden, pledging to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, makes the assumption that only a black woman can represent other black women, which also makes the assumption that all black women are the same.

The shocking thing is that nobody is shocked by what Joy Reid and Joe Biden said even though the notion that someone’s race should be a primary determining factor in who they can be represented by is racist and absurd. Representation is about having people who share our values and interests in office. What someone looks like is irrelevant, and it ignores the real question that has divided this nation for its entire existence, which is that of whether people are primarily individuals, or primarily members of groups. Joe Biden would say that we are members of groups and are largely interchangeable within those groups. I would disagree with him on that, as does Blexit.

We are not a nation of diverse races, but a nation of diverse people, and people are not defined by race unless they choose to be. This is a free country, so people are free to define themselves however they wish. If someone wants race to be their defining characteristic, they have the right to look at themselves that way, but note that when you make race the defining characteristic of who you are, you are also making race the defining characteristic of how you see other people, and that is a pretty good definition for the term ‘racist’.

Joy Reid is a racist. Joe Biden is a racist. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the squad – they are all racists. Most of the political left is racist, which is why they can never move beyond race, and I wonder if Blexit is about moving out of the Democratic Party so much as it is about moving out of the world view the Democratic Party currently holds. I suppose it’s probably a bit of both.

The left’s inability to see people as individuals drives most of their agenda, and in fact the whole notion of changing from an inclusive society that does not have artificial barriers preventing anyone from advancing to an equitable society that uses artificial barriers to prevent anyone from advancing any further than everyone else, is based on the notion that any system that allows advancement will invariably benefit some groups (not individuals) more than others.

There is a shadow of truth to what the left claims, but only in the sense that someone’s culture can have an impact on their chances for success, and not surprisingly, those immigrating from poor countries with weak education systems take an average of three generations to catch up to the income levels of the average American household.

Many Asian cultures have a hyper-focus on education, particularly in relation to math and the hard sciences. Because of this, Asian Americans lead most of the statistical categories we would generally relate to being successful. These families too, tend to regress to the mean over time – but it takes longer. Apparently cultural attitudes that work stick longer than cultural attitudes that do not, and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that a child who grows up focusing like a laser on learning as much as possible about math and science will likely do better than someone who has no interest in getting an education. To say that the child who focuses on getting an education has ‘privilege’ misses the point that all children should focus on getting an education, and should have parents helping them to focus on that.

When we look just at black people – and my data here borrows heavily from Dr. Thomas Sowell (who has researched this into the ground) – those who immigrate from the Caribbean or directly from Africa follow the typical pattern of reaching statistical parity with the rest of America in about three generations. The ONLY GROUP that does not fit this model is that of African Americans whose ancestry goes through the Antebellum South.

I’m a third-generation American myself. None of my Great Grandparents were born in America, but all of my Grandparents were. My family helped found Quebec – not the United States.

Thomas Jefferson banned the importation of slaves in 1807, which means that African Americans whose ancestry goes through the Antebellum South can trace their ancestry in the United States back at least that far. Who am I, as a third-generation American, to pretend that I am more American than is someone whose ancestors have been in this country at least 100 years longer than mine?  I use the phrase ‘African American’ only because it has become a part of the common vernacular, but really separating black people into a hyphenated group when their families have been in this country much longer than most white people is absurd.

My grandfather was born in Cadillac, Michigan, and spoke French at home, growing up. It’s pretty typical for the children of immigrants to be fluent in their parent’s language. My grandfather married a girl whose parents immigrated from Germany. My father learned neither French nor German, and that is a very typical story. 

People who move to the United States carry the culture from their country of birth, and in most cases, they pass that culture on to their children. Their children, however, are not apt to pass on much of the language or culture to their children, and as such most families are fully assimilated by the third generation.

I’m speaking of course in averages. Each person and each family is unique.

American culture cannot assimilate without also borrowing things from those who immigrate. The left calls this process ‘cultural appropriation,’ but the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’ is itself racist, as it implies that culture must be frozen, usually around racial lines. The concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a direct attack against the American melting pot – against a culture that has been appropriated from all of the people who have ever lived here. It is through appropriation that people from different cultures adapt and grow, and the notion that there is something wrong with that is absurd.

When we learn from one another, be that within a culture or between them, we grow. Such growth brings us together with such that we can be one nation, under God. As such, both Blexit and I see ‘cultural appropriation’ for what it is: cultural growth.

One of the pillar beliefs of the Blexit movement is that parents should be able to choose the school they send their children to. I grew up in Kalamazoo, where everyone went to the same schools. I was shocked when I moved to the Detroit area and saw the disparities between school systems and it has made me a huge proponent of school vouchers 

Some of the most important decisions I have made in my life were either based on opportunities that came unexpectedly or were made in the spur of the moment. In this case, an IM about possibly taking part in a CRT panel discussion led to me becoming the Director of City – Detroit. If you live in the Greater Detroit Metropolitan Area and you share Blexit’s vision, I urge you to join me.