[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 158 (Monday, September 14, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5564-S5565]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 Racism

  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, the events of the last few months--what we 
have been seeing in the streets and the protests and all the issues 
that surround that--I think, have forced the country to grapple with 
our history on the issue of race and, in particular, what we teach 
young Americans about what that means and how it fits in the broader 
story of America.
  Is America, in fact, a nation founded on racism, one that makes our 
very founding and its principles almost irredeemable? It is an 
important question. You can't ask Americans or any generation to 
sacrifice or defend a nation they believe is so deeply flawed, so it is 
one that I think we have to talk about.
  This country was founded in the year 1776, and it was founded by this 
declaration that all men are created equal; that your rights come from 
God, from your Creator. Now, we take those words for granted today. 
They were extraordinarily radical ideas 244 years ago. Up until that 
time, every person on Earth was told that your rights are whatever the 
sovereign allowed you to have, whatever the King allowed you to have. 
You didn't have any rights that were natural to you. So the very 
principle itself was pretty radical.

[[Page S5565]]

  The problem is that, from the very beginning, many people, including 
those who put their name on that document, and our laws at the time did 
not reflect that founding principle, and our story can largely be 
summarized as the 244-year journey to more fully live up to the 
promises made at our founding.
  For our first 89 years as a nation, human beings were owned as 
slaves. And beyond just the horrors of slavery, they were the subject 
of torture, of rape, of seeing their children sold away--away from 
them--never to see them again.
  When that horrible institution finally came to an end, it was 
followed by another hundred years of separate and unequal, where Black 
Americans were told where they could live, where they could work, where 
they could go to school, and more. They were told where they could eat, 
where they could sit or not, where they were allowed to stay overnight. 
They were even told what side of the road they would be allowed to walk 
on in many parts of this country. They were denied the right to vote, 
either directly or through intimidation and threats.
  It was a time when, in many parts of this country, any Black man was 
one false accusation away from losing his life at the hands of a lynch 
mob.
  This is a shameful truth, an undeniable part of our history, a stain 
on our legacy as a nation. But it is not the whole story. From the very 
beginning, it was clear that the promise of our founding and our 
failure to live up to it--these two things could not ultimately 
coexist. From the very beginning, within a year and even before the 
founding of our Nation, there were already Americans working to end 
slavery. Sometimes they paid for it with their lives.
  Ultimately, it became the single most divisive issue in the country, 
to the point that it was resolved only through a bloody civil war. For 
the next hundred years, during the era of separate and unequal, it was 
also Americans who worked to end segregation and Jim Crow laws, 
Americans of every walk of life: little children who would brave angry 
mobs to desegregate a school, the protesters and those in the streets 
who faced down ``Bull'' Connor's dogs and beatings, little girls who 
died when their church was bombed.
  Ours is not simply the story of a people who, for 189 years, failed 
to live up to the promise of America. Ours is also the story of the 
Americans who ultimately succeeded in making us a nation that was 
closer to who we were supposed to be.
  That is why, at least for me, when they play the ``National Anthem'' 
and the flag that I face and put my hand over my heart to honor--that 
flag--that is not the flag of slave owners; that is the flag of the 
abolitionists. That is the flag of Harriet Tubman and Frederick 
Douglass, who were American heroes. The flag that I pledge allegiance 
to is not the flag of a segregationist. It is the flag of the Freedom 
Riders, the people who made the march from Selma to Montgomery. That is 
the flag of Rosa Parks and Dr. King.
  Our history does not simply belong to the villains. It belongs, even 
more so, to the heroes who, frankly, made us more American in each 
successive generation.
  I have heard in some corners people suggest that our founding 
documents themselves are documents embedded in racism because I imagine 
many of the people who signed it, indeed, were or did not live up to 
the words they signed their names on. But that would be forgetting the 
fundamental fact that every single great movement in American history--
every movement for equality in the history of this Nation--has not been 
a rejection of our founding documents, has not been a rejection of our 
founding principles, has not been a call to overthrow the Constitution 
or the Declaration of Independence. Every one of these movements--great 
movements in the history of this country towards equality--has been an 
appeal to those principles, a demand that we live up to those 
principles.

  Dr. King said the magnificent words of the Constitution and the 
Declaration of Independence--an appeal to our founding documents, which 
he called a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
  As we talk now about what is taught to our children in our schools 
and in our lives, I think our children deserve to know the truth about 
their country--all the truth. We must teach our children about the 
times in which our Nation fell short. We must teach them about the 
people responsible for our falling short. We must point to the times 
even now when we fall short. That is the only way you learn the lessons 
of history and the only way to avoid repeating them. But we must also 
teach them that it was Americans who dedicated and even lost their 
lives to end these evils.
  While we are at it, we should teach them, too, about the greatness of 
our country. Teach them about the young Americans who died far from 
home for the freedom and the liberty of others, who lost their lives at 
Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal and Normandy and the Ardennes and Chosin and 
Fallujah, on San Juan Hill and in Manila Bay. Teach them also about 
how, when disaster strikes anywhere on this planet, it is their country 
that responds first and with the most--Fukushima, Japan, and West 
Berlin; after an earthquake hit Haiti; after floods impacted Pakistan--
how it is Americans and their charities and their government that have 
literally saved the lives of millions of people on the African 
continent from starvation, from the ravages of HIV-AIDS. Teach them 
how, on a summer night in 1969, the entire world stopped and watched 
with amazement as man first stepped foot on the Moon and there planted 
the flag of their country.
  Our children deserve to know the truth about their country, that in 
the history of mankind, there has never been a great power that has 
used its means to help more people and more places than anywhere in 
human history--no other great power in human history has done what the 
people of this Nation have done, both individually through the monies 
we give to charities and through their government. This is also true 
about America.
  Our children deserve to know that they are citizens not of a perfect 
country but of the single greatest Nation in the history of all of 
mankind. They deserve to know that they are the heirs to a 244-year 
journey to achieve in one land a nation where all people are viewed as 
equal under the law, whose rights come from their Creator. They deserve 
to know that their country is a special one--one worth defending, one 
worth protecting, and one worth passing on to the generations that will 
follow them.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.