when you have people with an incentive to promote racial polarization, you’re going to get more racial polarization. When you admit people not on the basis of qualifications to be there, but because or racial quotas, you then move very quickly from the students admitted by racial quotas to faculty hired for racial quotas.Ouch! No wonder higher ed is such a mess!! They have spent the past generation working to create an anti-intellectual academic Establishment!And again, they have every incentive to create trouble, especially if they know that they do not meet the same standards as their colleagues. At Cornell, one of the tip-offs early on for me was that the Admissions Committee had trouble admitting a black student who had English SATs over 700. The people who were part of the local campus black establishment fought against the admission of this girl — the reason being that obviously she was qualified to be there and they wanted people who were going to be disaffected and, therefore, would be part of their campus base of power.
Do you think Americans have a view of this country’s history of slavery that is probably too harsh, given the worldwide history of the institution?Sowell documented the worldwide history of slavery at more length in the second half ofOh, I think the distortion is almost beyond belief. Tragically slavery existed for thousands of years of recorded history. For most of that period of time, the people who were enslaved and the people who enslaved them were the same race as a matter of logistics and wealth. There wasn’t the wealth or the technological means to go to another continent and transport people across an ocean. That just didn’t exist and when they finally did exist, you ended up with Europeans as well as Africans being transmitted into slavery — although this is seldom noticed.
For example, centuries ago the number of Europeans transplanted to North Africa as slaves exceeded the number of Africans transplanted to the United States and to the American colonies that preceded the United States. But that gets no attention whatever. Today looking back, it’s almost inconceivable that for thousands of years there was no serious challenge to slavery as a system — that you get the first serious challenge [to the legitimacy of slavery] in the late 18th century, and solely at that point within western countries. Nobody else saw anything wrong with it.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell
I love it when Sowell speaks out on matters like this one, it absolutely infuriates the leftists. Shortly after his column is printed there are letters to the editors across the country with leftists saying what a rube Sowell is, they usually succeed in showing their own ignorance. There's one in the local rag now that refers to Sowell's column regarding the occupy mobs and the letter writer compares these mobs with Colonist's protesting the British.
Thanks for the "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" link.