Posted on 11/17/2014 2:20:10 PM PST by jazusamo
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said there were "phrases that serve as an excuse for not thinking." One of these phrases that substitute for thought today is one that depicts the current problems of blacks in America as "a legacy of slavery."
New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof asserts that there is "overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape inequity in the 21st century" and he mentions "the lingering effects of slavery." But before we become overwhelmed, that evidence should be checked out.
The evidence offered by Mr. Kristof in the November 16th issue of the New York Times seems considerably short of overwhelming, to put it charitably. He cites a study showing that "counties in America that had a higher proportion of slaves in 1860 are still more unequal today." Has he never heard statisticians' repeated warnings that correlation is not causation?
The South long remained a region that blacks fled by the millions — for very good reasons. But, in more recent years, the net migration of blacks has been from the North to the South. No doubt they have good reasons for that as well.
But there is no reason to believe that blacks today are unaware of the history of slavery or of the Jim Crow era in the South. Indeed, there are black "leaders" who seem to talk about nothing else. Yet blacks who are moving back to the South seem more concerned with the present and the future than with the past.
Kristof's other "overwhelming" evidence of the current effects of past slavery is that blacks do not have as much income as whites. But Puerto Ricans do not have as much income as Japanese Americans. Mexican Americans do not have as much income as Cuban Americans...
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
An economist totaled up all the money spent on “The War on Poverty”.
He found that the total monies spent was enough to buy ALL the stock of EVERY company on the NYSE and Nasdaq.
And then enough money would still be left over to buy EVERY acre of ALL farmland in the entire USA.
I had no idea but vast sums have been wasted with nary a thing to show for it.
There goes Sowell again injecting facts into a subject where sentiment reigns.
Yep, he has a good habit of doing that.
It sounds so much better when Thomas Sowell says it compared to Bundy who essentially made the same observation albeit far more coarse.
Wow, do you have a link to the source for this? I’m somewhat incredulous but it’s probably not as far-fetched as I believe.
In the early 1960’s, pre-interstate, we often rode through black neighborhoods on our way into town. I never felt threatened. Some of the houses were obviously poor but extremely well maintained. Flowers grew on the porches in cut-down bleach bottles. There was no trash and no junked cars, no graffiti. When I mentioned how old the houses looked my father told me that most of these families had owned their property since the Civil War. Then came Johnson’s “Great Society.” They condemned all of those black owned homes and took them at a fraction of their value. They built Soviet style block apartments and moved the people back in. The blacks went from owning their own homes to need government subsidies to rent an apartment. The graffiti and burned out cars showed up like they’d been air-dropped. Overnight the neighborhoods felt dangerous and we started taking only the main roads into town.
I believe that slavery does in fact hurt the blacks of today because of the culture they drag behind them.
QUESTION: Ask yourself this, “How much work does a slave do”?
ANSWER: As little as possible.
This attitude is leftover from slavery and is a large part of American black culture, and it hurts them/us tremendously.
LOL - I've read Kristof - I doubt he could pass high school algebra... no way he'd get college level statistics...
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