Why there won't be another Thomas Sowell among blacks today - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#13544050
Who is better to explain this than Thomas Sowell himself:

The old neighborhood

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- RECENTLY, I got together with a guy who grew up in my old neighborhood in Harlem, around 145th St. and St. Nicholas Avenue. As we talked about the old days, the world that we discussed seemed like something from another planet, compared to today.

There have been many good changes but, on net balance, it is doubtful whether kids growing up in our old neighborhood today have as much chance of rising out of poverty as we did.

That is not because poverty is worse today. It is not. My friend remembers times when his father would see that the children were fed but would go to bed without eating dinner himself. There were other times when his father would walk to work in downtown Manhattan -- several miles away -- rather than spend the nickel it took to ride the subway in those days.

Things were not quite that grim for me, but my family was by no means middle class. None of the adults had gotten as far as the seventh grade. Down South, before we moved to New York, most of the places where we lived did not come with frills like electricity or hot running water.

Some people have said that my rising from such a background was unique. But it was not. Many people from that same neighborhood went on to have professional careers and I am by no means either the best known or the most financially successful of them.

Harry Belafonte came out of the same building where my old school-mate lived. One of the guys from the neighborhood was listed in one of the business magazines as having a net worth of more than $200 million today. If anyone had told me then that one of the guys on our block was going to grow up to be a multi-millionaire, I would have wondered what he was drinking.

Not everybody made it. One of my old buddies was found shot dead some years ago, in what looked like a drug deal gone bad. But many people from that neighborhood went on to become doctors, lawyers, and academics -- at least one of whom became a dean and another a college president.

My old school-mate retired as a psychiatrist and was living overseas, with servants, until recently deciding to return home. But home now is not Harlem. He lives out in the California wine country.

Why are the kids in that neighborhood today not as likely to have such careers -- especially after all the civil rights "victories" and all the billions of dollars worth of programs to get people out of poverty?

What government programs gave was transient and superficial. What they destroyed was more fundamental.

My old school-mate recalls a teacher seeing him eating his brown bag lunch in our school lunchroom. A forerunner of a later generation of busybodies, she rushed him over to the line where people were buying their lunches and gave some sign to the cashier so that he would not have to pay.

Bewildered at the swift chain of events, he sat down to eat and then realized what had happened. He had been given charity! He gagged on the food and then went to the toilet to spit it out. He went hungry that day because his brown bag lunch had been thrown out. He had his pride -- and that pride would do more for him in the long run than any lunches.

His father also had his pride. He tore to shreds a questionnaire that the school had sent home to find out about their students' living conditions. Today, even middle-class parents with Ph.D.s tamely go along with this kind of meddling. Moreover, people like his father have been made superfluous by the welfare state -- and made to look like chumps if they pass it up.

What the school we went to gave us was more precious than gold. It was an education. That was what schools did in those days.

We didn't get mystical talk about the rain forests and nobody gave us condoms or chirped about "diversity." And nobody would tolerate our speaking anything in school but the king's English.

After finishing junior high school, my friend was able to pass the test to get into the Bronx High School of Science, where the average IQ was 135, and yours truly passed the same test to get into Stuyvesant High School, another selective public school that today's community "leaders" denounce as "elitist."

The rest is history. But it is a history that today's young blacks are unlikely to hear -- and are less likely to repeat.


It is clear that the current inferiority complex, the racism, and the sense of entitlement in the black community, which is by the way very clearly represented in this forum as well, is created and perpetuated by the left, and it will never allow a full recovery and integration of the African American community into modern economy.

Another great article on the same issue.

Dems, GOPers and blacks

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- NO GROUP votes more solidly for the Democrats than blacks -- and no group suffers more as a result than blacks. Political spin makes Democrats the best friends of blacks, the party of civil rights laws, the party of affirmative action and the party of social programs to help the poor in general and blacks in particular. But spin and facts are very different things.

The fact is that a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite all the media hype about the confederate flag flying over the state capitol in South Carolina, no Republican put that flag there. The Democrats' Senator Fritz Hollings, who was governor of South Carolina in the 1960s, put that confederate flag there at a time when it was used all across the South as a symbol of resistance to the civil rights movement.

With all the criticism of Texas Governor George W. Bush for not telling the state of South Carolina what to do, there was scarcely a word anywhere about Democrat Fritz Hollings. That's the media for you.

Democrats can claim credit -- if that's the word -- for all the government social programs that have played such a role in the disintegration of families. These programs have done little to reduce poverty. Blacks did more to reduce their own poverty than the government ever has.

Between 1940 and 1960, the poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent to 47 percent. Yet there was no major federal civil rights legislation or welfare state programs created during that period. The continuing rise of blacks out of poverty during the 1960s, when their poverty rate fell an additional 17 points, cannot be arbitrarily attributed to the Great Society programs, since this trend was already decades old before these programs were created.

As for the first decade of affirmative action -- the 1970s -- the poverty rate among blacks fell by only one percentage point then.

Education had much to do with the rise of blacks. As of 1940, black adults averaged just 5 years of schooling. By 1960 that was 8 years and by 1970 it was 10 years. Obviously, doubling your education within one generation tends to increase your income, regardless of which party is in power or what policies they follow.

In our own high-tech era, education is even more important. Nothing is more of a handicap to blacks today than inadequate education. There are many reasons for these inadequacies. How do the Democrats and Republicans compare, when it comes to the education of black youngsters?

Democrats are too completely dependent on the teachers' unions to be able to break the public school monopoly or to get rid of incompetent teachers or even to insist on the teaching of the basics, instead of the dumbed down education and amateur social engineering that the education establishment likes.

Republicans have a golden opportunity to offer blacks something that the Democrats cannot possibly offer -- the right of parents to choose where their own children go to school.

Whatever political support there is for vouchers has come almost exclusively from Republicans. Democrats are totally opposed -- and have to be, if they want to continue getting the millions of dollars contributed by the teachers' unions.

Another factor in the decline of American education in general and education in low-income minority communities in particular, is the difficulty of either punishing or expelling disruptive and violent students who destroy the education of the other students. Liberal judges have made it literally a federal case when schools crack down on disruptive and violent students. Who appoints liberal judges? Usually Democrats, though Republicans have slipped up and appointed a few as well.

One of the other huge handicaps that black students face is the attitude that trying to learn is "acting white." Self-destructive as this notion may be, it is a logical corollary of the social vision that says whitey is out to get you and it doesn't matter how much you know or how hard you try. Which party panders to this victimhood vision? Which party cuddles up with race hustlers like Al Sharpton, who promote this paranoid tribalism? The Democrats in general and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton in particular.

These are the facts. But how much weight do facts carry on election day?
By Decky
#13544349
His father also had his pride. He tore to shreds a questionnaire that the school had sent home to find out about their students' living conditions.


He willingly made his childs life in education worse becuase of pride? What a fine example of parenting, what is wrong with yanks? "No, no I'll be voting against that my health care being payed from the taxes of some rich fella, I'd rather go without. Help my childs schooling you say, no way."

In a democracy you get what the people deserve I suppose.
User avatar
By Nattering Nabob
#13544779
Lol...

Sounds like Thomas Sowell agrees with Tea Party spokesman Mark Williams:

Mark Williams wrote:Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.

The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

And the ridiculous idea of “reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government.” What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew NAACP Head Colored Person
By eugenekop
#13547867
Another excellent article by Thomas Sowell on the issue of egalitarianism.

Stereotypes about stereotypes

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Vanderbilt University is one of a number of academic institutions that are making a special effort to attract Jewish students. The idea is that these students tend to have higher test scores, which will raise the average test scores of these institutions -- which in turn will cause them to rise in academic rankings.

Whatever one thinks of this goal, or about academic rankings themselves, reaching out to Jewish students seems fairly innocuous, especially after colleges and universities have made special efforts to attract foreign students and students from various domestic minorities. Nevertheless, there have been hostile responses from a number of individuals and organizations, including some who are Jewish.

Officials of some predominantly Jewish high schools have called it "reprehensible" to single out Jews, even for special recruitment. A spokesman for a high school in suburban New York said, "a positive stereotype is just as pernicious as a negative one."

But is it just a stereotype that some groups do better at some things than other groups do? Do blacks not really play basketball any better than whites? Do our eyes deceive us when we notice the racial make-up of the NBA?

Is it just a coincidence that people of German ancestry produce the leading brands of beer in the United States -- and the leading brand of beer in China, not to mention Germany's position as the leading beer producer in Europe? Can anyone deny that people of Italian ancestry have long been over-represented among the world's leading figures in music -- classical and popular, vocal and instrumental?

It is one thing to say that everyone should be equal before the law or is entitled to equal opportunity. It is something else to deny the most blatant facts before our eyes, and insist on a dogma of equality of performance, when virtually every individual or group is better at some things than at others.

More is involved than incidental pious nonsense. Such ideological make-believe has come to dominate public policy and even judicial decisions in the highest courts in the land. Statistical disparities among groups are routinely equated with discrimination, as if there could not possibly be any differences in behavior or performance among the groups themselves.

It gets worse. Whole nations and civilizations are equated, despite enormous disparities between them. People may be living in air-conditioned homes with all the modern amenities in one culture and in huts and shacks without running water or adequate sewage disposal in another. People in one culture may have better health, longer life, more advanced technology, more stable government, and greater personal freedom and safety than others. Moreover, people from other cultures are constantly migrating to these cultures, which fashionable dogmas say are no better than the cultures they are leaving.

Those people who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal. Anything that goes against the prevailing social dogma is virtually certain to be dismissed as a stereotype.

To find anything comparable in its blind denial of facts before their eyes, and such fierce and ruthless insistence on an arbitrary party line, you have to go back to the worst days of 20th century totalitarianism. Ironically, it is in our most elite prep schools and colleges that this totalitarian mindset is most deeply entrenched and most intolerant of any other views.

Institutions that force-feed students the new trinity of race, class, and gender victimhood throughout the academic year are often unwilling to risk allowing even one lecture by a visiting spokesman for an opposing viewpoint. Like the Communist regimes which electronically jammed broadcasts from the Voice of America during the Cold War, the new academic totalitarians apparently fear lest their years-long propaganda efforts be knocked over like a house of cards by one brief exposure to a few facts and a different vision.

Why do parents send their children to such places, much less pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to have them brainwashed with political correctness? The harm is not limited to the particular social dogmas they are taught. The larger harm is in being forced to accept dogmas imposed by authorities, rather than learning to use their own minds.
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