ThomasSowell- [Townhall] Discussions of racial problems almost invariably bring out the cliche of “a legacy of slavery.” But anyone who is being serious, as distinguished from being political, would surely want to know if whatever he is talking about — whether fatherless children, crime or whatever — is in fact a legacy of slavery or of some of the many other things that have been done in the century and a half since slavery ended.
Another cliche that has come into vogue is that slavery is “America’s original sin.” The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for fifty years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking, even longer than that.
Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race. Even the leading moral and religious thinkers in different societies accepted slavery as just a fact of life. more
I do like and admire Dr. Sowell. This piece of his is timely and well put.
It is statistically extremely likely that every one of us here at iotwreport, in whatever role, has ancestors who were slaves, or ancestors who were slave-holders. Some have both.
“Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned…” that it is hard to believe that there are more slaves now than ever in human history. And it sure ain’t with the support of USA, although there are certainly some within our borders.
Of course we know all the arguments – that blacks owned slaves too, that whites were slaves too, that the blacks brought over (often by English boats, although England had abolished slavery) had been captured by other blacks, that after the Civil War there were still slaves in the North for a while, emancipation there came later. One quote that gets me is that ‘America was built on the backs of slaves.’ Well, de Tocqueville famously wrote about the American economy decades before the war, and noted how much less industry there was in the plantation South. No, America was built on industry, and actually in spite of slavery.
Random thoughts…
We are asked to be color blind, but modern day negros want none of it. They insist on having institutions that segregate them. Weather it be the Congressional Black Caucus or Black Entertainment Television or Miss Black USA, the insist they should have their segregated society. Until the negros understand that a segregated society will never be equal until they drop the self segregation and victim status, they have no hope of being perceived as an equal. Ben Carson is a front runner to “heal” the relations, but I fear too many negros will simply label him an “uncle tom”. So sad…because most whities I know are not inherently racist, just observant.
It is very profitable to keep those slavery shackles on.
Oh, and let me add that I have read Mr Sowell’s writing for years and I never knew he was black until some racist black dude said he was a sell out some time after Mr Obama got elected…and his race never mattered to me…and still doesn’t.
and one more thing…the southern boarder is pumping our country full of new “slaves”, and their treatment is far worse than what the 18th century negro went thru, it just labeled differently today.
This is like the guy on the freeway off-ramp with the sign “Homeless Vet, anything helps”. When you flunked out of boot-camp, or got a BCD for smoking pot, or went AWOL and got an other than honorable discharge, does not make you a “Vet”; any more than being black makes you a victim of a “legacy of slavery.”
Too many young people in America have nobody to look to that knows how to work. Incredible numbers of young adults are neither employed or in school and are somehow idling through life. Too many young women act like the life support system for a set of reproductive organs and can’t blow out a candle without instructions.
Cliven Bundy is right.
The blacks living in N. Las Vegas would be better off back on the plantation.
The system there and elsewhere that they’re in now is a much more cruel enslavement than what, at the time, was deemed “normal”.
Nope. The only branch of my family tree–my mother’s father’s–that was in this country prior to 1865 was located in the North. My great-great grandfather, Robert Wassner, ran a blacksmithing concern on Graham Avenue in the now hip Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. While he may have used apprentices in his businesses, he would not have used slaves.
Still coulda had an ancestor who was a slave of the ancient Greeks, or Romans, or Goths – or one of them coulda owned slaves – who knows?
Who really cares?
If you could go back to the beginning, I’m sure there were ancestors, both slave and slave owner. Might have a Jew forbear in there, somewhere, who spent time in Babylon … or Egypt.