Posted on 03/11/2013 11:45:03 AM PDT by jazusamo
There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels.
A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some races were genetically superior to others.
Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton urged "the gradual extinction of an inferior race."
It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like this. Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the leading universities and were internationally renowned.
Presidents of Stanford University and of MIT were among the many academic advocates of theories of racial inferiority — applied mostly to people from Eastern and Southern Europe, since it was just blithely assumed in passing that blacks were inferior.
This was not a left-right issue. The leading crusaders for theories of genetic superiority and inferiority were iconic figures on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Maynard Keynes helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society. Fabian socialist intellectuals H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were among many other leftist supporters of eugenics.
It was much the same story on this side of the Atlantic. President Woodrow Wilson, like many other Progressives, was solidly behind notions of racial superiority and inferiority. He showed the movie "Birth of a Nation," glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House, and invited various dignitaries to view it with him.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
You know a white man could never get away with writing this. Matter of fact, I’m sure someone is calling me a rascist right now just for posting in this thread.
The “race” issue is simply a convenient way for the left to use the shame of people with an actual sense of shame (unlike themselves) to silence any voicing of ideas contrary to their own agenda.
Bump
Would that Sowell be the prez.
That would most assuredly give me great confidence in the nation.
...the idea that differences in outcomes are odd, if not sinister, has been repeated mindlessly from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court.
Oh. Facts. How very inconvenient for leftist extremists!
This might be worth a ping to your list, given the early Progressive history aspects of this column.
Thomas Sowell ping
“Would that Sowell be the prez.
That would most assuredly give me great confidence in the nation.”
I agree with you on that. However based on his character, and his inner beliefs. From my understanding, he would slaughter the federal government. From my understanding again, that would be great!!!
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