Posted on 02/23/2002 7:06:31 AM PST by The Raven
Someday, many of their critics will apologize. Who am I talking about?
Two economists, who happen to be black, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.
For over 30 years, Thomas Sowell, currently with the Hoover Institution, and Walter Williams, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, led the charge against the "victicrat" mindset. Through decades of weekly columns, books, speeches and lectures before often-hostile crowds, they long argued that racism cannot be blamed for poverty, crime, illegitimacy, and under-performing schools.
Over 20 years ago, Sowell appeared on William F. Buckley Jr.'s PBS show, "Firing Line," and calmly dismantled the basis for affirmative action, arguing it immoral, divisive, and unconstitutional. In his 1989 book, "South Africa's War against Capitalism," Williams noted that white racists under South Africa's apartheid used minimum wage laws to suppress black employment. Both men demonstrated with -- get this -- facts, data, studies, experience, and personal observation that, no, the black middle class did not spring from affirmative action, urban renewal programs, enterprise zones, welfare benefits or set-aside programs. Racism, they point out persuasively, is bad for capitalism.
In Thomas Sowell's masterful trilogy, "Race and Culture"; "Migrations and Cultures"; and "Conquests and Cultures," Sowell traveled around the world seeking an answer to this question: Why do some groups survive and thrive under the most adverse conditions while others disappear? His answer? People who possess cultural capital -- a reverence for education, strength in family, and self-reliance -- endure.
Their reward? Former NAACP President Benjamin Hooks called people like Sowell and Williams "a new breed of Uncle Tom ... some of the biggest liars the world ever saw." Liars? For saying that the welfare state has done more to destabilize the black family than Jim Crow laws ever did?
Oreo. Uncle Tom. Boot-licking Uncle Tom. Straight-up Uncle Tom. Judas. Boy. Bug-eyed. Foot-shuffling. Sugarcane Negro. Handkerchief head. Trojan Horse. Anti-black. Pro-white. Remus. Sambo. Sambo-Tom. The Anti-Christ. Clarence Thomas supporter. Sniveling weasel. Evil. Ass-kisser. Coconut. Wannabe white. Nickering nabob of negativity. This catalog of names I've been called comes from my new book, "The Ten Things You Can't Say in America." Can you imagine the hate mail, including death threats, bombarding Sowell's and Williams' mailboxes for the last 30 years?
Black conservatives, goes the attack, take their marching orders and receive funds from the "White Racist Power Structure." Yet, according to Peter Noel of the "Village Voice," Jesse Jackson's Wall Street contributors forced Jackson to tone down his rhetoric (he called President-elect Bush "illegitimate") and put in a call to Bush!
Similarly, a few years ago, the NAACP faced a financial crisis. Declining membership and a sex-discrimination scandal by then-President Ben Chavis made headlines. One of the NAACP's principal donors, the Ford Foundation, withheld its $500,000 contribution until the organization cleaned up its act. So who's singing and who's dancing?
A few years ago, Rev. Jesse Jackson and I appeared on television to discuss whether blacks, at last, possess full civil rights. Jackson spoke about the wealth gap between blacks and whites, the lack of "access to capital." Problems remain, I said, but blacks now enjoy full "civil rights." Wealth, while desirable, is not something guaranteed by the Constitution. Rev. Jackson responded, "Mr. Elder identifies with white males." Typical. Dodge the merits of the argument and malign your opponent through the practiced, if unfair, use of the "if-you're-black-and-don't-think-of-yourself-as-a-victim-you-must-be-a-self-loathing-Uncle-Tom" attack.
Virtually every big city newspaper has the obligatory Angry Black Writer sounding the same themes: The country screws blacks; banks refuse to lend them money; cops routinely brutalize blacks; the SAT is culturally biased; racist insurance companies practice red-lining. Addressing these issues, Sowell and Williams expose the truth, a truth far less sinister than the race-hustlers claim.
The verdict is in. We now see the damage done by LBJ's War on Poverty, during which time the black illegitimacy rate grew from 25 percent to today's nearly 70 percent. Evidence shows the existence of a growing, thriving, black middle class well before the advent of affirmative action. Nor does history support the hysterical, emotional view that affirmative action accelerated the black middle class growth.
Sowell and Williams urge blacks to reject welfare in favor of self-help -- breaking the monopoly of public education, privatization of Social Security, and the adherence to responsible moral, personal, and sexual behavior. So who's the Uncle Tom? Those proposing the same old "solutions," or those, like Sowell and Williams, recommending real change?
Will Sowell and Williams get their apology? Hey, many pundits, present company included, felt Vice President Al Gore unlikely to use the "C" (concession) word in his speech. He did. So maybe, just maybe, we can begin a healthy, personal attack-free debate about what's right, just, and proper in America. An apology to Sowell and Williams would be an excellent start.
OK, if not an apology, how about a well-deserved round of applause?
And I don't think color is all that involved. It's visible, to be sure; but those that advocate the unilateral transfer of wealth from those that earn it to those that don't aren't all black. Rather, they are liberals - the "leaders" pursuing their socialist agenda, and those followers who - whether emotionally blind or through sheer stupidity - don't recognize the damage they're doing.
Eddie01
Dr. Sowell and Dr. Williams should be commended by other Black Intellectuals for their courage.
What is so terrible about diversity of thought among Blacks?
Must all Blacks think and speak the same as "The Man in the Big House" on the NAACP Plantation? And here I've been led to believe that slavery was abolished with our Civil War!
Guess it takes a little longer to end thought-slavery.
But you know the three biggest reforms we need: EDUCATION, IMMIGRATION,and TAXATION will never happen because the left controls the "COMMANDING HEIGHTS" of the culture: Media and Academia...
we better wake before Pat Buchanan is proven accurate
Let us celebrate the poor,
Let us hawk them door to door.
There's a market for their pain,
Votes and glory and money to gain.
Let us celebrate the poor.
Their ills, their sins, their faulty diction
Flavor our songs and spice our fiction.
Their hopes and struggles and agonies
Get us grants and consulting fees.
Celebrate thugs and clowns,
Give their ignorance all renown.
Celebrate what holds them down,
In our academic gowns.
Let us celebrate the poor.
Thomas Sowell
IMHO
Actually the black community rejects vouchers based on the idea that anything that is not perceived as strengthening the 'community' is seen as weakening it.
Vouchers would take black children out of the black community and integrate them into successful mainstream America. They see there strength in numbers, their communal bond to each other, brothers and sisters all.
If one was to go off and find success on their own, well... that just one less voice in the chorus, one less vote at the ballot box. They enslave themselves to a degree with this obsolete survival skill.
This same community/cultural defence mechanism is what drives the black community to demagog and label all successful blacks as "Uncle Tom's". Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Jesse Lee Peterson, the list is endless. Liberals on the otherhand, whether Charlatan or Dupe just go along with whatever the black community espouses right or wrong to get votes or suppress some coerced guilt complex respectively.
All in all, Liberals could care less about improving anything.
Eddie01
Exactly my thoughts. What would it take to get Alan Keyes to have on his program Dr. Sowell, Dr. Williams and himself just discussing these issues for the entire hour? I don't know that MSNBC is brave enough to allow that.
Then came the White Leftists, who founded the NAACP, and who began in time to promote the subsidies for failure, and the family destroying ADC, in the 1930s, followed by the "Civil Rights" movement and legislation from the 1940s. It was this steady diet of corrupting influence, that broke the back of the forward progress. While many individuals have succeeded, over half of the race today are far worse off, from the standpoint of social infrastructure essential to real progress, than they were a century ago.
It is both sad and outrageous. But when you mention Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, you are discussing men who have contributed far more to American Caucasions--who respect them tremendously--than to American Negroes; not because they wanted to slight their own race, not in the least. But because most of their race was being regimented into moronic self-destruction by a systematic, and thorough, Leftwing brainwashing.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Actually, black Americans overwhelmingly support vouchers. This can be seen in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and in Washington, D.C. It is the so-called "black leadership" that is opposed to vouchers, because they kowtow to the teachers' unions and Democrat big city political machines.
I don't believe it.....maybe the leaders.....The users of vouchers love them.
Polls in communities where they've been tried love them.
You have just described the base mentalities that (as I have said many times here on FR), make up the base of the DemocRAT party:
[1] Cynical opportunists (like Marx)
[2] Useful idiots (those Marx said he needed in order for his agenda (Socialism-to-Communism) to succeed.
As is always the case with cynical opportunists and what Marx called, his "useful idiots". (See #19)
If useful idiots (or Barnum's "suckers") recognized themselves, they would no longer be "useful".
There's no danger of that happening because even though their *true friends* (whom they never recognize until it's too late), try so hard to warn them about how and why they're being used, they always refuse to believe it.
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