thomas sowell black rednecks white liberals

“The misuse of history to condemn evils common around the world as if they were peculiarities of the West has serious practical implications.

It would not be much better to wake up some morning with a false memory, induced in you by some means by some other person-to serve that other person’s purposes, with all memories expunged that do not serve that end and other memories twisted or created out of thin air to make you the willing instrument of some ulterior design.” In addition to the emotional trauma of suddenly finding everything and everybody unknown and unfathomable, there would be no way to carry out the practical necessities of work or managing a home, much less maintaining or establishing relations with other human beings.

For an individual to wake up some morning with no memory would be devastating.

History has always been invoked in contemporary controversies.The only choice is between discussing what actually happened in the past and discussing notions projected into the past for present purposes. “We do not have a choice whether or not to discuss history. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.” Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century -even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. “White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained.

Thomas sowell black rednecks white liberals