Leftist Intellectuals Have Unhealthy Obsession With Race

[Wehrwolfen]

By Thomas Sowell

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.

Such views dominated the first two decades of the 20th century. Now fast forward to the last few decades of the 20th century. The political left of this era was now on the opposite end of the spectrum on racial issues. Yet they too regarded differences in outcomes among racial and ethnic groups as something unusual, calling for some single, sweeping explanation.

Now, instead of genes being the overriding reason for differences in outcomes, racism became the one-size-fits-all explanation.


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Leftist Intellectuals Have Unhealthy Obsession With Race - Investors.com

 

[TheOldSchool]

Um race has played a pretty damn big role in history so... or are you saying that it's the genetics of a race that make them inferior or superior and not their skin color?

 

[Clementine]

Excellent article. I am a huge fan of Thomas Sowell and find him to be one of the more brilliant people we have in this country. Shame that he doesn't run for president, but after seeing the racist way that the left treated Herman Cain, you know they'd be cruel to Sowell, too.

They can't figure out why some minorities don't think the way liberals think they should. Liberals believe that all Hispanics think one way, like all being for illegal immigration and that blacks are supposed to all think alike and want a big nanny government. It puzzles them when people step outside of the box and think independently. They can't handle it. They were so horrible to Cain and didn't give him an ounce of credit for all his amazing accomplishments and they called him so many nasty names. I've heard Sowell called an Uncle Tom. Why are liberals so damn mean when people don't think the way they do?