[Peace-discuss] Letter to News-Gazette

[David Green]

	It is understandable that several readers of the
News-Gazette find Thomas Sowell to be of unparalleled
brilliance—he is a black who obliterates white guilt
and responsibility for the starkly institutionalized
consequences of centuries of slavery, segregation,
caste, and racism. Responding to claims for
reparations for slavery, he writes “When slavery is
mentioned, too many people automatically think of
whites enslaving blacks. That is not even one-tenth of
the story of slavery, which existed on every inhabited
continent. The very word "slave" derives from the word
for some white people who were enslaved on a mass
scale—the Slavs—for more centuries than blacks were
enslaved in the Western Hemisphere.”

	What could be more satisfying than an
African-American invoking white suffering from
slavery? Yes, when self-centered African-Americans
think only of themselves when slavery is mentioned,
they need a firm corrective.

	The perceptive author Benjamin DeMott puts the
problem in terms that Sowell, the counterfeit
economist, might understand: The claim of a white
reformation regarding race “provides the majority
culture with huge supplies of fantasy capital—fantasy
moral capital. Each story of ‘improved’ white
attitudes qualifies as a contribution to solving the
‘black problem’—a daily deposit in the white goodness
savings account . . . guaranteeing that any seeming
severity at this hour toward African Americans is
unconnected with the hostility and meanness that
pollute our past.”

	Sowell’s appearance on the pages of the News-Gazette
is, unfortunately, simply another example of whites
hiring blacks to do their dirty work.

David Green



		
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