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In a November 15, 2014 article in the New York Times (“When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4“) op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that (emphasis added):

… the presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans [is] that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape inequity in the 21st century.

Several days later Thomas Sowell responded to Kristof in his weekly syndicated newspaper column “A Legacy of Liberalism” and here’s part of that response (emphasis added):

...

Kristof’s other “overwhelming” evidence of the current effects of past slavery is that blacks do not have as much income as whites. But Puerto Ricans do not have as much income as Japanese Americans. Mexican Americans do not have as much income as Cuban Americans. All sorts of people do not have as much income as all sorts of other people, not only in the United States, but in countries around the world. And most of these people were never enslaved.

………….

If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

…..

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.

If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.

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Originally posted by MS Warehouse
I love his books. This guy's a phenomenal writer.

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Originally posted by jaden101
No mention of either drug proliferation in housing projects

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admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions.

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Originally posted by jaden101
or collapse of manual industries lowering average pay as employment moved towards lower paid service economies.

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Originally posted by Withsensibility
White people took slaves from Africa for THEIR benefit. The africans were already slaves, as it is a part of African culture and slavery still exists in Africa today.

In America, they learnt how to pick cotton, grow tobacco, fry chicken, etc. Things they would have NEVER learned had it not been for white people. Even after slavery was abolished, they were able to live in beautiful cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, Columbus etc.

They should be grateful of slavery.

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Originally posted by Withsensibility
White people took slaves from Africa for THEIR benefit. The africans were already slaves, as it is a part of African culture and slavery still exists in Africa today.

In America, they learnt how to pick cotton, grow tobacco, fry chicken, etc. Things they would have NEVER learned had it not been for white people. Even after slavery was abolished, they were able to live in beautiful cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, Columbus etc.

They should be grateful of slavery.

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In April 1775, two days after the American War of Independence began, a notice appeared in the Virginia Gazette offering rewards for the return of 10 runaways. Two were "Negro slaves", but the other eight were white servants, including Thomas Pearce, a 20-year-old Bristol joiner, and William Webster, a middle-aged Scottish brick-maker. Whether they were ever found remains a mystery; almost nothing is known about them but their names. But their irate master was to become very famous indeed, for the man pursuing his absconding servants was called George Washington.

Pearce and Webster were indentured servants, the kind of people often ignored in patriotic accounts of colonial America. In the 17th and 18th centuries, tens of thousands of men, women and children lived as ill-paid, ill-treated chattels, bound in servitude to their colonial masters. It is a sobering illustration of human gullibility that, in return for vague promises of a better life, men would sign away their lives for 10 years or more. Once in the New World, they were effectively items of property to be treated as their masters saw fit. Brutal corporal punishment was ubiquitous: every Virginia settlement had its own whipping post. One man was publicly scourged for four days with his ears nailed to the post. He had been flirting with a servant girl.

Briskly written by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, a pair of television documentary producers, White Cargo is harrowing reading. For while thousands of servants signed up for the colonies of their own will, thousands more were shipped across by force.

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Most shocking of all, thousands of poor London children were rounded up by the constables and thrown on to the nearest ship. Urchins as young as five were shipped to America, where they spent most of their lives in backbreaking service. Few lived long enough to reach adulthood. And yet this horrifying enterprise had some impressive advocates. "It shall sweep your streets, and wash your doors, from idle persons, and the children of idle persons," declared the poet John Donne.