Tag Archives: Black

Creating Equal. Ward Connerly.

 

Ward Connerly

Ward Connerly

Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences. Ward Connerly.

A Courageous Man and a Brilliant Book…. March 25, 2000

In Creating Equal, Ward Connerly returns the *human* dimension to the realities of race in America. Where so often what the poet Robert Hayden called “race rhetoric” substitutes for thought and dialogue, Connerly confronts long-held affirmative action doctrine with compelling insight into the pervasive devastation race preferences have actually had for all people. His emphasis on the necessity of basic human virtue and morality stands as both an indictment of us all and a call to struggle together toward a new vision of what it means to be an American….

 

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

Frederick Glaysher

 

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A Dream Deferred. Shelby Steele.

Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele

A Dream Deferred : The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. Shelby Steele.

Reawakening the Dream…. December 7, 2000

This morning, sometime around three or four AM, I woke up thinking about Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred. I read it a number of months ago and have been wanting to write a brief note about it. There are so few intelligent, reasonable, sane voices speaking about racial matters in America I feel it as a duty to try to acknowledge those who are so scorned by the forces of both white and black extremist liberalism. The thought that impelled me out of bed was that I owe it to my memory of the best friend I’ve ever had in my life, who happened to be black, long deceased and sorely missed. So I struggle for words, knowing I will never meet that high mark. Others may criticize Mr. Steele for emphasizing this and underplaying that, but I want to praise his thoughtful probing of the dynamics of affirmative action and how it assuages white guilt while keeping some black people from developing their highest potential. As a former college English instructor, I occasionally had minority students who were accustomed to being handed A’s and were shocked to receive C’s. Repeated experience convinced me that affirmative action was part of the problem. They lacked the self-discipline and responsibility that Steele extolls: “Very often those who educate poor blacks feel excused from the responsibilities of high expectations and academic rigor by the very conditions that make such expectations mandatory….”

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

Frederick Glaysher

 

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Quest for Cosmic Justice. Thomas Sowell.

 

 

 

Thomas_Sowell

Thomas Sowell

 

 

The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Thomas Sowell.

Chastising the Self-Anointed…. June 27, 2000

Thomas Sowell may be one of the most despised black men in America–despised by extremist liberals, black and white, because Sowell has devoted his abilities to exposing their destructive ideologies of social redemption as counter productive to the best interests of all Americans. Widely known for his provocative, nationally syndicated newspaper articles and other books, he focuses, inThe Quest for Cosmic Justice, on the misguided thinking behind the modern impulse to reform the very nature of the human condition from individual responsibility, competition, and performance to the tragic consequences of affirmative action and politicized egalitarian equality. Sowell locates the source of much of the problem in the academy, law schools, and government where “new elites” are quietly repealing the American Revolution. The “morally self-anointed,” as he calls excessively liberal reformers and radicals, “have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin…. Given this exalted vision of their role by the anointed visionaries, those who disagree with them must be correspondingly degraded or demonized.” Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao all followed this procedure, as have utopians of similar or less horrible results…. That comparable dynamics rule the day, especially in the humanities in many American universities, will not surprise those who have any real experience of those departments. Sowell evokes the American political system and tradition in the hope of preventing its further erosion….

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

 

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Hating Whitey. And Other Progressive Causes.

David Horowitz

David Horowitz

Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes. David Horowitz.

For Betty – Oh God, What Have We Done…. June 16, 2000

One brings to a book everything one is and has been through. Let me discuss David Horowitz’s Hating Whitey by seemingly digressing a little on my own experience. I grew up in the white suburbs of Detroit during the `60s and `70s and have vivid memories of the Detroit riot and my uncle and aunt’s bakery being almost burnt to the ground, while their neighbors and friends were increasingly driven out by violence and the erosion of social order. In the end, they too accepted the inevitability of flight for their lives. More than forty years of programs and promises of “renaissance” have only produced a dysfunctional city that often can neither educate its young nor reliably provide the most basic services such as snow removal and, for a couple of days now, electricity….

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

 

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