[TheRealThing]

^Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite men of high achievement. His syndicated column is one of the best. The following is an excerpt taken from an interview entitled "Black and right" by Ray Sawhill in late 1999.

QUESTION: The passage of the '64 Civil Rights Act is usually viewed as one of the great events of the century. Not by you?



ANSWER: "Of course there were things that needed to be gotten rid of -- the Jim Crow system in the South. My point is that people expected social and economic results which were not to be expected from that source.

What happens is that there's a sweeping under the rug of black success that does not fit the ideological vision. Just recently I learned about a black man named Paul Williams. This man became an architect back in the 1920s. He was told, "Your people don't have enough money to buy houses and build buildings, so you're going to have to depend upon white people for a living, and white people are not anxious to have a black architect." But he dealt with it, and in the '20s he began to make a name for himself. As the years went by he built homes for various celebrities and wealthy people -- Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Cary Grant. He was part of a team that designed a building at the Los Angeles airport. For decades he was successful.

Now, no one wants to talk about him. Why wouldn't they want to? Because if you talk about him it knocks the props out from under the vision of why blacks are where they are. If it's all due to racism, how was this man able to succeed? Was it really just dumb luck?

Similarly, when I studied that high school, which became known as Dunbar High School in later years, I was naive enough to think that -- because everyone was talking about the problems of black education, what can the government do to bring good education to black kids, etc -- people would be eager to hear about it. I was saying, here's a place where there has already been outstanding education for blacks for 85 years. Well, I was totally wrong. I published my study, and it received very little attention. What attention it did receive was largely hostile attention from the black leadership community. Why hostile? Because it was of no use to them. It didn't justify new government programs, and it didn't show how the evils of white people were fatal to blacks. You just can't show people succeeding in ways that undermine the vision."

Here is the link for the whole article,]http://http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/11/10/sowell[/URL]



This is an example of democratic espoused hypocracy. Democratic liberals in league with black leadership. In the end, though there has been some short term benefit for the less fortunate, the real benefactors in the long run have been the politicians (who keep getting reelected) and those in positions of black leadership.