What's wrong with Thomas Sowell


First, who is Thomas Sowell?He is an African-American conservative economist who writes a lot of editorials that have been published in newspapers nationwide.

While I used to enjoy his articles on economics, I find him extremely paranoid when it comes to immigrant. He keeps saying that modern-day immigrants (especially the ones from the Middle East and Latin America) refuse to adjust to American culture.

Nevermind the fact there is many Latinos making hip-hop music (I keep hearing Fat Joe, Lil Rob and Pitbull on the radio), and it's only a matter of time before we hear descendants of Arab immigrants getting involved in the hip-hop industry.

Also, he ignores the fact that most immigrant teenagers (no matter where they're from) REBEL AGAINST THEIR PARENT'S CULTURE! I always hear teenagers with immigrant parents complain that their parents are "old-fashioned". So I wouldn't even worry about the descendants of immigrants adjusting to American culture. In fact, the descendants of modern-day Latino and Arab immigrant would struggle to adjust to the cultures of Latin America or the Middle East!

Meanwhile, I got this email from one of my allies Stuart Hayashi, and he gave me the permission to post the following (though I edited it only for length). It is about Thomas Sowell

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Assimilate THIS!
By Stuart K. Hayashi

Whenever I have heard a left-winger make the dirty accusation that some black man is an "Uncle Tom" just because he wants to roll back the welfare state, I have stood by that black man in defense. I cannot let people get away with smearing Larry Elder, Bill Cosby, or Ward Connerly in such a manner.

Sadly, nowadays, when somebody calls Thomas Sowell an "Uncle Tom,"I cannot do much to deny it.

It's time we face up to something: Thomas Sowell sounds like a white supremacist. He certainly doesn't cast doubt on that impression when he heaps accolades upon the eugenics advocacy of the late "BellCurve" co-author and Harvard professor Richard J. Herrnstein. http://tinyurl.com/a55wz http://tinyurl.com/hrwh5http://tinyurl.com/9chof

My poor dear uncle, Uncle Tom Sowell, does quibble with many of the book's conclusions, and he is correct to note that it is not some explicitly angry, foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe about non-whites. But there are two facts about this book that Sowell's whitewashing cannot erase -- (1) it *does* conclude that genes have doomed blacks and Chicanos to being congenitally less rational and more violent than northern Europeans and East Asians, and, (2) by promoting that book,Sowell *does* perpetuate that conclusion as well.

Or perhaps "white supremacist" is not a fully precise term for what Sowell has advocated the past few years. Like the late Dr.Herrnstein, Dr. Sowell often ostensibly touts the cultural (if not ethnic) supremacy of East Asians over whites. http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3529 http://tinyurl.com/8bakchttp://tinyurl.com/kyaw3

And Dr. Sowell, like many neoconservatives (but not so manypaleoconservatives), is quick to admonish others for anti-Semitism. http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/sowell.html

But there is one group that Dr. Sowell frequently berates as inferior. I am referring to a certain group of dark-skinned,Mediterranean-looking Caucasoids, many of whom are part AmericanIndian, and most of whom are Catholic.

Judging by my many years of faithfully reading Dr. Sowell's columns, when I mistook him for a proponent of free minds and free markets (he did write for "Reason" magazine for a time, after all) he appears to rank ethnic groups in the following order, with #1 beingthe group he praises the most.

01. East Asians
02. WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)
03. Jews
04. South Asians
05. Blacks
06. Persians, Arabs, and other non-Jewish Middle-Easterners
07. That group of dark-skinned, Catholic caucasoids (Sowell's absolute least favorite!)

Ann Coulter quipped that "Brown is the new black."http://tinyurl.com/oh9es That's true, though not in the way she meant it. Brown IS the new black in the sense that brown-skinned people are one of the last few scapegoats whom people can still verbally bad mouth without other Americans socially ostracizing them over it. It's not as easy these days for the Archie Bunkers of the world to criticizeblacks as a whole (nor *should* anyone criticize blacks as a whole, as all people are individuals, which is something that formerly anti-affirmative-action neocons seem to have forgotten). Well, native-born blacks anyway; Michael Savage still gets away with derogating Haitians.

If there is a group that people can still kick around, it is brown-skinned, part Indo-European, part "Amerindian" Caucasoids. Even Michelle Malkin -- not exactly an Aryan -- is on the bandwagon of demonizing them.

I myself have had a falling-out with certain rightwingers when I found out that they were trying to create the stereotypical impression that *all* people from the Middle East who call themselves "Muslim" necessarily either commit murder or at least condone it.

The conservatives' rhetoric about "assimilation" sounds like ahuge, stinking red herring -- emphasis on the RED, because the conservatives' rhetoric sounds so collectivistic that it might as wellbe communist.

When they demand that immigrants "assimilate,"they are using that word as a euphemism for "conform." Essentially,they expect immigrants to CONFORM to customs that are not even politically relevant. Hence we hear so much screeching about peaceful people coming to the United States and -- oh, Allah forgive me fornaming this horrible act! -- speaking *Spanish* to their relatives!

Such conservatives and libertarians ignore a simple fact --"assimilation" is not a one-way street. If everyone in America"assimilates," it not only means that foreign-born people adopt some of the best (or worst) customs of the native-born Americans, but also that native-born Americans may adopt some of the best (or worst)customs of the foreign-born migrants. *That* is the melting pot. How can one expect the foreign-born tobe influenced on the native-born customs without the foreign-born likewise having some influence over the native-born?

Neoconservative immigrant-haters portray Mexican and Middle-Eastern immigrants as being essentially static, robotic creatures that always stay the same when they have some (imaginary)duty to be influenced by the native-born. But what they truly fear is not that foreign-born people onlytake and never give, culture-wise, to the native born. Nay, what they truly fear is that there will *necessarily* be a cultural give-and-take between the foreign-born and the native-born. They are basically *protectionists* trying to shield estalished domestic customs from *competition* from foreign-born customs when all people in America choose which customs they want to buy in the marketplace of ideas.

You know all this talk about building a wall to keep the Mexicans out of the United States? I can describe the spiritual essence of that idea with just one word: . . . "segregation."

Assimilate THAT!