Thomas Sowell: Race and Politics
[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.]
Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.
You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stayed away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed....
Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they had lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those peaceful countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country — now called Sri Lanka — that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.
The world was shocked by the mass slaughters of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, but, half a century ago, there had been no such systematic slaughters there. Political demagoguery whipped up ethnic polarization among people who had co-existed, who spoke the same language, and who had even intermarried.
We know — or should know — what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A “race card” is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
Read entire article at National Review Online
Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.
You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stayed away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed....
Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they had lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those peaceful countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country — now called Sri Lanka — that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.
The world was shocked by the mass slaughters of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, but, half a century ago, there had been no such systematic slaughters there. Political demagoguery whipped up ethnic polarization among people who had co-existed, who spoke the same language, and who had even intermarried.
We know — or should know — what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A “race card” is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.