Division. Sowell vs. Kendi

It’s interesting to look at these two figures side by side. The great and brilliant Thomas Sowell and the mediocre and polarizing Ibram Kendi. Both are college educated. Both have earned a PhD. And both have studied statistical disparities in race. Oddly enough, the conclusions drawn by each of these intellectuals have polar opposite conclusions.

Thomas Sowell has written for decades about the intellectuals in society, whose end product are ideas. The anointed, as Sowell calls them, have put their faith in education and appointed themselves experts on everything. Experts, mind you, with no credentials and, as irony would have it, no results to speak of. Experts without expertise fill the pages of Sowell’s books. As he points out anytime in history, anywhere on the globe, where the anointed have implemented their ideas, it has led to disaster. In the wake of the disaster the anointed have almost always avoided the consequences.

Kendi, without a doubt would be atop of the list of the anointed. From this top spot he pontificates his race bating poison. Perhaps, no other has done more, while being funded more and charging more, to polarize people and turn our neighbors against one another.

Kendi has altered the definition of racism to include any disparity in outcome. Of course, he ignores any disparity that favors his preferred races. For example if minority parents have two children and one is successful and one is not this could be blamed on the racism of the parents, subconscious racism obviously.

Conversely, Sowell argues that if you can’t get equality from two people living under the same roof how can you expect equality anywhere else, nor should we try. It may be a worthwhile goal to provide equality in outcome, but when you try, everywhere you turn there are a thousand reasons why it can’t be done.

Kendi’s book, Stamped from the Beginning, is a large work of history pointing out a lot of hypocrisy; while ignoring the context and leaving out important facts. Facts that would mention the first administration of this country were largely against slavery and the entire cabinet wrote about it. A large scope of Kendi’s work spends time on Thomas Jefferson, accusing him of being pro slavery and spreading the lie that Jefferson fathered a child with one of his slaves. It may be easy to go along with that and I myself was curious about it but after reading Jeffersons own words and following his work it was easy to see that none of that was true.

Two of the heroes that Kendi chose in this book are in the anointed class. W.E.B Dubois and Angela Davis, both of which praised socialist dictators and were and are communists. Of course Kendi ignores these facts and praises their activism. Later in life Dubois would speak highly of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR.

In short, Sowell warned us about Kendi long ago. These warnings laid out step by step, the rise of the elite, anointed, intellectual Kendi, and Sowell’s warning are largely ignored. As history has shown the intelligentsia and the ideas they create and promote have had disastrous consequences, and the intelligentsia are without blame. If we continue down this current path history will repeat itself, in the face of vigorous warnings, to an already apparent outcome from which this country barely survived. Survival, I fear, this time, is not a likely outcome.