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George Leef's avatar

To the point about the success of Nigerian Americans, I'll add that Professor John Obgu, Nigerian by birth, was a sociology professor at Berkeley. (Sadly, he died some 20 years ago.) In a remarkable paper on the impact of affirmative action on black students from well-to-do families in the Cleveland area, he found that it greatly reduced their drive to succeed in high school, since they knew that racial preferences would enable them to get into top colleges even without noteworthy achievements. What a contrast from earlier times when black kids were taught that they needed to work especially hard to overcome any bigotry against them. Scholars like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams grew up in that environment.

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Bob Frank's avatar

> Sociologist John Sibley Butler offers the most strident, multifaceted criticism of systemic race theory. Systemic racism, he suggests, conflicts with the successes of ... Nigerian Americans

I think this is one of the strongest points in the entire article. Recent African immigrants to America by and large don't experience the same societal problems as "traditional" African-Americans (ie. the descendants of slaves) experience. This strongly suggests that something other than race is responsible for the problems. Correlation may not imply causation, but non-correlation absolutely does imply non-causation.

The article mentions Thomas Sowell. His book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" takes a good look at a more likely cause: the violent and dysfunctional Antebellum South "redneck" culture that the slaves inherited from their masters bears a disturbing resemblance to the worst parts of black American "ghetto" culture today. Southern white rednecks have since moved on with the passage of the better part of two centuries, but with Jim Crow keeping black Americans culturally isolated to a large degree, the descendants of slaves all too often remain stuck with this toxic cultural heritage.

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