| history of blacks in the United States has been virtually stood on its head by those advocating affirmative action. The empirical evidence is clear that most blacks got themselves out of poverty in the decades preceding the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the beginning of affirmative action in the 1970s. Yet the political misrepresentation of what happened—by leaders and friends of blacks—has been so pervasive that this achievement has been completely submerged in the public consciousness. Instead of gaining the respect that other groups have gained by lifting themselves out of poverty, blacks are widely seen, by friends and critics alike, as owing their advancement to government beneficence. Concern for the less fortunate is entirely different from imagining that we can do what we cannot do. Nor is the humbling admission of our inherent limitations as human beings a reason for failing to do the considerable number of things which can still be done within those limitations. In America, at least, history has demonstrated dramatically that it can be done because it has already been done. Of course, the easiest way to determine that affirmative action is ineffective is to measure against the success that blacks have found in areas where it was not implemented. As an example, we tend to dominate sports. It’s worth noting that LeBron James was never told that scoring one basket would equal four points for him because of his skin color. He was never told he was inferior or was |
utilize torture as a part of their religious rites. And it gets worse. Before Europeans ever landed in the Americas, Native Americans routinely cannibalized one another. Most notorious among them, perhaps, were the Aztecs. When the Spanish colonists arrived in Mexico City, they were greeted by arranged piles of more than 100,000 skulls belonging to human beings who had been sacrificed to the gods. In one archaeological expedition, they discovered the remains of forty-two children, all around the age of five, who were sacrificed to the rain god. Special ceremonies required more sacrifice. On the inauguration of the Aztec’s Templo Mayor, they sacrificed between 20,000 and 60,000 human beings. Relying upon the research of Mexican-American Harvard historian David Carrasco, author Rodney Stark recounted the Aztec ceremonial practices in his book How the West Won: The ceremonies… were performed in front of large crowds. An adult male victim usually was held down on a sacrificial stone atop a pyramid, his chest was slashed open, and the priest snatched his still beating heart and held it aloft to the sun. The head of the victim was usually severed and placed on a rack—soon to be a skull added to the ceremonial collection. Then [the remaining body] was rolled, flailing down the temple steps to the bottom where it was skinned and dismembered. The choice cuts were distributed to onlookers, who took them home and ate them. Despite the fact that early colonialists wrote extensively about the savage culture |
