Just another hustle. Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. First off, let me say that I agree with reparations ... MORE
America should be a free speech zone. Cliven Bundy should be happy for the public revelation of the private comments of fellow racist Donald Sterling; the latter has replaced the former as the person Americans most love to hate. These two bigots recently spewed racial hatred: Bundy suggesting that African-Americans might do ... MORE
The exception to the 13th Amendment. Death row inmate Ray Jasper, who has never used the internet, wrote an article that went viral. Part of his appeal is that he made it sound like he was innocent. Not true, it turns out he slit a man’s throat. But what stuck out to me, was his description of the prison system. First off, he was the only black ... MORE
School choice could be the key. Recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her voice to those who have long been urging the Republican Party to reach out to black voters. Not only is that long overdue, what is also long overdue is putting some time — and, above all, some serious thought — into how to go about doing it. ... MORE
Hypocrisy exposed. If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political left's avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now — and the place would be New York City, where far left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things. These ... MORE
The liberal vision of a stacked deck not necessary. People in the media and academia are mostly leftists hellbent on growing government and controlling our lives. Black people, their politicians and civil rights organizations have become unwitting accomplices. The leftist pretense of concern for the well-being of black people confers ... MORE
Declining standards in public education. A fortnight ago, my column focused on how Philadelphia's schoolteachers have joined public-school teachers in cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Columbus, New York and Washington in changing student scores on academic achievement tests. Teachers have held grade fixing parties, ... MORE
Martin Luther King knew all about it. I hear the same complaints about politicians that you do. And while I understand them (I’ve complained plenty myself), the fact is that complaining accomplishes very little. And there is a very simple reason why complainers have no effect: Because the complainers keep ... MORE
Nelson Mandela's commitment to liberty. A Martian visiting earth this week, coasting TV channels and perusing papers, would have to conclude that among the items that most interest this planet’s news bureaus is the plight of former political prisoners, especially black ones. Well, many Cubans (many of them black) suffered longer and ... MORE
Do facts matter more than social visions? Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some rethinking, ... MORE
The shadow cast by the president's failure. In a March 2008 column, I criticized pundits' concerns about whether America was ready for Barack Obama, suggesting that the more important issue was whether black people could afford Obama. I proposed that we look at it in the context of a historical tidbit. In 1947, Jackie Robinson, after ... MORE
Thomas Sowell on a very dangerous game. New York City police authorities are investigating a series of unprovoked physical attacks in public places on people who are Jewish, in the form of what is called "the knockout game." The way the game is played, one of a number of young blacks decides to show that he can knock down some ... MORE
On excuse-making and dependency. Sometimes I wonder when black people will reject the patronizing insults of white progressives and their black handmaidens. After CNN's Piers Morgan's interview with the key witness in the George Zimmerman trial, he said: "Rachel Jeantel is not uneducated. She's a smart cookie." That's a remarkable ... MORE
Those who struggled for civil rights had higher hopes. One can't imagine the fear in the hearts of the parents of those nine black students who walked past shouting placard-carrying mobs as they entered Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Each day, they were greeted with angry shouts of "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to ... MORE