Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show. Democrats talk about reparations for slavery.
They form commissions in places like California to study it.
Candidate's running for office promise it. There are many questions
involving reparations, including well, who's going to pay for it,
who gets it, how much should be paid out? However,
(00:24):
one question that's rarely asked is will it ever happen? Well,
Thomas Sole was asked that question, and here is that
great man's answer.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Something moved in the California legislature calling for formal reparations
to African Americans. How do you respond to that one?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I know and they know it's not going to happen.
So what we're looking at is someone who wants votes
or followers and that this will get them votes or
get them followers and finances.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
But it's not.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
All it would do is something tael the country apart what.
Speaker 5 (01:03):
We see in the United States in terms of the
bad things you see all around the world. If you
were to give reparations to everyone whose ancestors had been slaves,
I suspect that you would have to give reparations to
more than half the entire population of the globe. Slavery
was not confined to one set of races. I suspect
(01:25):
that most of the people who were either slaves or
slave owners around the world were neither white nor black.
I mean, this was a universal curse of the human species.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
It continued elsewhere long after it was abolished in the
western countries. The other thing, I have a slight sidebar,
and they are on the history of slavery, the history
of slavery. Slavery existed all over the world for thousands
of years, among all sorts of people, as far back
(01:59):
as the history of the human species goes. It's one
of many evils that the left tries to localize, when
in fact there's a universal evil. But more than that,
as much as slavery is repudiated around the world today,
prior to the eighteenth century, I know of no serious
(02:22):
effort to abolish the institution anywhere.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Anywhere, anywhere, Not in Africa, not in the Arabian not.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
In Africa in the twenty first century. Adam Smith wrote
in seventeen seventy six that the only place in the
world where slavery had been abolished completely was Western Europe.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And so this was as late as as late as
the as late as the year this country was founded.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Yes, and so the idea that this is something that
the United States had that nobody else had, or or
other other countries that didn't have. It's been estimated that
there are more slavers in India than in the entire
Western hemisphere. And that's quite and that's before and after
Columbus got here. Right. There are various laws and policies
(03:08):
that benefit one group at the expense of another, But
I think firmative action has the distinction of being one
that harms everybody, though in different ways.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
And so.
Speaker 5 (03:20):
There's a lot of evidence that there are black kids
who have all the qualifications to be successes in college
who nevertheless a failures because they are systematically mismatched with
institutions whose standards they don't meet, even though they may
meet the standards of eighty or ninety percent of the
colleges in America. I remember first aware of this when
(03:41):
I was teaching Cornell, and I found that half the
black students at Cornell were on some kind of academic probation.
And so I went over to the administration building to
look up the SATs, and these students. The average black
student at Cornell at that time scored up the seventy fifth.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Percentile, which is pretty darn good.
Speaker 5 (03:59):
Yes, And that means that in that in most colleges
in this country, they would have no trouble and many
of them would be on the dean's list. But at Cornell,
the average liberal arts student at that time was in
the ninety nine percentile. And and when you when you
when you're teaching the students like that, you teach at
a pace that most people of any race cannot keep
(04:22):
up with. And I was it was always complained that
I was assigning all kinds of reading. But he you know,
I'm teaching kids who are in the top one percent.
They can they can keep up with it with the
reading that I'm assigning.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Uh So, Cornell was taking very talented black kids and
spending four years teaching them to feel inadequate.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Yes, and succeeding at that terms of political leaders, all
the all the incentives politically off for black leaders to
blame all problems in the black community on the larger society,
and that enables them to take on the role of
being the defender of the black community against enemies, which
in turn, uh creates the situation in which many blacks
(05:03):
don't feel anything that they do is gonna is going
to help themselves unless it's done politically as a group.
That there's no point. I mean, why why would you
if you believe what that's what they say, Why would
you want to knock yourself out into school knowing that
the man is not going to let you get anywhere.
One of the most pathetic things I heard in recent
years was a young black man saying that, you know,
(05:26):
at one point he thought he would join the air
Force and become a pilot. And then he says he
realized that the white man is not going to let
a black man become a pilot. And he was saying
this decades after the Tennessee Airmen had established their reputation
in combat in Europe. You know, but but the hopelessness,
(05:47):
hopelessness is one of the big products of the of
the race industry. That you have, you have no chance.
I remember giving a talk at Marquette and at the
end of the talk, among the questions, it was asked
young again, young black man got up and he said,
even though I'm graduating from Marquette University, what hope is
there for me? And having gone through college when I
(06:10):
was in the fifties, I don't remember in any blacks
saying that in the nineteen fifties when there was a
lot more obstacles to overcome than there were when this
guy's graduating from Marquette. But you have to produce that
kind of feeling in order to serve the interests of
those in the race industry.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Somewhere watching this interview, there's a young Thomas Soul, There's
an African American who's smart and wants to do something.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
With his life.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
What seems to me, we've already got one piece of
advice you'd offer to him is stay away from the
from the racist industry, stay away from the what race hustlers?
What advice would you give a young Thomas Soul? How
do you make something of yourself as an African American
in America today?
Speaker 5 (07:02):
The way anybody else would you equip yourself with skills
that people were willing to pay for?
Speaker 4 (07:09):
All Right? Nowhere have intellectuals seen racial issues as issues
about intertemporal abstractions more so than in discussions of slavery. Moreover,
few facts of history have been so distorted by highly
selective filtering, as has the history of slavery. To many
people today, slavery means white people holding black people in bondage.
(07:32):
The vast millions of people around the world who were
neither white nor black, but who were either slaves or
in slavers for centuries fade out of this vision of
slavery as if they had never existed, even though they
may well about numbered both blacks and whites. It has
been estimated that there were more slaves in India than
in the entire Western hemisphere. China during the era of
(07:55):
slavery has been described as one of the largest and
most comprehensive mark markets for the exchange of human beings
in the world. Slaves were a majority of the population
in some of the cities in Southeast Asia at some
period or other in history. As John Stuart Mill pointed out,
almost every people now civilized have consisted in majority of slaves.
(08:21):
When Abraham Lincoln said if slavery is not wrong, nothing
is wrong, he was expressing an idea peculiar to Western
civilization at that time, and by no means universally accepted
throughout Western civilization. What seems almost incomprehensible today is that
there was no serious challenge to the moral legitimacy of
(08:41):
slavery prior to the eighteenth century. Christian monasteries in Europe
and Buddhist monasteries in Asia both had slaves. Even Thomas
Moore's fictional ideal society Utopia had slaves. Although intellectuals today
may condemn slavery as a historic evil of our society,
(09:02):
what was peculiar about Western society was not that it
had slaves like other societies around the world, but that
it was the first civilization to turn against slavery, and
that it spent more than a century destroying slavery not
only within Western civilization itself, but also in other countries
around the world over the often bitter and sometimes armed
(09:25):
resistance of people in other societies. Only the overwhelming military
power of Western nations during the age of imperialism made
this possible. Slavery did not quietly die out of its
own accord. It went down fighting to the bitter end
in countries around the world, and it has still not
totally died out to this day. In parts of the
(09:46):
Middle East and Africa. It is the image of racial slavery.
White people in slaving black people that has been indelibly
burned into the consciousness of both black and white Americans
today by the intelligentsia, and not simply as a fact
about the past, but as a causal factor used to
explain much of the present and an enduring moral condemnation
(10:10):
of the enslaving race. Yet two crucial facts have been
filtered out of this picture. One, the institution of slavery
was not based on race, and two, whites as well
as blacks were enslaved. The very word slave is derived
from the name of a European people, Slavs, who were
(10:30):
enslaved for centuries before the first African was brought in
bondage to the Western Hemisphere. It was not only in
English that the word for slave derived from the word
for slav. The same was true in various other European
languages and in Arabic. For most of the history of slavery,
which covers most of the history of the human race,
(10:52):
most slaves were not racially different from those who enslaved them.
Not only did Europeans enslave other Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians,
Africans enslaved other Africans, Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians, and the
indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples
of the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, after it became both technologically
(11:16):
and economically feasible to transport masses of slaves from one
continent to another, that is, to have a whole population
of slaves of a different race, Europeans as well as
Africans were enslaved and transported from their native lands to
bondage on another continent. Pirates alone transported a million or
more Europeans as slaves to the Barbary coast of North Africa,
(11:40):
at least twice as many European slaves as there were
African slaves transported to the United States and to the
thirteen colonies from which it was formed. Moreover, white slaves
were still being bought and sold in the Islamic world
decades after blacks had been freed in the United States.
Marked the modern era of slavery in the West was
(12:03):
the fact that, as distinguished historian Daniel Borston pointed out, now,
for the first time in Western history, the status of
slave coincided with the difference of race. But to claim
that race or racism was the basis of slavery is
to cite as a cause something that happened thousands of
years after its supposed effect. As for the legacy of
(12:26):
slavery in the world of today, that is something well
worth investigating, as distinguished from simply making sweeping assumptions. Too
many assumptions that have been made about the effects of
slavery on both blacks and whites will not stand up
under scrutiny. Back during the era of slavery in the
United States, such prominent writers as the French visitor and
(12:48):
observer Alecxis to Touckville, Northern traveler in the Antebellum South,
Frederick law Olmsted, and prominent Southern writer Hint and Helper
all pointed to striking differences between the throm the South
and attributed the deficiencies of the southern region to the
effects of slavery on the white population of the South.
(13:08):
These differences between northern and Southern whites were not merely
perceptions or stereotypes. They were factually demonstrable in areas ranging
from literacy rates to rates of unwed motherhood, as well
as in attitudes toward work and violence. But attributing these
differences to slavery ignored the fact that the ancestors of
(13:29):
white Southerners differed in these same ways from the ancestors
of white Northerners when they both lived in different parts
of Britain, and when neither had ever seen a black slave.
Does the moral enormity of slavery give it any more
decisive causal weight in explaining the situation of blacks today
than it did in explaining that of whites in the
(13:50):
Antebellum South. There is no a priori answer to that question,
which must be examined empirically, like many other questions, in
the fact that so many black families today consist of
women with fatherless children has been said by many to
be a legacy of slavery. Yet most black children grew
up in two parent families even under slavery itself, and
(14:13):
for generations thereafter. As recently as nineteen sixty two, thirds
of black children were still living in two parent families.
A century ago, a slightly higher percentage of blacks were
married than were whites. In some years, a slightly higher
percentage of blacks were in the labor force than were whites.
(14:33):
The reasons for changes for the worse in these and
other patterns must be sought in our own times. Whatever
the reasons for the disintegration of the black family, it
escalated to the current disastrous level well over a century
after the end of slavery, though less than a generation
after a large expansion of the welfare state and its
(14:56):
accompanying non judgmental ideology. To say that slavery will not
bear the full weight of responsibility for all subsequent social
problems among Black Americans is not to say that it
had negligible consequences among either blacks or whites, or that
its consequences ended when slavery itself ended. But this is
(15:17):
only to say that answers to questions about either slavery
or race must be sought in facts, not in assumptions
or visions, and certainly not in attempts to reduce questions
of causation to only those which provide moral melodramas and
an opportunity for the intelligentsia to be on the side
of the angels. Just as Western Europeans in post Roman
(15:40):
times benefited from the fact that their ancestors had been
conquered by the Romans, with all the brutality and oppression
that entailed. Blacks in America today have a far higher
standard of living than most Africans in Africa as a
result of their ancestors being enslaved, with all the injustices
and abuses that ined. There is no question that both
(16:02):
conquest and enslavement were traumatic experiences for those on whom
they were inflicted. Nor is either morally justified by whatever
benefits might come of this to subsequent generations of their offspring.
But history cannot be undone, nor does conceiving of races
as intertemporal abstractions have any such track record as to
(16:24):
make it look like a promising approach to the present
or the future.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
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(16:50):
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(17:15):
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(17:37):
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(18:03):
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