-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Add your name to the CLEAN GOA INITIATIVE | | | | by visiting this link and following the instructions therein | | | | http://shire.symonds.net/pipermail/goanet/2005-October/033926.html | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- In response to a question by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, the following links address the economic progress of African-Americans, or lack thereof, depending on your perspective. > Goanetters need to understand something that liberal and socialist-leaning critics seldom do, that, in a free enterprise society like the US, the goal is to provide equality of opportunity, not equality of results or outcomes. > African-Americans, unlike other Americans, were brought to this country forcibly, and their slave-ancestors had to endure mind-numbing brutality as the property of the slave owners. Thus they had to overcome unique conditions that the rest of us did not, and the overwhelming majority of them have done so, to their credit, with a lot of help from government programs and their own hard work. Yet, some of them have been unable to, and some African-American analysts and intellectuals, like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and John McWhorter, all university professors, believe it is because of dependencies created by the same programs that were intended to help them. > Unlike several years ago, there are no external obstacles to economic progress in the US any more, as proven by the progress made by all US minorities, especially the non-white immigrant communities. > Finally, it is always amusing to hear from our Indians indignant about perceived discrimination in the US, when compared to India, which wrote the manual on institutional discrimination, or parts of Africa, where one could be killed for being a minority, or wherever else we happened to live previously. > http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1365/is_5_34/ai_111065784 > http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3900 > http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html