Another big problem with Black History Month is its narrowness. You cannot understand even your own history if that is the only history you know. Some explanations of what has happened in your history might sound plausible within the framework of just one people's history, but these explanations can collapse like a house of cards if you look at the same factors in the histories of other groups, other countries, and other eras.
Shelby Steele has pointed out that whites are desperate to escape guilt and blacks are desperate to escape implications of inferiority. But, viewed against the background of world history, neither group of Americans is unique. Nor are the differences between them. Both their anxieties are overblown.
Black-white differences in income, IQ, lifestyle or anything else you care to name are exceeded by differences between innumerable other groups around the world today and throughout history -- even when none of the factors that we blame for the differences in America was present.
For example, when the Romans invaded Britain, they came from an empire with magnificent art, architecture, literature, political organization and military might. But the Britons were an illiterate tribal people. There was not a building on the island, and no Briton's name had ever been recorded in the pages of history.
The Britons didn't build London. The Romans built London. And when the Romans left, four centuries later, the country fragmented into tribal domains again, the economy collapsed, and buildings and roads decayed. No one would have dreamed at that point that someday there would be a British Empire to exceed anything the Romans had ever achieved.
Maybe we need a British History
- Topics:
- Education and Schools
- History
Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The Housing Boom and Bust.
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