Wednesday, May 29, 2019

No Guilt Trips

“There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American".” 

― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society