Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on January 29, 2017
… is from page 39 of Robert Higgs’s December 14, 2014, blog post “All Men Are Brothers, but All Too Often They Do Not Act Accordingly,” as this post is reprinted in Bob’s 2015 volume, Taking a Stand (links are original to Bob’s blog post):
After I became a professor, I spent much of my time during the first fifteen years of my career engaged in research and writing about American blacks since the War Between the States. This work was often hard to bear because of the nature of the subject. It was not that I was studying people who had low incomes, little education, or other deficiencies, often as a result of their treatment at the hands of the powers that were, especially in the South. It was more because of how the whites in general treated the blacks with contempt and viewed them as inferior by virtue of nothing but their race. This sort of pervasive withholding of basic human respect made my blood boil. As I studied occasions when such disrespect spilled over into the outrages for which the South became justly infamous – lynchings and similar savageries – I often had to struggle to keep my tears from staining my notes.
Nowadays, I have the same reaction to the contempt with which so many Americans treat the migrants from Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere solely because they belong to a different ethnic group, speak a different language, are very poor, or – worst of all – lack the official stamp of government approval that endows them with permission to be here, a right that no peaceful person ought to have been denied in the first place.
Comments
