The ideology that informs the thinking of present-day “civil rights” agitation is cluttered with misconceptions. It is not true, for example, that discrimination must lead to poverty. As Thomas Sowell observes, the Chinese have never enjoyed an equal playing field in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, or Vietnam, yet the Chinese minority in these countries – a mere five percent of the population – owns most of these nations’ total investments in a variety of key industries. In Malaysia, the Chinese minority suffers official discrimination at the hands of the Malaysian constitution, and yet their incomes are still twice the national average. Italians in Argentina were subject to discrimination but ultimately outperformed native Argentines. Similar stories could be told about Jews, Armenians, and East Indians. In the United States, the Japanese were so badly discriminated against that 120,000 of them were confined in detention camps for much of World War II. Yet by 1959 Japanese households had equaled those of whites in income, and by 1969 they were earning one-third more. [Full Article]
Myths About Discrimination
