Evidently Thomas Sowell, black conservative, gets a lot of silly letters. From Thomas Sowell: Silly letters:
One of the silly things that gets said repeatedly is that I should not be against affirmative action because I have myself benefitted from it.Think about it: I am 73 years old. There was no affirmative action when I went to college — or to graduate school, for that matter. There wasn’t even a Civil Rights Act of 1964 when I began my academic career in 1962.
Moreover, there is nothing that I have accomplished in my education or my career that wasn’t accomplished by other blacks before me — and long before affirmative action. Getting a degree from Harvard? The first black man graduated from Harvard in 1870.
Becoming a black economist? There was a black professor of economics at the University of Chicago when I first arrived there as a graduate student.
Writing a newspaper column? George Schuyler wrote newspaper columns, magazine articles, and books before I was born.
A recent silly e-mail declared that I wouldn’t even be able to vote in this year’s California election if there hadn’t been a Voting Rights Act of 1965. I have been voting ever since I was 21 years old — in 1951.