Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Race and Resentment

By Thomas Sowell

"The hatred of people who started at the bottom and worked their way up has far exceeded any hostility toward those who were simply born into wealth. None of the sultans who inherited extraordinary fortunes in Malaysia has been hated like the Chinese, who arrived there destitute and rose by their own efforts.


Inheritors of the Rockefeller fortune have been elected as popular governors in three states, attracting nothing like the hostility toward the Jewish immigrants who rose from poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side to prosperity in a variety of fields.


Others who started at the bottom and rose to prosperity-- the Lebanese in West Africa, the Indians in Fiji, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, for example-- have likewise been hated for their achievements. Being born a sultan or a Rockefeller is not an achievement."

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