Pat’s Polemics

Another angle. From 1960 to 1965 these from the mouths or pens of my professors: China is not a civilization; Ethiopians calling Italians who bombed villages barbarians is the pot calling the kettle black; the Black man is like a man knocking at the door in a rain storm, you’ll let him in when he gets the mud off his shoes; another devoted a chapter in his book to the question of why a White man would ever want to have sex with a Black woman, producing the mixed-race category of “coloreds” in South Africa; my wife, who is Black, had to sit in class as her astronomy professor told nigger jokes. I guess all this political correctness has pretty much silenced such insightful comments. Recently Roger Kimball quoted approvingly a major historian who said of newly emerging African nations that they consisted of cannibalistic tribes and slave-holding nomads. You yourself recently doubted that people in the “wilds of Nigeria” would have twitter accounts and Eugene Robinson countered that with yes, twitter, and facebook, and cell phones. But our country is divided, isn’t it? And it always has been.