Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Thomas SowellRead
Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the complexities of identity and race, questioning the perception that treats racial identity as incidental.
Thomas Sowell's quote challenges the notion of identity that reduces a person's race to a mere attribute. By pointing out the absurdity of referring to someone as 'who happens to be black', he suggests that such statements overlook the deeper realities of heritage and racial background, implying that identity should be acknowledged in a more nuanced way.
In practice
In a speech discussing diversity and inclusion, one might cite this quote to emphasize the importance of understanding the complexity of individual identities.
Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
When we grow older and begin to realize that our omnipotence is really not so omnipotent, that our strongest wishes are not powerful enough to make the impossible possible, the fear that we have contributed to the death of a loved one diminishes - and with it, the guilt.
Before a brain can register a thought, a mind must think it... every step of the way is mind over matter... We override our brains all the time.
On the whole, monks do not become famous - and that is a good thing - but monasteries do - and that is an excellent thing. In other words, it is the community that matters.
The offering of [the body] is called a spiritual sacrifice because it is freely sacrificed through the Spirit, the Christian being uninfluenced by the constrainst of the Low or the fear of hell.
Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define the "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival".
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