Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite opinion writers. In his latest column (A Challenge to Our Beliefs) he elucidates on the relationship between victimhood and low achievement. For an immigrant person like me, Sowell's article only reaffirms what I know to be true -- that there is very little, if any, difference in intelligence between people of different ethnicities that can be attributed to genetic differences.
What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.
What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.
The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.
