Books like Race And Culture: A World View

This is why I read Sowell:"Classic examples of double standards and selective indignation can be found in a vast literature on the history of slavery - a literature devoted almost exclusively to slavery in the Western world, with only a relative handful of writings on the larger number of slaves in the Islamic world. Thus the institution of slavery, existing on every continent and going back thousands of years, is often discussed as if it were peculiar to Western civilization when, in fact, even the African slave trade was carried on by Arabs for centuries before Europeans took part, and continued for at least another century after the European slave trade to the Western Hemisphere ended. A scholarly - or at least academic study of slavery - has claimed that 'legal barriers against manumission' were among the 'distinctive characteristics' of 'slavery in North America,' when in fact legal barriers to manumission existed in Southeast Asia, ancient Greece, the French Antilles, Surinam, and Curaçao. Reports of how mild slavery was in Islamic countries, and how happy and contented the slaves were there, have been uncritically repeated by writers who would never accept such statements at face value when coming from the white slave society of the Antebellum South in the United States."Neither the enormous mortality rates of the trans-Saharan slave routes, nor the virtual absence of an African diaspora in Islamic countries which took more slaves from Africa than the West did, seems to arouse skepticism about the Middle Eastern version of the story of happy and contented slaves."The biggest story about slavery - how this ancient Institution, older than either Islam or Christianity, was wiped out over vast regions of the earth - remains a story seldom told. At the heart of that story was the West's ending of slavery in its own domains within a century and maintaining pressure on other nations for even longer to stamp out this practice. Instead, the West has been singled out as peculiarly culpable for a worldwide evil in which it participated, when in fact its only real uniqueness was in ultimately opposing and destroying this evil. Yet intellectuals have engaged in desperate attempts to discredit or downgrade the West's long moral crusade which ultimately destroyed slavery. These attempts have ranged from crude dogmatism about Western 'economic interest' behind the abolition of slavery to elusive insinuations along the same lines."A vast literature exists in which this same general idea logical pattern is pervasive, whether the issue of slavery, racism, sexism, or other evils. In this literature, the sins and shortcomings of the human race are depicted as evils as peculiar to the Western world, even when such evils have been demonstrably more prevalent or demonstrably worse in regions of the world ignored during outburst of selective moral indignation. The reasons for such ideological patterns are a large and complex question. What is relevant here is that such ideologies are themselves a political force to be reckoned with. How successful these ideologies will prove to be in undermining the legitimacy of Western Civilization, or in polarizing its races, is a question which only the future can answer."— Thomas Sowell, Race and Cultures, pg. 149-150In short, nothing is new under the sun.