How the Left Exploits Ignorance

Their ideas blend together in the public consciousness and create an inaccurate view of history that portrays the population of sub-Saharan Africa as victims.

Today’s students cannot correctly place the Civil War, World War I, or World War II within 50 years of their actual occurrence. Some teachers are no better. A fellow graduate student once told me how excited she was to teach her class Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Zinn’s anti-white book is widely used, but even Stanford University has an article on its biases. Any serious historian who has read it would find it laughable. For example, it assumes the American colonists were anti-Indian because of simple racism. In fact, in King Philip’s War, which broke out just 55 years after the Mayflower arrived, tribal animosities were the main cause. The colonists aligned themselves with the Mohegans, Pequots and Mohawks against the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansetts.

Many students believe Africa is weak because Europeans colonized and looted it. I hear this so often that I ask students to pull out their phones and search for the dates of African colonization. It did not start until after slavery had ended in the United States. Why was Africa weak until then?

Another problem for Prof. Diamond is that West Africans were involved in trade during the late Roman Empire. The Ghanian Empire, as it is called today, was a major commercial hub. Even if draft animals had not been domesticated in Africa, Africans could have traded for them.

Also, colonization was partially spurred by the American Civil War. The North’s naval blockade of the South led the Spanish and French to begin vying for power in Indochina as a way to get raw materials instead of backing the Confederacy.

The obvious reason for black Africa’s backwardness is low average IQ, for which there is overwhelming evidence.

Is there any sub-Saharan country where blacks are better off than they are in the United States? No. Does having a black teacher improve black grades? No.

Making scapegoats of Europeans for black failure makes it impossible for our country to understand the problem, much less try to solve it.