Even since his elementary school career, he has spoken out and led protests against unfair and unequal treatment of African Americans. He received a top-level education at both Harvard and Princeton, where he received his PhD. In this particular piece of writing, as well as in much of West's literature, it is his main objective to link black discrimination throughout the ages with a sort of resulting place he feels they hold today.
To begin, West starts with a rather extremist view of black social history stating, "Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them."(664). This statement is rather unbalanced because if he is indeed speaking about "modern people" (modern blacks), then I must say society has evolved to the point where it would be accurate to say that the amount of black discrimination in most areas today, is really no more severe then the amount of discrimination against any minority, religion, or gender for that matter. So for that reason, West must most surely be speaking of the Blacks of the more early to late-middle nineteen-hundreds, when the real discrimination of slave trade and white supremacy was in full effect. It is only during this time that one could make the remark that Black discrimination differs from all others. If this is indeed the time period West is illustrating, then again his statement lies unbalanced, narrowly-viewed and without much research. This is because within this same century, there existed the genocide and massive exterminations of the Jews during the Holocaust, the persecution of non-Muslims in Islam, the killings of Koreans in China, and even the white slave trade in Africa. When examining these others instances of discrimination, I am by no means minimizing the violence "directed at" Blacks, but certainly cannot support West's statement about "unprecedented levels of violence" which "differed from all other modern people.
The steps taken by the Affirmative Action plan aimed to eliminate previous prejudicial selections, as well as to serve as a sort of recompense for previous mistreatments. ... The obvious contradiction here is that Clarence Thomas benefited immensely from the kind of Affirmative Action programs he later sought to exterminate. ...
