Walter Williams loved teaching. Unlike too many other teachers today, he made it a point never to impose his opinions on his students. Those who read his syndicated newspaper columns know that he expressed his opinions boldly and unequivocally there. But not in the classroom.
One of the painful realities of our times is how long a political lie can survive, even after having been disproved years ago, or even generations ago.
In just a matter of days -- perhaps next Monday -- a decision will be made in Washington affecting the futures of millions of children in low-income communities, and in the very troubled area of race relations in America.
Any honest man, looking back on a very long life, must admit -- even if only to himself -- being a relic of a bygone era. Having lived long enough to have seen both "the greatest generation" that fought World War II and the gratingest generation that we see all around us today, makes being a relic of the past more of a boast than an admission.
Nothing so epitomizes the politically correct gullibility of our times as the magic word "diversity." The wonders of diversity are proclaimed from the media, extolled in the academy and confirmed in the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. But have you ever seen one speck of hard evidence to support the lofty claims?
We are now in a kind of political no-man's-land between an administration on its way out and a new administration taking shape. Predictions are always risky -- and nowhere more so than in times like these.
Sometimes life forces us to make decisions, even when we don't have enough information to know how the decision will turn out. The risks may be even greater when people make decisions for other people. Yet there are some who are not only willing, but eager, to take decisions away from those who are directly affected.
This is a football story with both political and legal implications.
It was fourth down in a National Football League game, and the punting team came onto the field. The other team went into their formation to defend against the punt. Then somebody noticed that the man set to kick the punt was black.
People who call themselves "progressives" claim to be forward-looking, but a remarkable amount of the things they say and do are based on looking backward.
The good news is that we dodged a bullet in this election. The bad news is that we don't know how many other bullets are coming, or from what direction.
Let's talk sense about the election. Nothing is to be gained by refusing to face the hard facts. What are those facts?
The political left keeps announcing, as if it is a new breakthrough discovery of theirs, that life is unfair.
Despite controversies that rage over immigration, it is hard to see how anyone could be either for or against immigrants in general. First of all, there are no immigrants in general.
The greatest moral claim of the political left is that they are for the masses in general and the poor in particular. That is also their greatest fraud. It even fools many leftists themselves.
Donald Trump's gutter talk about women shows yet again that he is bad news. The problem is that Hillary Clinton is far worse.
Back in the days of the Cold War between the Communist bloc of nations and the Western democracies, the Communists maintained pervasive restrictions around Eastern Europe that were aptly called an "iron curtain," isolating the people in its bloc from the ideas of the West and physically obstructing their escape.
Back in the 1960s, as large numbers of black students were entering a certain Ivy League university for the first time, someone asked a chemistry professor -- off the record -- what his response to them was. He said, "I give them all A's and B's. To hell with them."
There is no point denying or sugar-coating the plain fact that the voters this election year face a choice between two of the worst candidates in living memory. A professor at Morgan State University summarized the situation by saying that the upcoming debates may enable voters to decide which is the "less insufferable" candidate to be President of the United States.
Ordinarily, it is not a good idea to base how you vote on just one issue. But if black lives really matter, as they should matter like all other lives, then it is hard to see any racial issue that matters as much as education.
Mark Twain famously said that there were three kinds of lies -- "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Since this is an election year, we can expect to hear plenty of all three kinds.
Even if the statistics themselves are absolutely accurate, the words that describe what they are measuring can be grossly misleading.
