Margaret Mead Quotes
We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.
Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. William Morrow and Company, 1935.
For a similar sentiment, see Thurgood Marshall.
The issue of slavery which had been suppressed in Congress for the first decades of the nation broke out when Missouri statehood was considered. By previous agreement, slavery was not even discussed in Congress but the time period elapsed. Tallmadge not only proposed that no more slaves could come into Missouri {613176} but most shocking to the Southerners was that every person born in the new state would be free at the age of 25. In a generation, there would be no more slavery in Missouri and there would be no economic compensation for slave owners at all. The House of Representatives accepted the amendment, but it failed in the Senate. At that time, Senators were not elected by voters but were appointed by the state legislators and the Southern slave states had a disproportionate share of the senate from a population point of view. But what this quotation shows clearly that a majority of the country in 1819 were opposed to slavery and were willing to end it without compensation.
What makes this quotation particularly interesting is that The American Enterprise Institute is a highly conservative “think tank” and Brooks himself, a leading conservative. Usually, conservatives are chided by the rest of the political spectrum for ignoring issues of fairness. In this case, an influential conservative not only admits this, but his article argues that it is desirable not to consider fairness in political decision making. Since conservative parties generally represent the more affluent members of a society, fairness arguments rarely help that constituency and are typically avoided by conservatives. However, few admit that. Here is an exception.
Many Irish use the term “race” in a cultural sense. To them, the Irish are a different race from the English or the Italians.
He was criticizing the other major Black leader of the time, Booker T. Washington. See {625803} for the kind of position that angered Du Bois.
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.
