Dinesh D’Souza

I first picked up one of D’Souza’s books in high school, at the height of the conservative scares over PC’ism, and he had string of books in the 90s that were bandied about (yes, “bandied about”) all over the place—he was the go-to guy for the academy run-amock. (Remember how one person in one dorm somewhere got told not to have gays and suddenly that was a totalitarian movement afoot in U.S. universities? Good times…) Michael Bérubé has a post up that includes some of D’Souza’s greatest hits:

You might remember [Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism] for such pull quotes as “The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well” and “Activists recommend federal jobs programs and recruitment into the private sector. Yet it seems unrealistic, bordering on the surreal, to imagine underclass blacks with their gold chains, limping walk, obscene language, and arsenal of weapons doing nine-to-five jobs at Procter and Gamble or the State Department.”

Don’t forget also his beautiful assessment that “Jim Crow laws were ‘designed to preserve and encourage’ black self-esteem.”