Birds Of A Feather

Some good Thomas Sowell insights:

Cliques form in all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons. Chess players, jazz fans and gamblers tend to hang out with others who share their interests.

The fact people sort themselves out in many ways is not usually a big problem -- except to those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling others what to do. Government programs to unsort people who have sorted themselves out have produced one social disaster after another.

Decades-long attempts to mix black and white school children through school busing produced no real educational benefits but much racial polarization and ill will. The same continues in colleges in the name of "diversity," with the same bad results.

Among the most unconscionable attempts to unsort people who sorted themselves out by behavior are government programs to relocate people into neighborhoods where they could not afford to live without subsidies. Often the people in those neighborhoods have sacrificed for years to live where they could raise their children in decent surroundings and not in fear of hoodlums -- only to have the government import the bad neighbors and hoodlums they tried so hard to escape.

Both kinds of people may be of the same race, but that does not make the consequences any less painful or the resentments less bitter. Blacks as well as whites have objected to having problem people thrust into their midst through housing subsidies or government projects in their neighborhoods.

Almost never do the social experimenters relocate dysfunctional and dangerous people into their own elite neighborhoods. They unsort other people's neighborhoods and embitter other people's lives.