by Thomas Sowell

About the author: Thomas Sowell is a syndicated columnist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University in Stanford, California.

Hostility toward racial, religious, linguistic, and other minorities has been an all too common feature of human communities around the world for thousands of years. Some minorities seem to be disliked more than others, however, and some particular types of minorities seem to evoke the most seething hatred of all. While former slaves and conquered indigenes, for example, may be held in contempt and treated with cavalier disregard, those who have provoked the most bitterly intense animosities have often been middleman minorities. Middlemen play various roles as intermediaries between producers and consumers. They may be retailers, ranging from peddlers to shopkeepers to international traders, or they may...