Tag: Thomas Sowell

American History Month

Thomas Sowell, Morgan Freeman, race, America

When we think of Black History Month, whom do we tend to think of?

One person I think of is Morgan Freeman, who “detests” this commemoration, “the mere idea of it.… You are going to celebrate ‘my’ history?! The whole idea makes my teeth itch.… My history is American history.”

He also dislikes the term “African-American,” calling it a misnomer.

“Most black people in this part of the world are mongrels. And you say Africa as if it’s a country when it’s a continent, like Europe.”*Freeman regards his skin color as only one attribute, and not one that goes very far to distinguish him as an individual.

What events and which achievers might we ponder in addition to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, other champions of civil rights, great inventors, scientists, educators, business, artists, even actors like Freeman and Denzel Washington? The list of celebration-worthy black Americans is endless.

In a proclamation about Black History Month, the new White House mentions a name that doesn’t always make the list: scholar Thomas Sowell.

Highlighting Sowell may make the teeth of many progressives itch, for he advances unconventional perspectives and reasoning about race and the real impact of racism on economic as well as other features of American life and our global civilization. He has done this for decades, especially in books featuring provocative titles, including Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (1984), The Vision of the Anointed (1995), Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), and Discriminations and Disparities (2018), often criticizing policies such as “affirmative action.”

Black history is American history — and vice versa — every month of the year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Of course, in this part of the world, most of us are “mongrels.”

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education and schooling ideological culture

Cowardice 101

An anonymous author at Quillette reports a 2017 conversation between the author, a professor, and a student, Daniel. Daniel had carefully analyzed abundant evidence of race-based “affirmative action” policies at their university and the destructiveness of those policies.

The author says he stressed that “it would be unwise for Daniel to launch a campaign against the admissions committee,” no matter how solid the data.

Bury the findings, was his advice. The campaign would fail and “probably” do no long-run good. (Implying that bad cultural trends are not even partly reversible, or at least “probably” aren’t; ergo, good men, do nothing.)

Also, publishing “would probably end up hurting him rather than helping him.”

Suppose a scholar like Thomas Sowell, who has compiled massive evidence contradicting the assumption that racism or the legacy of slavery “explains” all economic patterns and disparate outcomes, had followed such vicious advice when starting out?

“Don’t do it! Don’t report your research and conclusions, Mr. Sowell! You’ll never advance by pursuing the truth! Just go along to get along. Like me.”

According to the professor, Daniel was not entirely consistent in his indictment of quotas. The professor could have encouraged him to be more consistent. Instead, he encouraged him to give up.

Our quisling Quillette academic could have told Daniel: “You’re right, and I can help you to strengthen your argument. Why don’t we co-author something about this so that you won’t have to deal with the flak alone?”

Did the possibility even occur to him?

What an education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture individual achievement too much government

The Pattern Here

Thomas, Sowell, intellectual, race, Common Sense

Thomas Sowell, who retired from his syndicated column last week, may be the greatest public intellectual of our time.

Though he is “an original,” an iconoclast, his work is best seen as the carrying on of a tradition. Or two.

Consider his most famous research area: race. An African-American, Sowell is the age’s most persuasive dissident to the dominant strains of racial advocacy. He brought much common sense to a subject beset with unhinged passion.*

And yet even here he was obviously drawing on traditions that, if not well known, were firmly established.†

One of Sowell’s most important contributions, in books such as A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed, is his distinction between two very different ways of looking at the social world:

the “constrained vision” .… of most conservatives and classical liberals; and
the “unconstrained vision” … of so many socialists, anarchists and progressives.

For many conservatives, this is Sowell at his best. But is it original? A few of my readers could probably lecture me on its origins in a famous essay by F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False.”‡

Over at the Foundation for Economic Education, David R. Henderson addresses the one area where I tend to disagree with Sowell: foreign policy. Henderson gently calls out Sowell’s apparent credulity regarding the dishonesty of our war party leaders. Sure, Henderson writes, “[t]here are downsides to distrust.… But there are upsides too.”

Mourning the loss of trust in presidents, Sowell blames it on presidents lying to us in recent decades. But, as Henderson notes, “war presidents” lying to us about war is not new — providing examples.

Pity that Sowell, of all people, does not see the pattern here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* See Sowell’s Ethnic America: A History, Race and Culture: A World View, and The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective; but also popular argumentation, such as Pink and Brown People and Black Rednecks and White Liberals. And then there is the important Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

† Economists W. H. Hutt and Gary Becker, at the very least, provided the background for Sowell’s research with their respective books The Economics of the Colour Bar and The Economics of Discrimination.

‡ See F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order. In another essay, Hayek provides Sowell with the seed of Knowledge and Decisions.

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Tags Common Sense, intellectual, race, Sowell, Thomas, Thomas Sowell

Common Sense general freedom U.S. Constitution

Slavery & Racism

On Sunday, I marked an awful event in our history: The official beginning of chattel slavery as such in Britain’s American colonies.

At first, John Casor, an African indentured servant, had gained some control of his life. He charged his master, Anthony Johnson, a free black, with having forced him to labor longer than the term of his indentureship. He won, was freed, and then indentured himself to one Robert Parker.

But Johnson sued, and, on March 8, 1655, won Casor back — as a slave for life.

The case established a civil ground for slavery, also enabling free blacks to own slaves. Even as late as the Civil War, the South harbored families of obvious African descent who themselves owned African-Americans as slaves.

On the surface, American slavery wasn’t about race. But in the 1640 case of John Punch, sentenced to a life of slavery as criminal punishment for running away from his indentured servitude, his fellow escapees — whites — merely got longer terms of forced labor.

Racism, Thomas Sowell explains, became increasingly important to “the peculiar institution” as time went on. If you exalt the notion that “all men are created equal,” how do you square that with your slave-holding?

By denigrating the humanity of blacks.

This vile ugliness of racism is still with us, to some degree … and slavery, too — at least, in small pockets around the globe and in a much bigger way in the Muslim world. An estimated eleven million slaves are held in Africa and the Middle East. And black Africans are still the main victims.

Sunday was also the 240^th anniversary of Tom Paine’s first American call for slavery’s abolition.

Ending slavery: it’s way past time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags racism, slavery, Thomas Sowell

free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Against Enabling Segregation

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 4, 2015
6 Comments on Against Enabling Segregation

Rosa Parks, born February 4, 1913, became a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement for her actions on December 1, 1955. Ordered to move from the first row of the “colored” section after seats reserved for white passengers had filled up, Parks refused.

“When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”

Economist Thomas Sowell believes that the conflict might never have even come up as an issue, had the bus been privately run.

“Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place?” he asked on the occasion of her death in 2005. “[T]here was certainly plenty of racism in the South, going back for centuries. But racially segregated seating” did not have the same unbroken history. Sowell pointed out that no matter what their own views, owners of the private transit lines of the 19th and early 20th century lacked motive to enforce segregation and thereby alienate many of their passengers.

When markets aren’t overrun by politics, both buyers and sellers must focus on the value they want from trade — a good product or competent service. Participants are penalized if they routinely set aside those benefits in order to indulge an animus.

In the 20th century, the trend towards taxpayer-funded mass transit displaced economic incentives with political ones.

Only governments can force entire industries to routinely act on an irrational prejudice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.