Intellectuals and Race Read online

  INTELLECTUALS

  AND RACE

  THOMAS SOWELL

  BASIC BOOKS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Thomas Sowell

  Published in 2013 by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  Portions of this text were previously published in the paperback edition of the Author’s work Intellectuals and Society, published in 2012 by Basic Books.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013930756

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-465-05870-9

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The gods mercifully gave mankind this little moment of peace between the religious fanaticisms of the past and the fanaticisms of class and race that were speedily to arise and dominate time to come.

  G.M. Trevelyan1

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Questions About Race

  Chapter 2: Disparities and Their Causes

  Chapter 3: Changing Racial Beliefs

  Chapter 4: Internal Responses to Disparities

  Chapter 5: Race and Intelligence

  Chapter 6: Liberalism and Multiculturalism

  Chapter 7: Race and Cosmic Justice

  Chapter 8: The Past and The Future

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Intellectuals have had a powerful effect on racial and ethnic issues, in countries around the world, for at least the past hundred years— and there is no sign that their influence will not continue, for better or worse, in the generations ahead. Even within a given country, such as the United States, that influence has been exercised in diametrically opposite directions at different times, promoting racial segregation and eugenics in the early twentieth century, and then civil rights and affirmative action in the later decades of that century. In other countries and in different eras, intergroup differences have led to even more varied and extreme consequences, including outright civil war and mass murder.

  Such issues and patterns will be explored in the chapters that follow. Most, but not all, of these chapters first appeared in a special section on race that was added to the revised edition of a much larger and more sweeping study, Intellectuals and Society. Here I have belatedly taken the advice of my research assistant Na Liu, and published these chapters in a separate book for those who wish to focus on racial issues, rather than take on the larger and more time-consuming task of traveling on a more sweeping journey across the landscape of intellectuals’ influences on issues ranging from economics to law to war and peace.

  New chapters have been added to this book, including the last chapter exploring current trends, in hopes of discerning their implications for the future. The chapters that precede this effort to foresee what lies ahead should tell us enough about what has already happened to make it obvious how large are the stakes and how difficult the choices facing this generation and those that will follow. If this book succeeds in simply demonstrating through its facts and analysis how inadequate, and even dangerous, the currently fashionable assumptions and catch phrases about race are, it will have achieved its purpose.

  Chapter 1

  Questions About Race

  Like many things that people are reluctant to discuss in polite society, or to discuss honestly, race is too important to be ignored or— worse yet— to think about only in the safe conventions and evasive phrases of our time. Too much of the history of race, in countries around the world, has been a story of hostility and hatred, and often a story written in blood. Ignorance about race is a luxury that few people of any race can afford. Misinformation is even worse, even when it is well-meaning misinformation.

  The emotional difficulties of discussing race are matched by the intellectual difficulties. These difficulties begin with defining race itself. Ideally, we might think of a race as a set of people genetically and indelibly different from others in physical characteristics of one sort or another. But the ideal and the reality can differ as much when it comes to race as in any other aspect of human life. People have been singled out for racial discrimination, or even extermination, who looked so much like other members of the society in which they lived that they had to be forced to dress differently or to wear identifying insignia. Some have defined race broadly, such as black, white and yellow races, while others have considered Anglo-Saxons, Slavs and Celts to be different races. Racial intermixtures complicate definitions even more.*

  Race is not entirely in the eye of the beholder, but it is a social concept with a biological basis. A stricter definition could lose touch with realities in societies where intermarriage is sharply increasing. Nor is intermarriage the ultimate solution to racial problems that many once thought. Jews in Germany in the 1920s had high rates of intermarriage,1 but that did not stop the rise of Hitler in the 1930s or the Holocaust in the 1940s. Indeed, intermarriage led to larger numbers of offspring being classified as Jews, with tragic consequences. Arbitrary demarcations and inconsistent definitions of race have marked societies preoccupied with race, including the South of the Jim Crow era in the United States and white-ruled South Africa of the apartheid era.

  Many have yearned for a society where race was irrelevant, and some saw the election of the first black President of the United States as a major step toward that kind of society. But polls on support for, and opposition to, that president among different ethnic groups are just one sign of continuing racial polarization. In short, no matter how ultimately irrelevant race may seem to some, racial issues show no sign of going away. They cannot be ignored. The only question is how we confront them.

  That is a special question when it comes to intellectuals, because their views can influence the way millions of other people see race, as the tendencies, preconceptions and conclusions of the intelligentsia spread through the media and educational institutions from the schools to the universities. For better or worse, intellectuals have played a large role in racial issues in many countries around the world. In the United States, they have played opposite roles on racial issues in the early twentieth century as contrasted with the late twentieth century. These roles and these issues are explored in the chapters that follow, leading to many conclusions very different from those currently prevailing in the media, in politics or in academia.

  Both “intellectuals” and “race” are words with many elusive definitions. By “intellectuals” is meant here people in a particular occupation— namely, people whose work begins and ends with ideas. It is an occupational designation, rather than an honorific title, and implies nothing about the mental level of those in that occupation. Chemists or chess grandmasters may be of equal or greater mental accomplishment, but they are not intellectuals because their work ends with an outcome subject to empirical verification by known standards, while the outcomes of the work of intellectuals are subject essentially to peer consensus. Even in academia, professors of medicine or engineering are not what come to mind when intellectuals are discussed, even though they may be the mental equals or superiors of professors of sociolog
y or literature.

  These are not just verbal issues about nomenclature. Any attempt to have rational discourse requires that those with different views have a common language in which to discuss their differences. And there is no subject more in need of rational discourse than is the subject of race.

  While Americans are rightly concerned about issues involving racial and ethnic groups in their own country, such issues are common in other societies around the world. Moreover, even to understand what is happening in one country may require some knowledge of the extent to which similar things have been present in other societies, and whether they have led to similar or different outcomes.

  This is especially so when a given outcome in one country is attributed to a given factor— and yet that same outcome can be found in other countries where that factor is absent. For example, when lower class whites in Britain exhibit strikingly similar behavior patterns to those of blacks in America, attributing those behavior patterns among American blacks to “a legacy of slavery” or to past or contemporary racial discrimination, is offering an explanation which obviously cannot apply to lower class Britons who have experienced neither. That then calls into question to what extent it applies to American blacks, though many take such explanations as a foregone conclusion requiring no further inquiry or closer scrutiny.

  Much that has been said on many sides of racial and ethnic issues requires far more inquiry and far closer scrutiny than that behind currently prevailing views. This book attempts to provide some of that further inquiry and closer scrutiny.

  E. Franklin Frazier urged that the history of black Americans be studied in a larger, international context.2 In the chapters that follow, American racial and ethnic issues in general will be put in an international context. This neither assumes nor denies the uniqueness of American racial and ethnic issues, but lets that be an empirical question.

  There is no subject that is more in need of dispassionate analysis, careful factual research and a fearless and honest discussion than is race. Ideally, we might look to intellectuals for such things. But it is also true that the mental skills and verbal dexterity of intellectuals can be used to evade evidence and promote whatever beliefs or agendas are in vogue among their peers. The intelligentsia in the media can decide what to emphasize, what to downplay and what to ignore entirely when it comes to race. These may be individual choices, rather than a conspiracy, but individual choices growing out of a common vision of the world can produce results all too similar to what is produced by centralized censorship or propaganda.

  As a concrete example, statistics comparing American blacks and whites in many respects— jobs, incomes, and mortgage approval rates, for example— are often drawn from data that include similar information about Asian Americans. Yet seldom are the Asian American data included in news stories, or even in academic studies, which conclude that racial discrimination explains much or most of the disparities between blacks and whites. In many, if not most, cases, reporting the data for Asian Americans would undermine, if not devastate, the conclusions reached from black-white comparisons.

  In the job market, for example, it has often been said over the years that blacks are “the last hired and the first fired,” since black employees are often terminated during an economic downturn sooner or to a greater extent than white employees. Data thus seem to substantiate this social vision of the world common among the intelligentsia and others. But if data on Asian Americans were included— which seldom happens— it would turn out that white employees are usually let go before Asian American employees.3 Can this be attributed to racial discrimination against whites by employers who are usually white themselves? More fundamentally, can we accept statistical data as showing discrimination in cases where that reinforces existing preconceptions, and then reject the same kind of data when it goes counter to those preconceptions?

  It is much the same story when examining what happens to people who apply for mortgage loans. There has been much indignant outcry in the media when statistics have shown that black applicants for mortgage loans were turned down more often than white applicants. Newspapers across the country, as well as television commentators, have treated such statistics as proof of racial discrimination by white banks against black applicants for mortgage loans. Yet statistical data on Asian Americans have been conspicuous by their absence from these comparisons as well. If such data are included, it turns out that, in 2000, black applicants were turned down for prime mortgage loans twice as often as white applicants— and white applicants were turned down nearly twice as often as Asian American applicants.4

  The question arises again whether we are going to accept statistical data as evidence of racial discrimination when it fits the preconceptions of the intelligentsia and reject it when it goes counter to those preconceptions. In the case of mortgage loans, there is other evidence against the conclusions reached almost universally in the media and in academia. Average credit scores are higher among whites than among blacks— and higher among Asian Americans than among whites.5 Taking into account the data for Asian Americans threatens to reduce a moral melodrama to a mundane matter of elementary economics in which lenders are more likely to lend to people who are more likely to pay them back.

  Since many, if not most, of those financial officials who actually make the decision to lend, or not to lend, do so on the basis of paperwork passed on to them from others who do the face to face interviews with applicants, it is doubtful whether these decision-making officials even know the race of the applicants. But differences in credit scores and other qualifications virtually guarantee racial disparities in outcomes anyway. Again, it seems hardly likely that white-owned banks are discriminating against whites and in favor of Asian Americans. Moreover, black-owned banks turn down black mortgage loan applicants at an even higher rate than do white-owned banks,6 and it seems equally unlikely that this is due to racial discrimination.

  It is much the same story in the public schools, where black students are disciplined for misbehavior more often than white students— who in turn are disciplined more often than Asian American students.7 Again, the question must be faced whether disparities in outcomes represent disparities in behavior or disparities in the way that others treat various races. Certainly the disparities themselves cannot be denied, however much different observers may attribute these disparities to very different causes. This extends far beyond questions of blacks and whites in the United States because, as we shall see, disparities of similar or greater magnitude are common in other countries around the world.

  Uncritical use of statistics risks many pitfalls. The very definitions used with statistical data create traps for the unwary. For example, when the Ravenswood School District in California turned out to have the country’s highest rate of disciplining of students who are “Asian and Pacific Islanders,”8 that was taken by some as showing racial discrimination. However, the omnibus category “Asian and Pacific Islanders” includes many very different groups. People whose ancestors originated in China, India or Japan are very different in many ways from people who originated in Guam or Samoa. In most places in the United States, most of the “Asian and Pacific Islanders” are people from the mainland of Asia. But, in the Ravenswood School District, most of the students who are “Asian and Pacific Islanders” are the offspring of Pacific Islanders.9 Comparisons of outcomes in this school district with outcomes in other school districts across the country are comparisons of apples and oranges.

  This small example is a microcosm of problems involved in attempting to understand racial and ethnic issues, whether these issues are expressed in numbers or in words, and whether they are expressed by the intelligentsia, the media or academia.

  __________

  * A white Congressman once said of black Congressman Augustus Hawkins, “Gus Hawkins is whiter than I am.”

  Chapter 2

  Disparities and Their Causes

  Any serious study of racial and ethnic groups, whether in a g
iven society or in a wide variety of societies in countries around the world, repeatedly encounters the inescapable fact of large and numerous disparities among these groups, whether in income, education, crime rates, IQs or many other things. These differences cannot be dismissed as mere “perceptions” or “stereotypes,” nor can they be automatically attributed to some one given cause, such as genetics, as was often the primary cause cited in the early twentieth century, or to maltreatment by others, as was equally often cited in the late twentieth century.

  The sources of these disparities are numerous and complex, and they must be confronted in their complexity, if we are seeking the truth, rather than trying to promote a vision or an agenda.

  THE REALITY OF DISPARITIES

  Sometimes minorities are on the short end of disparities (as in the United States, Britain and France), and sometimes it is a majority that lags behind (as in Malaysia, Indonesia or the Ottoman Empire). Sometimes the disparities are blamed on discrimination, sometimes on genes, but in any event the disparities are treated as oddities that need explaining, no matter how common such supposed oddities are in countries around the world or in how many centuries they have been common. Because intellectuals’ assumptions about these disparities are so deeply ingrained, so widely disseminated, and have such powerful ramifications on so many issues, it is worth taking a closer and longer look at the facts of the real world, now and in the past.

  Where minorities have outperformed politically dominant majorities, it is especially difficult to make the case that discrimination is the cause.* A study of the Ottoman Empire, for example, found that “of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul in 1912 not one bore a Muslim name.” Nor was even one of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul a Turk. Of the capital assets of 284 industrial firms employing five or more workers, 50 percent were owned by Greeks and another 20 percent by Armenians.1 In the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, the palace medical staff consisted of 41 Jews and 21 Muslims.2