Preferential Policies

Well, some of the issues that have been fought over are now coming to a head, especially with the Civil Rights Act of 1990, so-called, up before Congress, and especially in the light of Supreme Court decisions of last year, which have been called a cutback in civil rights, but which, in fact, I think are, a corrective to many of the things that have been going on. I'm really worried about the attempt to reverse the Wards Cove decision because I think that's the first case where a company was being prosecuted, not because of any act of discrimination against any individual, not even because, their numbers of employees were less than the numbers of the group in the population, but because they had a larger proportion of non-whites in the lower levels than they had in the upper levels. And if that decision is reversed, that will mean that employers will have an incentive not to hire as many working-class minority people, and to hi- try to hire more elite position minority people.

Well, Wards Cove is a, was a Wards Cove packing company in Seattle, ran a cannery up in, or still does, in Alaska. They hired the permanent and higher-level people in around where their headquarters were in Seattle, Pacific Northwest. and up in Alaska, since there was only seasonal work during the salmon season, they would hire only local, hire local people for that, makes sense. And they happened to be located where there are a number of Eskimos, and there was a union that had a lot of Filipinos in it. and the net result was they had a predominantly white permanent staff and a predominantly non-white ca-- set of cannery workers. And there were other subsidiary, there are always subsidiary issues involved. But by the time the case got to the Supreme Court, all those other issues had been shot down so that there was no question of anybody being discriminated against in hiring, no individual being discriminated against in treatment on the job. All that had been shot down in the lower courts. Now, all that was before the Supreme Court was that the statistics looked bad, that they had all these non-white cannery workers and all these predo-- well, not all white, but predominantly white, upper-level workers. and the idea was they were supposed to be convicted of discrimination on that basis, and the Supreme Court wouldn't buy it, and they, they voted five to four that they wouldn't. And now the act before Congress is gonna make it possible to convict a company on that basis. Even before the Wards Cove decision, I had heard from people who are knowledgeable about civil rights that attorneys were advising their employer clients, "If you can't find Black engineers or Black, accountants, then at least don't hire so many Black janitors or assembly line workers because it looks bad." And if they succeed, that means that it will hurt the people who most need a job, and it will benefit, if anyone, only a handful of people in elite positions.

Oh, I suppose, Sri Lanka perhaps. The question is how much did it help them, and in what ways? In Sri Lanka, the Tamils are the minority and the Si- Sinhalese are the majority, and the preferences in that country are for the majority, the Sinhalese, 'cause the Tamils had done quite well And, after a tr- number of years, the Sinhalese were able to overtake the Tamils, in income. But along the way, they had such violence in the street that people were burning each other alive in the street. The, army, which is predominantly Sinhalese, when attacked in Tamil territory, has been known simply to stop a bus and take people off the bus and shoot a few of them at random because they are Tamils. And so if you say that's been a success, then it's been a success. But, I'm not sure we want that kind of success.

I went to Sri-- to not, not Sri Lanka and Nigeria, but to India, Malaysia, also to other places, that are mentioned in passing, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji. Israel also has some, preferential policies. you can't, in school, you can't leave back a disproportionate number of Sephardic Jews as compared to Ashkenazic Jews. Otherwise, that's considered bad.

Well, there are differences in skills, if that's what you mean. That is, Germans have been prominent in piano manufacturing around the world, in the Czarist Russia or Australia or the United States and so on. underlying differences, those I've argued against, the genetic differences, and the-- those I've argued against, but that's, that's another whole issue that I really don't get into in the book.

I would look at it differently. I would say, and especially in the United States, I would say, why would we expect different groups to do the same? I say especially the United States because, there are very few indigenous Americans. Americans have come here from all over the world, and why would you ever expect that countries that had entirely different histories, located in entirely different climates, different geography, why would you expect those countries to develop exactly the same mix of skills to exactly the same degree so that their people would arrive on these shores in such a way that they would be represented evenly across the board? Especially since even in countries where most of the population is indigenous, you don't find it there. the Germans arrived here with piano-making skills, and therefore you shouldn't expect to find the Irish equally represented with Germans in the piano industry. So when you find Steinways and other German, name pia- pianos, you shouldn't expect to find a Houlihan pia- pianos to the same extent and so on. nowhere in the world do you find this evenness that people use as a norm, and I find it fascinating that they will, hold up as a norm something that has never been seen on this planet and regard as an anomaly something that is seen in country after country.

I grew up, I guess, in Harlem. I was born in, North Carolina

Yes.

In right in the middle of Harlem, PS 5.

I went o- went to Howard University in Washington for, a year and a half, and then I transferred to Harvard.

Oh, good heavens. there'd be so many people. I think my family itself would be, the biggest influence. When they came out of the South, their thought was that I would have opportunities which they had never had, and that they wanted me to take advantage of it. And more than that, they realized that there was no way that they, either in terms of money or in terms of education, would be able to do that. And so they looked around for people for me to meet that would help me in some way. And there was a kid named Eddie Mapp that they had picked out for me to meet before I ever got off the train, you know. And, Eddie Mapp was from the West Indies, and his, mother was much more educated than the members of my family. And, Eddie Mapp began to tell me various things such as that one school was better than another, which would not have occurred to me until it was too late. and that one could transfer so that one could get into a better school, and of course, I didn't. Him being... He was about a year older than me, and so I was in effect able to follow in his footsteps, and I learned about Stuyvesant High School in New York and took a test and got into there and so on. So I got a very s- good foundation, largely because of him. He introduced me to my first public library. I remember standing in this room with these tremendous numbers of books and s- asking, "Why are we here, because I don't have any money to buy books?" And then he had to tell me what a public library was, and I was about nine years old. and then once tried it out, I went, "Sounds like a good idea."

Oh, well, that depends on how you count them. If you, if you count collections of old stuff, then you get a bigger number than if you count books that are real books from scratch.

I, I think, I think, I think that's maybe the 14th, if I've counted correctly.

Oh, it,... I started writing it in 1970. It was published... No, I started writing it in 19... Yeah, that's right, 1970. It was published in '71. And what

It was Economics Analysis and Issues, introductory economics textbook.

No, it sank without a trace.

Yes.

Oh, almost everything didn't work. one thing, I never published with that publisher again. That's, that's just what started. they brought it out at the wrong time. They changed, what I'd, what I had done. one of the features I had was that when I teach, I used to use different colors of chalk, and I found that the students were able to follow complicated graphs better if I had each line in a different color. And I can say, you know, "The gross national product, which is in green," and then they could follow that along and so on. And so I'd done this whole book the same way, and it came out in black and white. and that was one of the many little things, but,...

A Conflict of Visions.

I think it's m-- what is most, what is more mine than anything else in the sense that, it doesn't build upon any theory that anyone else has or anything that's already out there in the literature. and it's an attempt one, to explain why people reach different ideological positions from one another. two people similarly informed, sim-similarly well-meaning will ag-- will meet, will reach opposite conclusions, not just on a given issue, but on the whole range of issues. That if you were to take a resolution about m-military spending and take it to a pro-choice, meeting and to a pro-life meeting, you would probably get a very different, reading on it. Or if you took all sorts of other things wholly unrelated to the abortion question to those same two meetings, you would probably get entirely different readings on those other unrelated questions, because, their positions grow out of a certain vision of the world, and if you have that vision of the world, then certain things make perfect sense and certain other things make no sense at all.

Ten years.

Absolutely nothing. I'm not a professor at Stanford. I'm a senior fellow, which means that, I don't do any teaching. in fact, I have no hours and no duties. And, once I was an expert witness in a case and the opposing attorney said to me, "It says here that you're a senior fellow. Now, just what does a senior fellow do?" And I said, "Well, actually, a senior fellow has no hours and no duties." And the judge said, "I wouldn't mind having a job like that." So, it's really, it's really the ideal kind of job.

I write. I read.

Occasionally, but that's not required of me.

None. Occasionally, a student will stop me on the campus and, chitchat, but aside from that... But that will happen in the streets of Washington, so I have n- I have no connection whatever with the teaching, at Stanford University.

Yes.

Once a week.

I have no idea, except when I get letters from people. I don't even know in what papers it appears. I send it to the syndicate, and that's the syndicate's problem from there on. And they pay me a fixed amount, so there's no need for them to give me an accounting.

Hmm.

Hmm.

hmm.

Well, I guess it's a question of, where your advantages lie. my advantages lie in writing the books. And, in order to do the amount of work that I do, there are many other things I don't do. And unfortunately, there are very few people who take positions similar to mine, and if that viewpoint is to be heard at all, I'm gonna have to be the one that does a lot of it, and therefore, I can't do a lot of other things. as regards television, there are many problems with television, not the least of what are the... which are those shows where they tape you for an hour and a half and put you on for five minutes with other people interspliced to, say what they have to say. and I don't go for that format at all because it will end up proving whatever the people want it to prove at the beginning.

Those kinds of television shows, yes.

Not really. it's, it's what, what really just appeals to me at the time. when I... The first time I was contacted by the Hoover Institution, they asked me what did I wanted to do research on if I came there, and I said I wanted to write about Marxian economics. And some years later... And that didn't come to fruition at the time. And some years later, they came to me again, and then they asked what would I like to do, and I said Marxian economics. And so I, made a, made an appointment, and, I started studying Marxian economics. Now, in my, in my spare time, I was reading a book called The Chinese in Southeast Asia, and I got so fascinated that two months into this, I put Marxian economics to one side, and I began to learn more about the Chinese in Southeast Asia and so forth, and then the book The Economics and Politics of Race came out of that. And then I decided to go back, but then now I saw that the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act was coming up in 1984, and I thought someone ought to present some of the things they're not likely to hear in this discussion, and so I then did the Civil Rights: Re- Rhetoric or Reality?, and finally I got back to the Marxism, and that came out some years later.

Only as one among many Randall Kennedy up at Harvard did a very, fine article in the Harvard Law Review last June, for which he was denounced as an academic minstrel and other things because he was out of step. I mean, people who raise their heads, will set off a search and destroy mission because, people have a lot at stake, and they're sitting on a house of cards. They have many assumptions which simply cannot be examined carefully, because those assumptions will collapse, and they will fall from a very high position to a very low position, and they are not about to tolerate people, questioning what they're saying.

Oh, wait. I think, I think one of the, one of the ways that the, organized noisemakers have succeeded is saying that what they're saying is what their race is saying. My race is not saying that about me. Those p- particular individuals who are a small minority themselves within the Black community, who have a vested interest in many of these programs, they are saying that. But when I checked out of my hotel this morning, you know, the Black, security guard kind of came over and says, " are, are you Sowell?" I said, "Yes," and he shook my hand warmly, and we walked... He walked me the length of the corridor and talked about this and about that, and that's not at all an uncommon experience for me. So it's not Sowell versus Blacks. It's the Black int- intellectuals, and the Black intellectuals are no more typical of the Black population than white intellectuals are of the white population. but they have a very large vested interest in certain beliefs which they're, which underlie various programs from which they benefit enormously. And as I point out in the book, this is common around the world, that the elites benefit from preferential programs, even when those programs are in the name of the masses. The masses do not benefit. In the case of the current so-called Civil Rights Act, the masses are gonna lose big if that law goes into effect.

Because employers will not want to hire as many Blacks in the jobs which most Blacks will be applying, because those will not be jobs as rocket scientists or as doctors or as any, or any of those things, and therefore, they'll wanna hold down percentages down there, to what they can do, in the higher ranks, which is gonna be much less. and so you'll h- so you're sacrificing the working-class Blacks for the benefit of the professional elite.

You mean, how do they have the influence they have?

Emotion, largely, but also a large amount of self-interest, increasingly self-interest. I think that if you went back, you know, into the '60s, you'd find people with different views, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but I think that both those men believed in what they said. whereas today you have people who are simply professional hustlers. And again, this is not peculiar to Blacks or peculiar to the United States or even peculiar to racial issues, that organizations typically, many movements are set off by idealistic people who want to promote some good for mankind or for some group. But as time goes by and as they succeed, they will be followed by people who can use these things for their own self-interest, and that's been the history of regulatory agencies in the government. it's been the history of, I think, of religions, that the first Christians who were being persecuted by the Roman Empire were not in it, you know, for what they could get because all they were gonna get is trouble. But once Christianity became the state religion, this became a very lucrative career for some people. and then you get an entirely different kind of person coming in at that point, and they have an entirely different kind of movement.

hmm.

Yes.

Because they're mismatched with Berkeley. That is, these stu... The average Black student at Berkeley is above the national average on test scores. It's just that the average white student is further above the national average, and the average Asian student further above than the white students. And so in that atmosphere, these students who have every qualification to succeed are artificially turned into failures, and the only beneficiary of that is the University of California at Berkeley. Because what they've effectively done is rented these bodies for window dressing for a few years, and then when they're through with them, they're put aside, and a new bunch of bodies are brought in.

Oh, yes.

Oh, different things. I remember one fellow saying, "Oh, Tom, I'm just a little guy. I can't do anything about this," which, you know, wonderful. But I really... The people who, the people who really have the influence are not the people I've talked with. those people know exactly what they're doing. There's another group, I guess, that benefits from this. You have an establishment there, a Black studies establishment, who need students to man, to be in their classrooms, and these students serve those, serve those purposes. People who have political movements have people they can mobilize for those movements while those students are there. It's very much like what happens in athletics, that you have students who come in. As long as they can score touchdowns, the coach is happy. The fact that these students don't graduate is not the coach's problem. His problem is how to hold on to his six-figure salary and his job, and the students have to be sacrificed, then they are sacrificed.

I would tell them what I've told, students in general of all races to do, which is to go to schools that match your educational capabilities at the time. Because you need to be matched with a school. You shouldn't try to go to where the glitzy name is or what have you. Now, unfortunately, many of the minority students have such low income that they must go to wherever the money is, and the money is disproportionately at the kinds of schools that they will find very difficult to graduate from.

To admit students on the basis of their qualifications.

Well, they won't, they won't have anything at, at the top level. But we have more than three thousand colleges and universities in this country. every human being that's not severely mentally retarded is perfectly qualified to be at one of those institutions. I mean, there are institutions where if you can fill out the application form, you're qualified to do the work. And there are others where if you're not in the top one or two percent, your chances of making it are extremely slim. And it's precisely these second places that they wanna send Black students, that they don't send white students of the same level of ability. And it's not at all surprising that they had to run into the academic problems they do. Let me give you another example that's not in the book. At MIT, the average Black student is at the top ten percent nationwide in mathematics, and in the bottom ten percent at MIT, and one-fourth of them don't make it. Now, when you realize how few Black students at that level, to lose one-fourth of them, you can't afford that. I think there's another larger loss that you have. You have the kid who goes to a top-level school, and he wants to be a chemist or whatever. And now he gets there, and he finds he cannot learn chemistry as it's taught at that school. Does not mean he can't learn chemistry. It means that they have very high-pressure students. They can teach this stuff at a very fast rate, skipping on explanations, skipping over steps in the, in the mathematics, and these students will all pick that up as they go along. He may find that he can't keep up with that, and so in order to survive, he switches into some easy subject, which may be, some ethnic studies program or what have you. And so someone who could have gotten a first-rate education at a good college ends up getting a third-rate education at a top college or ends up flunking out altogether

Well, I think, I think both. a book like Civil Rights Rhetoric and In Reality, I would never have written, except for some practical purpose. That is, I had been through the subject before. I resisted throughout the 1960s all sorts of efforts to get me to write on race because I said, "I'm, I'm not an expert on that. There's no... There are people who have studied this for their, all their lives and let them do it." And then I began to read some of the stuff they were writing, and I realized what nonsense it was. And I said, "If this is what the professionals are doing, then we should try an amateur to do this." And, once I got into it, I realized there were so many terrible things that the general public is simply unaware of, and there are so many bills of goods being sold to the public by people who personally gain from this stuff. I mean, when you, when you sell a program, you become the program director, you become the consultant, you become all of that sort of thing, and, I just needed to debunk some of that, and I think that's the reason I've written them. then once I start to write, my write-ups, I would approach any other thing, subject intellectually.

Well, there's, there are, there are so few opportunities for my ideas to get into print that I don't have the luxury of doing that. But, it would, it would bother me. I haven't seen much of that, actually. I haven't seen much of that.

No, I wouldn't know about it. They... Whoever would discriminate against me would have the good sense to keep me from finding out.

Oh, sometimes, although, it's not so much being ignored as being distorted, beyond recognition. a terrible thing happened, some years ago on CBS Morning News when, they tried to represent me as someone who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior. And I had written, oh, at least half a dozen articles attacking the thesis of Arthur Jensen, and so much so that the BBC had once wanted to arrange a debate between me and Jensen, and neither of us wanted to be bothered. But I was thinking, "Why is it that in London they understand what my position is, but in Washington, they can't find out what it is?" Particularly since it's been in print repeatedly and at enormous length. I conducted a large survey of IQs, about 20 years ago, collected about a hund- over 100,000, and wrote all this stuff up, so it's a matter of public record. And yet to lie like that, is just too much.

It depends on the base year, like, like most comparisons. if you take thirty years ago, greater. Among... Certainly greater among in the academic world. in the book that I wrote about colleges, I urge minority parents not to think that because they had a good experience on a particular college campus thirty years ago, that their children will have that good an experience today, because the racial tension is enormous on many campuses. the colleges themselves try to say that they're, they're victims of the racism of the larger society, and point of fact, the racism on the campuses is greater than that in the larger society, in many campuses. And what I worry about is that they're going to graduate into the general society, Blacks and whites alike, who hate each other's guts, and who are go-- who can be the leaders of new racial strife for the future.

One of the factors is the pr- the preferential policies. But it's more than just that, because that in itself sets in motion a series of events which add to the original resentment over the preferential policies. That is, you... Put yourself in the position of a Black kid who comes out of a ghetto school, and he's gone through for twelve years with nothing but A's and B's, without a great deal of effort. And now he finds himself for the first time in his life in a predominantly white environment, and he finds that when he works twice as hard as he's ever worked, all he gets back for his work is a D. And that there are, and that there is also a minority establishment. This is true not only of Blacks, but of minorities in general. Establishment which tells him, "Yes, this is, this is the racism on this campus, that, the, the white power structure is trying to keep you down." And it has to have a certain plausibility to it. it would have had a certain plausibility to me, had I come along in that era. Now, I was fortunate enough in one sense that, having grown up in the South and then transferred to New York, I was shifted between different levels of education. And so I was a top student in my class in, North Carolina, and then I was immediately the bottom student in my class in Harlem, and I was way behind whoever was next to the bottom because the educational differences was, were just that great. Very painful period of adjustment, but it, but there was no racial issue involved since these were... all the other kids who were ahead of me were all Black. And so I got through that. And then for a second time in my life, I'd gone out on my own when I was 17, and I didn't return to college full time till I was about 25. for the second time in my life, I sh- went into a, an environment that was very difficult compared to what I'd been used to. And once again, I was way behind. I was in danger of flunking out of school the first semester.

Harvard. it's really incredible to, you know... For the first time in your life, in 10 years, you're a full-time student, and you're a full-time student at Harvard without a high school diploma. so there were little difficulties.

oh, at fir- at that stage, I was studying, just general things, but I majored in economics, and all my, all my degrees are in economics. and again, an enormous adjustment to make, but there was no one there to tell me, "All these white professors have it in for you, and that's why you're doing badly." Because first of all, I had done badly in Harlem, and I'd overcome it. I was doing badly there. I overcame it. But-

Well, I graduated.

I went there for a year and a half, and then I transferred to Harvard.

All right. See, but I was going to Howard in the evening while working full time during the day. so this... so when I went to Harvard, I was a full-time student for the first time in 10 years. And, so that, that was, a-

I graduated class of '58. so that you can understand how the student would find this plausible. I talked to a black man recently, a lawyer, who said when he was in law school, he was told when he first got there that Professor X never gives black students more than a C. You know, and he got a B plus. But there was great consternation because one of the myths had fallen. But it's truly criminal what goes on in terms of using and manipulating the students, to serve all kinds of external purposes.

Oh, political purposes. I just a couple of days ago was told by someone from Wellesley that, there's a divestment, campaign at We- at Wellesley, demonstrations, the whole thing. That those black girls who did not wanna participate in that were threatened with violence, and that's not unique. At Stanford, the Hispanic students, some Hispanic students, have complained that the Hispanic establishment has threatened them if they don't wanna go along with what's being said and done. And they claim that, only fifteen percent of the Hispanic students at Stanford have ever attended a single event sponsored by the Hispanic establishment, which speaks boldly in their name. and so you have this kind of thing going on at these schools across the country. Again, notice that when-- once you let in the students who cannot make-- meet the academic standards, you're gonna end up having to let in professors who can't meet the academic standards. You're gonna have to create courses that don't meet the academic standards.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, no. Well, he's, he's take-- he's, he's taking, if I understand it correctly, he's taking, unpaid leave until such time as they, hire a woman of color, as he says. but he's also said that by black, he does not mean skin color. He means those who are really black, not those who are, who think white and look black. And so what he's really saying is, he wants ideological conformity in the people that he had to hire to fill this position. That's not uncommon either. I know a black woman, for example, who, she has a PhD. She's had a book published. She's had a contract on another book. She's taught at a couple of very nice places. She has a devil of a time getting a job, not a job in a prestigious institution, a job teaching at a college. and the reason is that she gets Shot down, blackballed, whatever, by people who don't like her ideology. That's happening not only racially, it's also happening even to where race is not an issue. a law school I learned recently, there was a woman who was being considered for a tenure position, and all the men voted for her, and all the women voted against her because she does not follow radical feminism. And so you're getting these ideological tests so that at the very time that there's all this mouthing of the word diversity, there is this extremely narrow ideological conformity that's being enforced wherever people have the power to enforce it.

Well, every, his chances of success will depend upon whether or not he's overestimated his importance to the Harvard Law School. I think, I think, I think it would be a tragedy if, if they caved in, and I was very pleased to see that they seem to show some backbone, which is quite rare among academics.

It's been quite gentle. -

To me?

Well, he's, he's looked at as an idealist who is self-sacrificing and so on. I suppose one could have, if one wanted to look at it that way, see Hit- seen Hitler that way in his early days. it's just a question of, where that kind of idealism leads. He has launched a despicable attack on a young Black professor at the law school who doesn't go along with this. Young man named Randall Kennedy written a very, thoughtful, intelligent article last June in the Harvard Law Review, questioning some of the assumptions that people are making, people like Derrick Bell, and doing it in a very, gentlemanly as well as a very logical way, empirical way, and, that's not what they want. They want the conclusion to be that... They want him to walk, march in lockstep, and he won't do it, and they're doing their best to make life impossible for him.

I've heard that... Kennedy and I don't know this. I've heard that he has tenure, and so I think that, he may be all right.

Derrick Bell?

I hope that they will re- they will resist it, and since it's gotten so much publicity, I'm not sure they could stand to cave into it. I was very pleased to see that Alan Dershowitz at Harvard had criticized this. I mean, he picked up on the fact that what Bell is really asking for is not only that people be hired by race, but they be hired to fit Derrick Bell's ideology.

They would have caved in long ago.

Yes, I think so. It's a judgment call, but that's my judgment.

Just looking at their track record or they have perfected the technique of preemptive surrender

Well, my, I, I always say that my political bias is that I'm biased against politics. And, I haven't been a registered member of any political party since 1972. and I really am quite, disenchanted with politics of all sorts.

Well, I guess mainly just by following what they do and how they do it, that, they're really quite clever at things they do, but the things they do really don't benefit the public very much, and that's not just race issues, all issues in general.

if it's changed, it's been for the worse. I see some hopeful signs. People are trying to talk about limiting the terms of congressmen. I would like to see it, see it limited to one term. In other words, if y- if you're gonna, allow a member of, the House of Representatives, for example, to spend four years in Washington, I would rather that they change that to one four-year term rather than two-year terms because the problem is re-election. And as long as they have to be re-elected and have to raise all that money, then they're gonna sell out the public interest to get the money. It's really quite simple. You know, the s- for example, an industry like the sugar industry can contribute money to Congress, and Congress will appropriate enough money to the sugar industry subsidies to pay, to pay them back $1,000 on every dollar. Now, you can't get that kind of return on your investment many places, and so there's no sign that they're gonna stop doing that either they're gonna stop offering the money or the Congress is gonna stop, giving the money

Oh my. Do you mean, historic figures, or do you mean people whom I sort of looked up to when I was growing up?

Well, I think Winston Churchill was the greatest man of the 20th century. and I find it horrifying that most American high school students do not know who Winston Churchill is.

One thing alone I think would, I think that he probably, if any one man could be said to have saved Western democracy, that one man would be Winston Churchill. But he saw the enormous dangers that led to World War II, warned against them, that if he had been heeded in time, there might have been 40 million people who wouldn't have lost their lives. But even being heeded at the 11th hour, it was enough for him to pull Britain through. And had Britain not pulled through, it's very doubtful that the United States would be, would have pulled through. And in that case, it's highly unlikely that I would be sitting here alive.

Oh, my heavens. That's a tough... Well, Abraham Lincoln, I guess. But, it's, it's a shame that one has to go all the way back to Abraham Lincoln to find a president that one really can admire in an unqualified way. I think among the modern people, in different respects, I would say FDR, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, and even though domestically Reagan and FDR are at opposite poles, that they recognized an international danger and saved the life of this country, which, without which all the other issues wouldn't matter.

Oh, I suppose. Yeah, I'm, I'm a great believer in, maximum freedom.

I ce- certainly not in the sense in which the American Civil Liberties Union is. I don't believe that hoodlums should be kept in school because of some strange reading of the Constitution, because I think, people have to recognize that all people owe their lives to the surrounding society, and that they cannot simply, demolish it because it is unjust, because everything human has always been unjust. and that what you're gonna do to make it better will have to be within that context. So that, my tendency is to want more freedom for the individual and less un... I don't want people making decisions who don't pay the price of their decisions, and that's what politics is all about. You don't pay the price of a decision. As I point out early in the book, one of the reasons we had a Jim Crow era in this country was because the politicians didn't pay the price of that. That was enormously costly to the white as well as the Black population, but the politicians who put that in, didn't pay any cost for that. They drew their full salary irrespective of all that. And I want someone who discriminates to have to lose money discriminating because as, from the examples I gave in the book, people tend to back off when they start losing big money. Harlem was an all-white community. It became a Black community despite organized efforts to keep Blacks out because people were losing money trying to keep it a white community. And I think, people in the civil rights area missed a bet by not trying to promote more free markets, because that makes discrimination the most costly it can be.

Good heavens, no. They don't melt in the slightest. they're polarized. In fact, I think one of the tragedies is we have organized groups in the United States trying to balkanize the United States, to create in the United States the enormous handicaps under which India is laboring, under which many parts of, sub-Saharan Africa are laboring, due to all kinds of historical and geographical reasons. And now, the United States having escaped all that, having been blessed with having one language and culture, over a distance that in Europe would go from Madrid to Moscow, having had that blessing, we are now gonna pour that down the drain, and we're gonna go for balkanization, not being aware apparently of what has happened in the history of the Balkans, or aware of what happens when you have people who speak different languages and, have different, radically different beliefs trying to be in the same society.

Oh, they'll get worse and worse. There are alway- already, skinheads recruiting on some college campuses. There are already white students unions being formed. there are already harassments of minority students on a scale unseen 20 or 30 years ago. and of course, then, then there's the reaction on both sides. It escalates because, what you do is give a lot of leverage to the crazier elements in all the different groups. That is, you pick an international example. In Israel, someone said on the radio, on the television that because this Israeli man has killed these, what is it, six or seven Arabs, that any thought right now of any rapprochement between the Arabs and the Jews, has to be put aside. So you're saying that one man has the leverage to prevent millions of people on both sides from working out some kind of livable arrangement between the two of them. And of course, once you get this racial hype, you put that power into the hands of demagogues and hoodlums, to prevent vast numbers of people who may be, decently disposed not to be able to do anything because they are polarized by the relative handful of crazies or whatever.

Well, the differences have always been there, but they got along before I mean, Blacks and whites were different at Harvard when I was there, but you didn't find all the Black students, huddled together at lunchtime at the, at the end of some table the way you do on many campuses today. m- all the Black students I knew had white roommates. and m- and I would say that the mo- the ones that I knew were all popular, other than me. but, that's not the situation today.

The fact that you do have those little elites who have their agenda. It's the fact that the Black students are forced to come out and do, and do the demonstrations and the whatnot. the fact that you have students there who are tremendously, alienated because they suddenly find themselves in this situation where academically they're... it's all they can do to keep their noses above the water, if they can do that. And then there's someone there to tell them that this is all due to the white power structure. And then there are the white students who are sick of hearing that, and they say, "If you can't hack it, that's your problem. Don't, don't, don't give us this, this junk." And then that's called insensitivity. It's also, it's self-reinforcing. You know, there are some reactions that are self-equilibrating, but there are some that keep feeding each other. Let's say an ugly racial incident happens on campus at one of the elite colleges. Invariably, the first thing that will be said is we must have now a larger quota of minority students, a larger quota of minority faculty, and we must now subject the white students to these, sensitivity courses or ethnic courses or what have you. Courses that they've rejected taking, otherwise they wouldn't, wouldn't be necessary to force them. That is not gonna make things better. That's gonna make them worse. But as they get worse, then you keep doing that, and so it's just an upwards spiral, and I just don't know where that spiral's gonna end. I don't see anybody with the courage to end it, and I see it, leading only to bad things.

Well, you see, you're, you're, you're bringing me in now 20 years after they've gone into this mess. 20 years ago, I said, "Don't do it." 20 years ago, I said, "If you do it, this will be the consequence," and I wasn't the only one, and people simply did not want to hear it. And so I am very unsympathetic to the administrators. I say, you know, "You made this mess, you get out of it." now fortunately for me, nobody wants to hear what I have to say about it now, and so it's not a live issue for me. Some gentleman wrote me from Princeton, I think he's associated with the university in some way, that would I come to Princeton and confer with this or that person? And I said, "No." You know, no one has ever asked me in all these years to come to a university and do this. I don't think there's the slightest interest at Princeton or anywhere else in what I have to say about these matters because the ideologues feel they have the word, the truth, and the light, and they don't want me confusing the issue. And the others are afraid of the ideologues. And so there's no point in my making an unnecessary trip across the country, just to chitchat with people at Princeton.

No, we do not have tenure. In fact, I use that very often when people tell me that you need to have tenure in order to have academic freedom. I say, "Nobody has tenure at Hoover. That's why we're so cautious in what we say."

Well, but it's Hoo- Hoover, but my paycheck is from Stanford University, 'cause it's, it's in some peculiar legal relationship. But, no, I think, I think ten- tenure does not produce people who speak their mind, that timid people are disproportionately attracted to jobs that have ironclad tenure. And so I... As in the civil service, that's not where you'll get your bold, new ideas, out of the career civil servants. Because if you attract timid people, you're gonna have conformity, no matter how much freedom they have.

I don't know. I've, I've ne- I've never seriously thought about it. I do get, you know, feelers from various places at various times. and I was, oh my goodness, back in '72, I was offered a, I was offered... Well, '72, I was offered a, visiting professorship at Harvard, and then around the s- I guess really the same year, also it's a visiting professorship at Stanford, and I turned both of those down. so I guess it's... un- unless I'm so much better known now than I was in 1972 that they would never dream of, making the same offer.

No, it's, it, there's a lo- longer study in progress, and this book is a spinoff from it. The longer study is a study called Race and Culture: A Worldview, and it's about 1,200 pages of manuscript at this time.

Yes. and that, and I in fact put that aside to do this because the policy implications of this seem to me to merit moving this ahead in the schedule.

Hopefully publish it, if I find someone who wants to publish it.

Oh, I, I hope that people will start to reexamine some of the dogmas about race that have been unthinkingly repeated for a very long time by people who compliment themselves for being thinking people. the very notion that you would expect groups to be evenly representative, is staggering when you realize the tremendous difference in backgrounds from which all groups come, when you realize that cultures tend to endure over a period of time, beyond a single generation. And so there's no reason to think that groups who come from Germany and Ireland to the United States are gonna be all the same in a generation or two, because they're not. And still less people who come from more distant cultures, from Asia, from Africa, from other parts of the world, that... That's nonsense. Correspondingly, the notion that the individual or the group is a function of the immediate surroundings, is nonsense. Give you an example. The Japanese in the United States during World War II, as you know, were interned. They were treated very badly prior to that time. In Brazil, the Japanese were treated much better, and then very few of them were interned. In the United States, the Japanese remained steadfastly loyal despite the bad treatment. In Brazil, the Japanese were loyal to Japan right on through to past the end of the war, despite the good treatment. You cannot explain this by what happened in the United States or in Brazil. You can only explain it if you understand that those two groups of Japanese were different before they ever got on the boat in Japan, and that difference persisted in the countries they went to. there are other groups like that, where the, where you see differences. The Scots, for example, that most Scots in the United States have been prosperous, and yet the biggest pocket of white poverty in the United States have been the Scots and the Appalachians. And the question is: Was that because of the environment or immediately in the Appalachians, or how they were treated, or anything of that sort? Well, you can't explain it that way. But if you trace the history of these groups, you realize those groups were very different before they ever left Scotland, or in the other case, Ireland, mostly county.

Oh, that's, that's a hard one since you're trying to quantify something that's inherently non-quantifiable. I would say that, compared to India, the wor- the, I think the worst prejudice against blacks of, say, 50 years ago, was not as bad as what is currently existing against the untouchables of India in the rural areas, that there are Indian, people who are attacked and sometimes killed for such things as daring to draw water from the village well. there are, I mention in the, in the book, that back in the 1930s when blacks were supposed to sit in the back of the bus in the South, in Ceylon, the untouchables were not supposed to sit anywhere. They were supposed to stand in the back of the bus or squat on the floor in the back of the bus, but they were not to sit anywhere. And so I think the untouchables would be among the most persecuted people, in the world today.

I'm thinking of writing a book about intellectuals.

By Paul Johnson.

Yes.

Mine would not be as generous as his.

Oh, I, I think they're funny in some ways, but, I think that the intellectuals have a set of, attitudes and beliefs which, simply will not stand up under scrutiny, and which have been enormously damaging to the society around them. In other words, if they had a few crazy ideas of their own and it was between themselves, who would care? But that's... many of these ideas, and I think the preferential policies thing is just one of those ideas, and I think environmentalism is one of the others, that an enormous sacrifice of the resources, of the well-being of other members of society and so forth are made in order that a little handful of people can feel especially noble and especially wise.

Oh, I take it as an occupational description. you know, it's people who make their living with words. and so therefore it has, there's nothing qualitative about it. I, I do not assume, for example, that the average sociologist is smarter than the average auto repairman. So it's, it's not an honorific term, it's simply a job description, the way you would describe an accountant or a policeman or anything else.

Thank you