Intellectuals and Race
The questions you're not supposed to ask about race and outcomes, asked plainly.
- Interviewer
- Peter Robinson
- Program
- Uncommon Knowledge
- Topics
- Race, Ideas
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Lightly cleaned for reading (76 of Sowell’s turns). Tap any timestamp to jump the video there.
He holds degrees from Columbia and the University of Chicago, but his undergraduate years at Harvard hold a special place in his heart. "The principal advantage of a Harvard education," he has said, "is that you never again have to feel intimidated by anyone with a Harvard education." Economist, journalist, and author, Dr. Thomas Sowell. Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Thomas Sowell has taught economics, intellectual history, and social policy at institutions including Cornell, UCLA, and Amherst. A fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Dr. Sowell is the author of more than two dozen books. His most recent, Intellectuals and Race. Tom Sowell, welcome.
Well, good to be here.
The progressives I'll quote Intellectuals and Race. "Broadly speaking, while in the Progressive Era, socioeconomic differences were attributed to race, in the Liberal Era, such differences were often attributed to racism." Let's take each in turn, the progressives and the liberals. The progressives, of course, dominated the first several decades of the last century. Who were they, and broadly speaking, what did they believe about race?
They believed that differences in performances and outcomes between races were due to genetics, and therefore, that they also believed in things like eugenics. and they set the stage for what ultimately became the Holocaust.
And why did they call themselves progressives, or why did they come to be called progressives?
Well, I guess they seemed to think that, they alone were, interested in progress. But of course, everybody, wants, believes in some changes, and they believed that those changes would be for the better. So, it's, it's hard for me to understand how they could distinguish themselves from others by that t- that term, but they believed they could, and I guess that's what mattered.
All right. You quote H.L. Mencken, whom you call a prominent intellectual during the Progressive Era. Quote, "It is apparent that the Negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a race, in a condition of subservience, that he must remain the inferior. Therefore, the effort to educate him has awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, in the very nature of things, must go unrealized." Close quote. It's that phrase, "in the very nature of things"- Yeah... that gets to the view.
Yes. That was a pervasive view during that era.
And it is straightforward, pure racism in the strict sense of believing that the races are materially different from one another.
Yes. it's, it's, it's, it's sort of hard to, - One of the, one of the problems with this way of thinking is that it eter- it eternalizes a set of circumstances that exist at the moment. and when you realize how even a whole century is just a, blink of an eye, in the history of the human race, and when you realize, for example, that, IQ tests have only existed for about a century, and are by no means infallible. y- you... If you look back over the centuries, and you see how the races that were on top at one time were now no longer on top. I mean, at one time, the Middle East was the leading civilization in the world, and before them, China, for even more centuries, was the leading civilization in the world. And even within Europe, it was precisely the Southern Europeans who were so much more advanced than the people in Britain or Scandinavia back in the days of, -
Greece and Rome
Greece and Rome. but what the people of that era did was take the different achievements of different groups, and sort of freeze them in stone, as if there was no past and there would be no future.
it's possible to dismiss Mencken.
Mencken is one of the figures you mention here as a provocateur or a reactionary. But you note that his views were shared by John Maynard Keynes- -hmm... H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson. Leading figures- Yes... looked upon even today as leading intellectuals of the first years of the 20th century. They weren't bad or malevolent people. no. Talk for a moment or two, bec- they based, as best I can tell from the book, the IQ tests. They believed that they actually had objective evidence. They had proof-... of the differences between races- -hmm... arising from these intelligence tests that began to be given around the time of the First World War.
Yes.
Where do these tests come from?
Well, different places. c- some from Stanford, Terman, for example. but, - One of the people, Brigham, who was the author of the scho- college board apt- scholastic aptitude test- Right... made the argument that, these tests disproved the idea that Jews were very intelligent, - Okay... because they scored low on the Army Mental Test in the First World War. And now, seven years later, he finally comes out and l- says, you know, that, admits that his conclusion was without foundation because, many of the immigrants who took that test were raised in homes where people didn't speak English. Right. they didn't look into the data on Blacks, where, whose,... My gosh, the, amount of education that Blacks had at that time was pathetic, and the quality was even worse. so one of the i- ironies that I found in going through these things in detail was that if you look at the Army tests, that, Blacks did, much worse on very easy te- questions, that required a knowledge of words than on much more difficult questions that did not. and so, for example, the questions were, "Tell which of the following are, opposites." And they had things like, black and white, night and day, up and down, and Blacks got wiped out on those tests. And the reason, is that how many of them knew what the word opposite meant at that point?
Right.
Well- But the, but the other test, for example, required you to look at pictures of stacks of blocks, including some blocks you couldn't see, but which you had to infer from the shape of the stack and count them, and Blacks didn't do nearly as badly on those tests.
Got it. You also note that certain cultural groups scored especially low on abstract reasoning. It's not just African Americans. It's also Gaelic speakers in the Scottish Hebrides. It's Indians in South Africa. It's working-class children in rural England. It's lower-class youngsters in Venezuela.
Hmm.
It's p- a particular culture that is perhaps too poor to have the time, as it were, or the, the intellectual resources to devote to abstract reasoning.
I would look at it somewhat differently.
You would.
I would say that, very often we try to explain, for example, why the Irish didn't do as well as the English. and the real question is, well, the real fact is that the Irish, were much more typical of people around the world than were the English, and the real question is, why did the English do so much better? Not-
Why was there an industrial rev- revolution on one island and not on the other?
That, that's right. and I th- I think the same thing here, that, - If you go far enough back in history, I suspect you'll find that most of the human race had no interest in abstractions and so the question becomes certain kinds of cultures- Oh, I see do have a, have a desire for abs- get into abstractions and that becomes an enormous advantage to them but, y- I wouldn't try to explain why the others didn't do it because the others were un- were unfortunately what the majority of the people, are like in the world, even today.
All right. Liberals, intellectuals and race. If minorities were seen as the problem during the progressive era, the majority was seen as the problem during the liberal era that began after the Second World War. The central premise of liberal intellectuals for decades was that the racial problem was essentially inside the minds of white people.. Explain that, Tom.
Well, what Gunnar Myrdal, who did the classic s- study on this, said was that, he... you didn't even have to look at what Blacks did. You could only look at, just look at what the white was- whites were thinking. And this suggests that, that these random thoughts from nowhere were the reasons, reason for the problems. The pr- the problem was that different groups of people have been different in substance all around the world and for centuries, and that Blacks and whites in the United States are no, are no exception to that. and it's very hard to have a society where people with very different cultures coexist.
Tom, you quote in Intellectuals and Race the famous Black writer James Baldwin. He's writing in 1960, quote, "People in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. In a new housing project in Harlem, they naturally began smashing windows, defacing walls," and you'll forgive me, but this is his language, "urinating in the elevators," close quote.. What's wrong with his thinking?
Oh my gosh, you'd need a couple of hours. But, it so happens I grew up in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, and you didn't expect to find, people urinating, in places where Black people lived. in fact, the pu- there's very little attention given to the fact that the public housing of that era was radically different from the public housing of today. I remember we had a relative of ours got into some public housing. We were so proud-... because, you had to have a certain character, a record and so forth to get in. these were not places where you had dumping grounds for people who were at the bottom of the pile.
There was no less discrimination in the '40s and '50s in the minds of white people toward Black people- That's right when you were growing up in Harlem.
That's right.
And yet Harlem, I was just thinking about this the other day, the great Duke Ellington classic, Take the A Train.
Yeah.
The A train was and remains, as far as I know, the subway train up the West Side of Manhattan. Yes. It's what white people used to get to Harlem. Yeah. Harlem was an attractive place. It was a place of culture and excitement. Yeah. So what was it, then, if it wasn't in the minds of white people, what took place in Harlem in the '60s?
I think the '60s was a period of general irrationality, and wherever there's irrationality, there are people who know how to turn that irrationality to their benefit. And you began to get some very opportunistic, l- leaders who then began to say things, that they knew to be false but which they knew would advance their careers.
Now, let me quote Intellectuals and Race one more time. "Among the differences between the two eras," that is to say, the time you grew up in Harlem and the '60s, "was that the intelligentsia, both Black and white, became more prone in the later period to make excuses for moral squalor and barbaric behavior." Your words here. -hmm. "After such notions permeated the society, barbaric behavior and moral squalor became accepted norms within some segments." Close quote. So you are not merely making the argument, I'm asking, that the liberal view that what was in their minds dictated the behavior of African Americans- that you're not merely making the view that the liberals were mistaken.
You're making the view that they're, that they, you're making the argument that they were culpable.
Yes. and, a- and as I point out a few ti- places in the book, you can go to England and see the very same pattern emerging, including this, pattern where, kids in school who are trying to do well get beaten up by other kids. Theodore Dalrymple is a doctor in Britain, and he writes about the, those kids who come to, who have to go to the hospital, they're, they're so badly beaten up, simply because they're doing well in school, and these are white kids, lower class in Britain. So you see the very same pattern, and all the things that are supposed to explain that pattern and explain it away among Blacks are found among people who have none of those same factors. But what's the same in both places is that the intellectuals have told them that the world is unjust, that other people are keeping them down, that the fact that they don't have what other people have is somebody else's fault. And if you buy that vision, then of course there's no reason for you to do well in school, and you resent those who do well because they are, they've bought into the enemy's, way of thinking.
Multiculturalism. First, the progressive era in intellectuals and race, then you deal with the liberal era, and then the, comes the era of multiculturalism. Intellectuals and race, quote, "The era of multiculturalism might be considered an extension of the liberal era, but it has evolved its own characteristics. Multiculturalism is an insistence that the particular cultures found among less fortunate groups are not to be blamed for disparities in income or education or crime rates, but are a net positive."
Yes.
Close quote. Explain that.
Well, I don't know how to, how to say it differently. the, you, you can't find an- any fault with any group that is, less fortunate. The, n- there are no, there are no, behaviors that they need to change in order to advance. Society needs to accept them as they are. In other words, y- the causes are to remain the same, but the effects are to change. And if the effects don't change, then it's society's fault.
So for example The, there was a period, I'm trying to remember now, I believe it was in the mid-'70s- when, substandard English began to become a s- a, a- Yes... began to become viewed as a discipline of its own within linguistic- Oh, yes... studies and so forth. And for all I know, it was all perfectly legitimate that certain speech patterns would be traced back to various regions in Africa and so forth, and th- this is a, this is a language of its own. It has its own validity. But the argument, your argument would be, I don't really care what its validity is, it's holding people back.
Yes.
It's, it's preventing them par- from participating in the wider society. Is that right?
Abso- absolutely. And also, none of these things went back to Africa.
Oh, is that so?
No. yeah, you can, y- yes, they did not go back to Africa. if you look at, the peach- for example, using the word aks for ask and stuff like that, all of that goes back to the South and the, and it goes back to the parts of Britain from which white Southerners came. So, if you trace The ca- calling, hog entrails chitlins, that was, that, that was in a certain section of Britain, the section from which whites moved into the South. And the pe- and they were known as, rednecks and crackers in Britain in centuries past, before they ever set foot in the South. so it, the whole thing is as phony as the three-dollar bill.
All right. Once again, intellectuals and race. The key word among advocates of multiculturalism became diversity.
Ah, yes.
Sweeping claims for the benefits of demographic and cultural diversity have prevailed without a speck of evidence being asked for or given. Name a few institutions in which diversity is championed without s- w- without evidence.
Gosh, the question would be, name one where that isn't the case. I would say the whole Ivy League, s- Stanford, Berkeley.
Corporate America?
Yes. and it's really, it's really miraculous almost. I mean, I can't think of a word that has gained such widespread use and which is utterly unchallenged, without one speck of evidence. If you look at societies that are diverse, they have all they can do to avoid, b- mutual bloodshed. I mean, India, for example, is very diverse. And, you know, the, the
num- It bar- barely coheres as a nation, so
That's right. when, when India, was w- given its freedom by Britain and split into c- India and Pakistan, I mean, the number of people slaughtered between Hindus and Muslims ran into the hundreds of thousands.
All right. so this brings us to affirmative action, of course.. And, let's take a look at the 2003 Supreme Court case, Grutter versus Bo- Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court upheld the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School. Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "The Constitution," quote, "does not prohibit the tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body," close quote. That's pretty high-sounding.
It certainly is.
What's wrong with that?
It would've been nice if she could produce one speck of evidence for it
Doesn't it feel intuitively correct, though- No... that you put students together with other students of different backgrounds and different-
Yeah, let's assume for the sake of argument that it is intuitively, accepted. That doesn't relieve you from having to look at the evidence to find out if that's true. one of the things that the,... When I was going around, when I was taking my kids around to pick colleges, I would go into the lunch room at lunchtime and look around, and if I found that all the Black kids were at the s- at one table and all the white kids were at a different table, I knew what the, what the atmosphere was at that school.
I went to school in the, in the '50s. I never saw that.
So you, you say what the benefits are gonna be, and then you come along and test it. You don't just say, "That sounds so wonderful that there's no need to go into, go any further." And if, and if you look at what has happened in these places, you find that the polarization is far greater after these policies are followed than there were before.
So the test, this never occurred to me before, but I th- I think we've just invented the Sowell test.
Well, I,
I- The test is not admissions.
huh.
The test is whether there's diversity at the lunch table.
Well, there's that.
Or, or people sitting with their groups of their own. Oh,
yes.
Okay. Intellectuals and race. Quote, "A growing body of empirical data shows that Black students mismatched with the colleges or universities they attend fail or drop out more often than other students. The problem is not that these Black students are unqualified. The problem is that they are mismatched with the college or university that has admitted them for the sake of," quote, "diversity."
Yeah.
Now, what do you mean by mismatched?
Well, I, I'll give a c- simple example. when I was teaching at Cornell in the, back in the '60s, the average, SAT score of Black, of Black students at Cornell was at the 75th percentile. the average, SAT for the white students in liberal arts was the 99th percentile.
We all taught to the students who were at the 99th percentile. Students who were at the 75th percentile had a hard time trying to keep up. They didn't have the reading speed. They didn't have the mathematical facility, and so on. Had these very same students gone to some place where the other students were the 75th percentile, they'd have had no problem. Half the Black students at Cornell at that time were on academic probation. It was even worse at MIT. The average Black student, when this study was done some years ago at MIT, scored in the top 10% nationwide in math. They scored in the bottom 10% at MIT.
So the point is, there are a lot of very good schools in America where they could have gone and been right in the swim- Yes of elite institutions.
Yes.
Just not at MIT.
That's right.
All right. So we've established in Intellectuals and Race, the progressives are obviously culpable. They were racists.. They were straightforward racists. Under Woodrow Wilson, you make the point, it was under Woodrow Wilson that certain agencies in the federal government first begin to enforce segregation.
Yes, in Washington.
So culpable, culpability on the part of the progressives. You've just told us that the liberals, by enunciating their views, insisting on them in public again and again and again, set up a kind of intellectual culture that made things worse- Yeah... not better. Again, they're at fault. And now you're saying that multiculturalists, if only, th- this example of bringing kids into institutions for which they're ill-qualified, you take bright, hardworking, otherwise perfectly well-qualified students and put them in the wrong institution, and you set them back in life.
Yes.
And they're culpable as well. They ought to know better.
Yes.
Intellectuals and Race, quote, "The intelligentsia pay no price for being wrong."
Th- I think that's the secret of their influence.
How's that?
Well, i- i- if you come up with a lot of wrong ideas and pay a price for it, you're forced to think about it and to change your ways or else get eliminated, but there's no such test. The only test, for most intellectuals is whether other intellectuals go along with them, and if they all have a wrong idea, then it becomes invincible.
Tom, you're coming pretty close to saying intellectuals aren't very smart.
They are very smart in ver- in very limited areas.
Oh.
And they don't realize that it's the limited areas. That's the problem. I mean, chess grandmasters are very smart. I mean, if you can stand there blindfolded and play three different players without looking at the board and beat them, you're pretty smart.
S- so your argument would be that at a l- elite institution, the folks in the physics department are really good physicists.
hmm.
And the folks in the English department know everything there is to know about Shakespeare and Milton.. But there's no reason to suppose at all that they've done any work in or studied the evidence on affirmative action or any of the other policies by which they int- attempt to deal with racial problems in this country, and yet they all, somehow or other, believe the same things about it.
Yes.
Okay. This is all very disconcerting, Tom, you know. Cosmic justice. Ah. Intellectuals and race. Quote, "No individual or group can be blamed for being born into circumstances that lack advantages, but neither can society be automatically assumed to be either the cause or the cure for such disparities."
Yeah.
Close quote. So what you're arguing is that despite centuries of, several centuries of slavery... for, I'm talking now about Af- the African American experience in this country. Slavery ends, you've got decades of Jim Crow.. You've got policies that have created substandard conditions in one inner city in America after another to this day. Despite all of that, for the African American child born in inner city Detroit tomorrow, it just is what it is. It's nobody's fault that child is likely to have worse life expectations than the white kid born tomorrow in Greenwich, Connecticut.
That's true you can't, the ease with which people draw connections between one thing and another is just amazing. I mean, it's like, it's like, I mean, the, the average of Black kid today, I think, is probably, better off, certainly materially, than, say Ben Carson was when he was growing up.
Ben Carson, the famous, - Black neurosurgeon surgeon at Johns Hopkins.
Right. Right. I-
Who is immensely accomplished in every way.
Yes.
Right.
I would say that, certainly the Black kids who, are growing up today have a higher material standard of living than I had. the only, the differ- difference was that, the schools were good when I came along. They were especially good in New York at that time, hard as that is to believe. but, the kids who grew up that, in that same place where I lived, they will not get that same education. Now, that can be blamed on somebody, but it has very little to do with what happened, 100 or 200 years ago And it's true in other countries. I mean, in Nigeria for example, there's a tribe, the Igbos, who are living in one of the l- least fertile parts of, Nigeria, who were in fact enslaved, in centuries past by other tribes and so on. when the British moved in and set up schools, the Igbos went for the schools. By the time Nigeria became, independent, the Igbos had climbed above the other groups that had been ahead of them b- to begin with. So there, but there are all kinds of, cross currents of factors. the particular culture or the particular geography. Y- you run through the whole list of them.
Here's... Y- you cite, in Intellectuals and Race, you cite an observation by the intelligence expert, IQ scientist James Flynn, w- that just stopped me cold.. After the Second World War, you've got large numbers of American troops remaining in Germany. Yeah. For that matter, there's still s- several tens of thousands there today, and both Black and white American soldiers had children with German women.. And Flynn discovered that those children growing up in Germany- showed no IQ differences at all.
The, the Black kids and the white kids, the same. Quote, quoting Intellectuals and Race, "Professor Flynn concluded that the reason was that the offspring of Black soldiers in Germany," and now you're quoting Professor Flynn, "grew up in a nation with no Black subculture."
Yeah.
Close quote. Which means what? Which means they experienced exactly the same expectations? Is this the-
No, no. The expectations are external. The culture in which they grew up w- was not the culture in which Black kids grew up in America today.
So they had-
There's no gangster rap in Ger-... that was pervasively, available in Germany
So here's what I'm getting. There is something about Black subculture in America today-... that holds African Americans themselves back?
Yes. In fact, I, well, I, I went into this in a previous, book on which, about B- Black rednecks and white liberals. Because that same
subculture- Let's, well, let's talk about two of your books here. Go
ahead... b- because that very sub- same subculture held white- whites in the South back as well. That in the time, this, mental testing in the First World War turned up, among other things, the fact that, whites from various, oh, f- four or five southern states scored lower on the mental test than Blacks from s- four or five northern states. And so it really was a question of the subculture that was there, which was a handicap to both.
All right. And so whose job is it to say, "Wrong subculture, folks. You're har- you're harming yourselves"?
Well, I would think in an ideal world that intellectuals might take on that task, but, the world that we live in, I've noticed, is not ideal.
All right. What is to be done? Take a look at President Lyndon Johnson speaking at Howard University in 1965. Oh, yeah.
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying now, "You are free to go where you want, now do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please." You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
It's pathetic. It's not a question of... There's no you who has the control to be completely fair or completely unfair. I mean, the circumstances are... S- so someone want, once criticized a m- mental test on grounds that the tests were unfair. And, one... And I think it was David Riesman who said, "The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair, and the tests are measuring the results." But who has control of life? Who has control of the past? Who has control of the culture that people have in the present, which they've inherited from the past?
So Lyndon Johnson, he's m- i- in fact, although good liberal that he was, at least in regard Lyndon Johnson had a complicated career and changed positions on issues many times. But good liberal though he was at that moment, he was in fact engaging in a breathtaking arrogance- Yes... on two counts. One, that white people were the ones who were responsible for where Black people stood in the race.. That it was up to whites entirely, that Blacks, as he descri- I mean, I put it to you- It's devastating. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a devastating- The Black people are passive. They're acted upon. That's right. That's right. And then the second act of arrogance is the supposition that somehow the federal government could fix it.
Yes. i- it is staggering. but y- if you wanted to be charitable, you could say, "Well, he said this in 1965." But if you say, "All right. Why are people now repeating it in 2013, when we've had, a nearly half a century o- of experience to the contrary?" And if you look within the Black community, those Blacks who had escaped what I call the Black redneck culture, they've moved on. B- so but it is, it's in, it's, it's, it's, it's the culture the different parts of the Black community had. They were, they were different.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his famous 1965 report entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, close quote- Longest, longish quotation, but it gets to something, I believe. Moynihan, "The fundamental problem is that of family structure. The Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class has managed to save itself." -hmm. "But for vast numbers of the unskilled and poorly educated, the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself." Close quote. When Moynihan wrote those words, the illegitimacy rate among African Americans was 25%.
Today, the illegitimacy rate among white Americans is 36%. Yeah. Among Hispanics, more than 50%, and among African Americans, more than 70%.
Yes.
Aside from throwing up your hands in despair, what, h- what is to be done?
First, the first thing to be done is to understand that this was a result of policies begun in the 1960s. This is not a legacy of what happened 100 years before the 1960s.
The breakdown of the Black family is not a legacy of slavery.
No. If you, the, the classic study of this goes all the way back to the era of slavery, and they find that most, Black kids, even under slavery, had lived with two, with two parents, and that was true all the way up until the 1960s. and so you, if you really wanna find out what has hap- what's changed, it has changed since the 1960s. And then the fact that, that whites now ha- have a higher rate of l- illegitimacy than Blacks had when Moynihan wrote suggests that this is, something that spreads out. But if you look at something else, if you look at those Blacks, look at Black husband-wife families- -hmm the, poverty rate among such families has been in single digits ever since, every year since 1994. So- And so, and so we, so if you look at the e- and you look at the external causes, why the, the husband-wife families and the, welfare, single mo- mom families all are facing the same, society and objective things, but the, but the results are radically different because the cultures and values are different.
So you would, you would roll back welfare. I guess that's the principal policy. You, you... Let's, okay, so what would Tom Sowell do? One, you'd roll, you'd eliminate welfare, you'd reform welfare? What would you do?
Roll it back.
All right. And what about affirmative action?
Eliminate it.
Just gone.
Yeah.
Color-blind- Yeah... policy completely. All right. What prospect for that do you see?
None.
No black- At present... no Black leader of any standing. I'm talking about a political leader as opposed to an intellectual- Right... such as yourself. You've got... Well, there's you, there's Walter Williams. is there, do you get the sense that there's a, that there's a growing generation, a rising generation of African American intellectuals who say, "Enough of this. I'm with Tom Sowell"?
Well, I don't know if, that they'll go that far. There's no point in being- That
would be asking
a lot. Being, not, being, there's no point in being reckless. but, I think, there are people like, Shelby Steele and many others, Larry Elder. You can run through a long list, and there are more such pe- more such people now than there were, say, in the 1970s. But in terms of political leaders, all the, all the incentives politically are for Black leaders to blame all problems in the Black community on the larger society, and that enables them to take on the role of being the defender of the Black community against enemies, which in turn, creates the situation in which many Blacks don't feel that anything that they do is gonna, is gonna help themselves unless it's done politically as a group. That there's no point. I mean, why would you, if you believe what the, what, that's what they say, why would you wanna knock yourself out in the school knowing that the man is not gonna let you get anywhere? one of the most pathetic things I heard r- in recent years was a young Black man saying that, you know, at one point he thought he would join the Air Force and become a pilot, and then he says he realized that the White man is not gonna let a Black man become a pilot, and he was saying this decades after the Tennessee Airmen had established their reputation in combat in Europe, you know? But he, but the hopelessness i- is one of the big products of the, of the race industry. That you have, you have no chance. I remember giving a talk at Marquette, and at the end of the talk, among the questions that was asked, a young, again, a young Black man got up and he said, "Even though I am graduating from Marquette University, what hope is there for me?" And, having gone through college when I was in the '50s, I don't remember any Blacks on this, saying that in the 1950s, when there was a lot more obstacles to overcome than there were when this guy's graduating from Marquette. But you, but you have to pr- produce that kind of feeling in order to serve the interests of those in the race industry.
Final question, then. Maybe we can, maybe we can think in terms of that young man at Marquette or let's put it this way. Somewhere watching this interview, there's a young Thomas Sowell. There's an African American who's smart and wants to do something with his life What s- it seems to me, I've al- we've already got one piece of advice you'd offer to him is stay away from the, from the racist industry. Stay away from the- Race hustlers... what advice... Race hustlers. What advice would you give a young Thomas Sowell? How do you make something of yourself as an African-American in America today?
The way anybody else would. You equip yourself with skills that people are willing to pay for.
All right. Thomas Sowell, author of Intellectuals and Race, and-
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Black Rednecks and Right- White Liberals, and the author of another two dozen other books-... every one of them worth reading. Dr. Thomas Sowell, thank you.
Thank you.
For the Hoover Institution and the Wall Street Journal, I'm Peter Robinson
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