Review of Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Race

Thomas Sowell’s book Intellectuals and Race argues, among other things, that discrimination and past discrimination are not the sole causes for differences in achievement between ethnic groups, that affirmative action usually ends up not helping who it is intended to help, and that perverse financial incentives have a role in motivating what he calls “the race industry.”

Thomas Sowell is one of the most prominent critics of social justice philosophy, but, disappointingly, few people seem willing to respond to him. The Goodreads reviews of Intellectuals and Race tend to be gushing in their praise. One exception is Ryan, who brings up several issues about Sowell’s book. Some of Ryan’s critiques I am not convinced about; however, Ryan has it spot-on on this issue:

There is some recent work . . . about the experiences with discrimination of recent African Immigrants that also undercuts the culturalist explanation- it turns out that being perceived as "Black" regardless of your own culture and values (and other opportunity structures) can limit one's life chances in ways that matter.

Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, the co-author of Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?, points to a variety of conclusive empirical studies that there is something distinctive about color of skin that results in divergent outcomes even when other factors are controlled for (see here).

Another frustration I have with Sowell’s book is that he seems unwilling to make concessions and instead repeatedly represents liberal attitudes about race solely in a negative light. He is prone at times to overstatement and inflammatory language. For instance, he writes,

Multiculturalism, like the caste system, tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them (110).

Sowell uses “multiculturalism” to mean the liberal vision of race relations. Sowell’s justification for his view lies in the widespread hesitancy in placing the onus on underperforming minorities to improve their situation. Sowell writes,

The corrections being urged are seldom corrections within the lagging groups, such as Hume urged upon his fellow Scots in the eighteenth century. Today, the prevailing tenets of multiculturalism declare all cultures equal, sealing members of lagging groups within a bubble of their current habits and practices, much as believers in multiculturalism have sealed themselves within a bubble of peer-consensus dogma (50-51).

My experience leads me to believe that these statements are an unfair characterization of most of those who do the work on the ground in social justice. I lived in a teacher boot camp for eight weeks at Teach For America Bay Area, an organization that was led and composed of people who, without exception as far as I could tell, ascribed to liberal views on race issues. Yet, at the risk of stating the obvious, we wanted to help students have more opportunities than their parents had, and not uphold the status quo. I certainly was encouraged to have high expectations of my students and was warned about how lowering expectations for students could be a kind of racism.

To his credit, Sowell usually qualifies his statements more carefully, leading to more sound conclusions as below:

Sometimes there is an implicit assumption that any lack of skills or other qualifications among blacks today is solely a result of previous discrimination-- rather than any of the innumerable other factors producing equal or greater differences among other racial or ethnic groups in other countries around the world. Sometimes this belief even became explicit, as when Justice Harry Blackmun declared in the Weber case in 1979 that there could be “little doubt that any lack of skill has its roots in purposeful discrimination of the past” (105).

Sowell's book contains one of the most thorough critiques of social justice philosophy I have ever heard, but I think that unfortunately, its moments of one-sidedness play a part in the fact that the book is mainly ignored by liberals.

I did not know that Thomas Sowell was black when I started reading this book and I was quite surprised when I eventually realized that he was. It is interesting to consider what led Sowell to passionately defend ideas that some might call racist. The book is almost entirely bereft of personal anecdotes, but Sowell does include one revealing footnote:

As a personal note, I lived in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, when no one expected the smell of urine to be the norm in places where blacks lived. Others familiar with that period likewise paint a radically different picture of that era. For example: “These were not projects of idle, stinky elevators, of gang-controlled stairwells where drug deals go down. In the 1940s, ‘50s and 60’s when most of the city’s public housing was built, a sense of pride and community permeated well-kept corridors, apartments and grounds.” . . . There was certainly not less discrimination or racism in this earlier period, so the difference was not due to white people. Among the differences between the two eras was that the intelligentsia, both black and white, became more prone in the later period to make excuses such as James Baldwin made for moral squalor and barbaric behavior. After such notions permeated the society, barbaric behavior and moral squalor became accepted norms within some segments of society -- and among many intellectuals observing those segments of society.

So Sowell does have his own personal reasons for his conclusions, which inform his intellectual arguments. I find his arguments about how “enlightened” views about race relations have the potential to be counterproductive to be sincere and persuasive.