Race and Politics: Part II & III

Race and Politics: Part II
Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, April 07, 2010


No dogma has caused more mischief-- and, in some countries, tragedies-- than the notion that there is something strange and wrong when some groups are "over-represented" or "under-represented" in some occupations or institutions.

This dogma is so widely accepted, and so deeply entrenched, that no one asks for evidence and no speck of evidence is offered.

Moreover, tons of evidence to the contrary are ignored.

Over the centuries, and in countries around the world, all sorts of groups have been disproportionately concentrated in particular occupations and at different income levels, and have had radical differences in their behavior, from rates of alcoholism to rates of crime and infant mortality.

Often some minority, with no political power, has outperformed the dominant majority in lucrative or prestigious professions-- the Tamils in colonial Ceylon, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese minority throughout southeast Asia, the Huguenots in France, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Japanese in Brazil, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Jews in medieval Spain. The list could be extended almost indefinitely.

Yet, through sheer assumption and repetition, the opposite view-- that any "under-representation" of any group in desirable situations or their "over-representation" in undesirable situations must be due to the way they are treated by others-- has become the prevailing dogma of a secular religion.

Not only the media and politicians, but intellectuals and even the highest courts in the land, presume discrimination when some groups are "under-represented" in an employer's workforce or are "over-represented" among children disciplined in school. Tests that show some groups more proficient than others are declared to be "culturally biased." Higher infant mortality among some groups are assumed to be society's fault for not providing "access" to prenatal care for all.

A major factor in the housing boom and bust that created the present economic predicament was massive government intervention in the housing market, supposedly to correct discrimination in mortgage lending. How did they know that there was discrimination? Because blacks were turned down for mortgage loans at a higher rate than whites.

It so happens that whites were turned down for mortgage loans at a higher rate than Asian Americans, but that fact seldom made it into the newspaper headlines or the political rhetoric. Nor did either the mainstream media or political leaders mention the fact that black-owned banks turned down black mortgage loan applicants at least as often as white-owned banks did.

There was never the slightest reason to expect the different racial or ethnic groups in the United States to have the same credit ratings or the same behavior or performance in any other way, when both racial and non-racial groups of various sorts have for centuries had radically different patterns of behavior and performance in countries around the world.

The difference between per capita income in Eastern Europe and Western Europe has long been greater than the difference in per capita income between blacks and whites in America.

Yet, despite the fact that group differences have been the rule-- not the exception-- in all sorts of times and places, many people in these places and times have pointed to such disparities in their own country as evidence of something strange, if not sinister.

An extremist movement began in Bombay (now Mumbai) when a journalist hyped the fact that the indigenous people of the region were almost totally missing among the business elites of that city. The seeds of a disastrous civil war in Sri Lanka were planted by politicians who hyped the fact that the Tamil minority was over-represented among the owners of businesses and among university students. A military coup in Fiji was provoked because the descendants of people from India were likewise doing so much better than the indigenous Fijians.

Not all of this was simply a matter of intellectual confusion. Political power was the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Race hustling can also be a lucrative occupation, as Jesse Jackson -- among others-- has demonstrated in the United States. As long as we keep buying it, the hustlers will keep selling it.
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Race and Politics: Part III
Thomas Sowell
Thursday, April 08, 2010

The blatant and undeniable fact that different racial, ethnic and other groups have had radically different economic and intellectual achievements for centuries, in countries around the world, has led to widely varying theories and widely varying political and other reactions.

A hundred years ago, during the Progressive era in the United States, the dominant explanation was that different genes made different races either more capable or less capable. Similar views prevailed on the other side of the Atlantic, among people on both the left and the right, many of whom urged eugenics, in order to prevent "inferior" groups from reproducing.

The problem with this explanation was that it ignored the great changes in the relative positions of races over the centuries. In medieval times, Europeans could not match the achievements of the Chinese, but in later centuries their relative positions reversed-- and there was no evidence of any fundamental change in the genes of either the Chinese or the Europeans.

Much was made of the fact that, within Europe, "Nordics" were prospering more so than the peoples of Mediterranean Europe. But, a thousand years earlier, the reverse was true. A 10th century Muslim scholar pointed out that the farther north you go in Europe, the more pale the people become and the "farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are."

However much such words might be dismissed or condemned today, there is no reason to say that these words were untrue as of the time they were said. So many things that have been said about race may have had some basis as of a given time, even if the sweeping conclusion that these are immutable traits does not stand the test of time.

Today's racial dogmas are no more realistic, when they try to dismiss or downplay behavioral and performance differences among racial and ethnic groups, blaming different outcomes on the misdeeds of others. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings. But the fatal misstep is to assume that those sins must be the reason for the differences we see.

The more fundamental question that almost never gets asked is whether there was ever any realistic basis for expecting different racial, ethnic or other groups to all have the same skills and orientations, even if they all had the same genetic potential and there were no injustices.

Those who see differences among groups as being due to environment, rather than heredity, too often think of environment as the current immediate surroundings. But a major part of any group's environment is the culture that they have inherited from the past.

One of a number of factors that has made Western Europeans more prosperous than Eastern Europeans is that Western Europe was conquered by the Romans, so that Western European languages acquired Roman letters, centuries before the languages of Eastern Europe had written versions.

Being conquered by the Romans was one of those historic happenstances with enduring consequences. For those who were conquered, it could be a traumatic experience, for the Romans could be both brutal and oppressive.

Their abuses in Britain caused a massive uprising of the Britons, who were slaughtered by the thousands. Nevertheless, even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, "We owe London to Rome."

The enduring cultural advantages that the peoples of Western Europe acquired as a result of being conquered by Rome in no way justifies the Romans morally. But the fact is that the advantages that Roman civilization brought to Western Europe allowed Western Europeans to advance earlier and faster in a wide range of endeavors.

In a similar way, the fact that people of African ancestry in the United States have a far higher standard of living than the people of African ancestry still living in sub-Saharan Africa, is due to injustices and abuses inflicted on black Americans' ancestors.

Causation and morality are two different things, however much they get confused today by politicians and the media.
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To read the first article of this series by Thomas Sowell, click here.