Intellectuals and Race

by Thomas Sowell

  If the dogmas of multiculturalism declare different cultures equally valid, and hence sacrosanct against efforts to change them, then these dogmas simply complete the sealing off of a vision from facts— and sealing off many people in lagging groups from the advances available from other cultures around them— leaving nothing but an agenda of resentment-building and crusades on the side of the angels against the forces of evil— however futile or even counterproductive these may turn out to be for those who are the ostensible beneficiaries of such moral melodramas.

  Nor can whole cultures always be left unchanged while simply tacking on new skills, since the very desire, efforts and perseverance required to acquire and master those skills are not independent of the existing culture. Moreover, the corollary of the presumed equality of cultures— that existing disparities are due to injustices inflicted by others— reduces a felt need to subject oneself to the demanding process of changing one’s own capabilities, habits and outlook.

  The perspective of cosmic justice is implicit in much of what is said and done by many intellectuals on many issues— for example, best-selling author Andrew Hacker’s depiction of people like himself who tend “to murmur, when seeing what so many blacks endure, that there but for an accident of birth, go I.”1 However valid this may be as a general statement of the vision of cosmic justice and cosmic injustice, the word “endure” implies something more than that. It implies that the misfortunes of those on the short end of cosmic injustices are due to what they must endure at the hands of other people, rather than being due to either external circumstances that presented fewer opportunities for them to acquire valuable human capital or internal cultural values which worked against their taking advantage of the opportunities already available to them.

  In this, Professor Hacker has been in the long tradition of intellectuals who more or less automatically transform differences into inequities and inequities into the evils or shortcomings of society. Among the many feats of verbal virtuosity by Andrew Hacker and others is transforming negative facts about the group that is considered to be the victim of society into mere perceptions by that society. Thus Professor Hacker refers to “what we call crime,” to “so-called riots,” and to “what we choose to call intelligence.”2 Such exercises in verbal cleansing extend to racism, from which blacks are definitionally exempt, according to Hacker, by the newly minted proviso of possessing power3— a proviso which serves no other purpose than providing an escape hatch from the obvious. All this clearly puts Hacker on the side of the angels, rather explicitly when he says, “On the whole, conservatives don’t really care whether black Americans are happy or unhappy,”4 as presumably liberals like himself do.

  Professor Hacker expresses empathy with those blacks who work in predominantly white organizations and “are expected to think and act in white ways”5— the same kind of objection made by Latvians and Czechs in times past, when acquiring another culture was the price of their rising in a world where their own culture did not equip them with the same prerequisites for achievement as Germans already had. Apparently people are to think and behave as they have in the past and yet somehow get better results in the future— and, if they don’t get better results, that is considered to be society’s fault. Achieving the same results as others, without having to change, in order to acquire the same cultural prerequisites that others acquired without changing, would be cosmic justice, if it happened, but hardly a promising agenda in the real world.

  Multiculturalism, like the caste system, tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one’s life chances should be the same— and that it is society’s fault if these chances are not the same. Although both caste and multiculturalism suppress individual opportunities, they differ primarily in that the caste system preaches resignation to one’s fate and multiculturalism preaches resentment of one’s fate. Another major difference between caste and multiculturalism is that no one was likely to claim that the caste system was a boon to the lower castes.

  As for more general questions about racial or ethnic identity, the costs of an identity ideology include not only the advancement that is forfeited, but also the needless disadvantages of letting people who represent the lowest common denominator of a group have a disproportionate influence on the fate of the group as a whole.

  If criminals, rioters and vandals from within the group are to be automatically defended or excused for the sake of group solidarity, then the costs of that solidarity include not only a lower standard of living, since such people raise the costs of doing business in their neighborhoods and thereby raise the prices of goods and services above what they are in other neighborhoods, such people also cause fewer businesses to locate in their neighborhoods and fewer taxis to be willing to take people to such neighborhoods. Worst of all, the damage committed by those representing the lowest common denominator— encompassing crimes up to and including murder— is overwhelmingly against other members of their own group.

  The high costs of putting race-based solidarity ahead of behavior and its consequences include letting the lowest common denominator become a disproportionate influence in defining the whole community itself, not only in the eyes of the larger society but also within the community. When middle-class black youngsters feel a need or pressure to adopt some of the counterproductive attitudes, values or lifestyles of the lowest common denominator, including negative attitudes toward education, lest they be accused of “acting white,” then the life chances of whole generations can be sacrificed on the altar to racial solidarity. Yet a sense of the overriding importance of solidarity based on race extends far beyond children in school and goes far back in history. Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 classic, An American Dilemma, pointed out that it had long been the practice of black Americans to “protect any Negro from the whites, even when they happen not to like that individual Negro.”6

  When outsiders’ criticisms of any segment of a community cannot be either accepted or refuted, the response is often to claim that these critics are “blaming the victim.” But this whole concept confuses blame with causation. The masses of less educated and less acculturated blacks, whose migrations out of the South in the twentieth century and whose arrival in Northern cities led to retrogressions in race relations in the early part of the century— and whose later arrival in west coast cities during the Second World War led to similar retrogressions on the west coast— could hardly be blamed for having been born where they were and having absorbed the culture which existed around them in the South. But that does not deny these migrants’ causal role in the changes for the worse which occurred in cities outside the South after the Southern blacks’ arrivals there.

  No one in John Rawls’ “original position” as a disembodied being contemplating alternative circumstances into which to be born would have chosen to be born black in the South of that era. From a cosmic perspective, it was an injustice to those who were. But that is very different from saying that their mass migrations in search of a better life did not impose large costs on both the black and white populations already residing in the Northern cities to which they moved, or that these latter had no right to resent these costs or to try to protect themselves from them. The inherent conflict of these different legitimate desires and interests in each of these groups is part of the tragedy of the human condition— as contrasted with a simple moral melodrama starring the intelligentsia on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

  RACE AND CRIME

  The intelligentsia’s feats of verbal virtuosity reach their heights— or depths— when discussing the crime rate among blacks in America. For example, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker responded to an incident in which a white woman jogging in Central Park was gang raped by black youths, by denying that this was a racially motivated crime. Wicker said, “the fact that the victim was white and the attackers black does not seem to have caused the c
rime.” He added:

  But if race does not explain this crime, race was relevant to it. The attackers lived surrounded and surely influenced by the social pathologies of the inner city. They hardly could have reached teen age without realizing and resenting the wide economic and social gap that still separates blacks and whites in this country; and they could not fail to see, and probably return, the hostility that glares at them undisguised across that gap. These influences are bound to have had some consequences— perhaps long repressed, probably not realized or understood— in their attitudes and behavior.7

  The “wide economic and social gap” between blacks and whites that Wicker referred to was even wider in earlier years, when it was common for whites to go up to Harlem at night for public entertainment or private parties, and common for both blacks and whites to sleep out in the city’s parks on hot summer nights during an era when most people could not afford air-conditioning. But sleeping in parks— or in some cases, even walking through some of those same parks in broad daylight— became dangerous in later and more prosperous times. Yet here, as elsewhere, the prevailing vision often seems impervious to even the plainest facts.

  The role played by many people who, like Tom Wicker himself, have incessantly emphasized “gaps” and “disparities” as injustices to be resented, rather than lags to be overcome, is seldom considered to be among the candidates for inclusion among the “root causes” of crime, even though the rise of crime is far more consistent with the increasing prevalence of such grievance and resentment ideologies than with other things that are considered to be “root causes,” such as poverty levels, which have been declining as crime rates rose. Resentments, based on ideologies of cosmic justice, are not confined to the intelligentsia but “trickle down” to others. For example, right after charges of gang rape of a black woman were filed against white students on Duke University’s lacrosse team in 2006, angry reactions from a black college in the same town reflected that same vision, as reported in Newsweek:

  Across town, at NCCU, the mostly black college where the alleged victim is enrolled, students seemed bitterly resigned to the players’ beating the rap. “This is a race issue,” said Candice Shaw, 20. “People at Duke have a lot of money on their side.” Chan Hall, 22, said, “It’s the same old story. Duke up, Central down.” Hall said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”8

  Implicit in these statements are the key elements of the cosmic justice vision of the intelligentsia— seeing other people’s good fortune as a grievance, rather than an incentive for self-improvement, and seeing flesh-and-blood contemporaries as simply part of an intertemporal abstraction, so that a current injustice against them would merely offset other injustices of the past. There could hardly be a more deadly inspiration for a never-ending cycle of revenge and counter-revenge— the Hatfields and the McCoys writ large, with a whole society caught in the crossfire.

  The built-in excuse has become as standard in discussions of black crime as it is unsubstantiated, except by peer consensus among the intelligentsia. The phrase “troubled youth” is a common example of the unsubstantiated but built-in excuse, since those who use that phrase usually feel no need to offer any specific evidence about the specific individuals they are talking about, who may be creating big trouble for others, while enjoying themselves in doing so. An all too common pattern across the country was that in an episode in Milwaukee:

  Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone stolen, and then the laughter… “They just said, ‘Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,’” said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend… Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn noted Tuesday that crime is colorblind… “I saw some of my friends on the ground getting beat pretty severely.”… Perry needed three stitches to close a cut above her eye. She said she saw a friend getting kicked and when she walked up to ask what was happening, a man punched her in the face. “I heard laughing as they were beating everybody up. They were eating chips like it was a picnic,” said Perry, a restaurant cashier… Most of the 11 people who told the Journal Sentinel they were attacked or witnessed the attacks on their friends said that police did not take their complaints seriously… “About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn’t listen to us, they wouldn’t take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating.”9

  Variations on such episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people on beaches, in shopping malls or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other places across the country, often with the attackers voicing anti-white invective and mocking those they left injured or bleeding.10 But such episodes are often either ignored or downplayed in most of the media, and by officials— and the Chicago Tribune even offered an excuse for not reporting the race of the attackers in a series of such episodes that alarmed the Chicago public.11 Yet race is widely reported when it comes to imprisonment rates or other racial disparities. For example:

  In March of 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered a speech that highlighted racial disparities in school suspension and expulsion and that called for more rigorous civil rights enforcement in education. He suggested that students with disabilities and Black students, especially males, were suspended far more often than their White counterparts. These students, he also noted, were often punished more severely for similar misdeeds. Just months later, in September of 2010, a report analyzing 2006 data collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that more than 28% of Black male middle school students had been suspended at least once. This is nearly three times the 10% rate for white males. Further, 18% of Black females in middle school were suspended, more than four times as often as white females (4%). Later that same month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary Duncan each addressed a conference of civil rights lawyers in Washington, D.C., and affirmed their departments’ commitment to ending such disparities.12

  The very possibility that there might be behavioral differences behind the punishment differences does not surface in such discussions. To believe that there are no behavioral differences between black and white school-age males is to assume that the large and undeniable differences in crime rates— including murder rates— between black and white young adults suddenly and inexplicably materialize after they finish school.

  Professor David D. Cole of the Georgetown University Law School expressed views similar to those of Tom Wicker and many others among the intelligentsia of the multicultural era, when he lamented the increasing imprisonment of black men:

  In the 1950s, when segregation was still legal, African-Americans comprised 30 percent of the prison population. Sixty years later, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population, and that population has skyrocketed. The disparities are greatest where race and class intersect— nearly 60 percent of all young black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five.13

  Professor Cole posed the issue explicitly in the cosmic justice terms of John Rawls:

  Were we in John Rawls’ “original position,” with no idea whether we would be born a black male in an impoverished urban home… would we accept a system in which one out of every three black males born today can expect to spend time in jail during his life.14

  The preemptive assertion in passing that it is the system— something external, created by others in the larger society— that is the cause of the problem arbitrarily puts off limits at the outset the very possibility that the problem may be elsewhere. By sheer verbal virtuosity, rather than by any facts or evidence, collective responsibility is put on
those in the larger society. There is clearly something in the circumstances into which many black males are born that makes it far more likely that they will commit crimes than is true of the population in general, including the majority of the black population that does not end up behind bars. But that tells us absolutely nothing about what that something is. If it is being “impoverished,” then clearly there is a lot less poverty today than in 1950, when the imprisonment rate among black males was lower, even though invoking poverty remains at least as much a part of the rituals— as distinguished from arguments— of intellectuals today as then.

  Professor Cole adds some other statistics, that “only 5 percent of college-educated African-Americans” have spent time in prison, while the imprisonment rate for black male high-school dropouts “is nearly fifty times the national average.”15 He also notes, “Children with parents in prison are in turn seven times more likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lives than other children.”16 None of this supports the claim that the cause is an external “system,” as asserted by Professor Cole, rather than an internal counterproductive culture, perhaps aided and abetted by outsiders who excuse or even celebrate that counterproductive underclass culture— an underclass culture which has produced very similar results among lower class whites in Britain,17 where similar ideologies of envy and resentment have long been promoted by the British intelligentsia.

  Both in Britain and in the United States, as well as in other countries, there has been a steady ideological drumbeat of rhetoric from intellectuals depicting “gaps” and “disparities” as grievances against those who are better off. In both Britain and America, this resentment and hostility generated by the intelligentsia has been directed by those who accept it, not only against members of the larger society, but also against those members of their own group who are working to do well in school, in order to have a better life later on.