Intellectuals and Race

by Thomas Sowell

  What is truly remarkable in its implications is the contrast between the higher rate of imprisonment among young men in the black ghettos of America today compared to the 1950s, and how that undermines the very argument in which these imprisonment rates are cited. Surely the supposed “root causes” of crime— poverty, discrimination and the like— were not less in the 1950s, before the civil rights laws and policies of the 1960s. And what of those blacks who do not drop out of high school but who go on to college instead— and seldom end up in prison? It should also be noted that, from 1994 on into the twenty-first century, the poverty rate among black husband-wife families was below 10 percent.18 Are these blacks living in a different external “system” or do they have a different internal culture, representing different values in their families or among others who have influenced them?

  Yet such questions are seldom asked, much less answered. Instead, today’s higher rate of incarceration is blamed on drug laws, tighter sentencing rules, and a general failure of society. In short, society is to blame, except apparently for those members of society who actually commit the crimes. But, whatever the reasons for the higher crime rate now than then, or between blacks and whites, it is indeed a tragic injustice— from a cosmic perspective— to be born into circumstances that make it more likely that one will commit crimes and be imprisoned, with negative consequences for the rest of one’s life. If some personified Fate had decreed this, then that would be the perpetrator of the injustice. But, if this is just part of the way the world has evolved, then it is a cosmic injustice— if something as impersonal as the cosmos can be considered capable of being unjust.

  As noted in Chapter 4, a cosmic injustice is not a social injustice, and proceeding as if society has both the omniscience and the omnipotence to “solve” the “problem” risks anti-social justice, in which others are jeopardized or sacrificed, in hopes of putting some particular segment of the population where they would be “but for” being born into adverse circumstances that they did not choose. It is certainly no benefit to blacks in general to take a sympathetic view of those blacks who commit crimes, since most of the crimes committed by blacks— especially murder— are committed against other blacks.

  Whatever the injustices of society that might be blamed as “root causes” of crime, the black victims of crime are not responsible for those injustices. Here, especially, “social justice” in theory becomes anti-social justice in practice, sacrificing innocent people’s well-being— or even their lives— because some other individuals are considered not to have been born into circumstances that would have given them as good a chance as others have had to achieve their own well-being without becoming criminals. Moreover, it is wholly arbitrary to imagine oneself in Rawls’ “original position” as a potential black criminal, rather than as one of the far more numerous blacks who are victims of criminals.

  Those who say that we should “do something” seldom face the fact that everything depends on just what specifically that something is. Being lenient with criminals has not worked. Relieving poverty has not reduced crime. And certainly being “non-judgmental” has not done so either. Crime rates skyrocketed when all these things were tried, whether among blacks or whites, and whether in America or in England.

  The automatic “celebration” of cultural differences, or the non-judgmental view of socially counterproductive behavior, for example, cannot be continued if the goal is to improve the well-being of actual flesh-and-blood people, rather than seeking cosmic justice for an intertemporal abstraction. One can be humane or inhumane only to living people, not to abstractions.

  SLAVERY

  Nowhere have intellectuals seen racial issues as issues about intertemporal abstractions more so than in discussions of slavery. Moreover, few facts of history have been so distorted by highly selective filtering as has the history of slavery. To many people today, slavery means white people holding black people in bondage. The vast millions of people around the world who were neither white nor black, but who were either slaves or enslavers for centuries, fade out of this vision of slavery, as if they had never existed, even though they may well have outnumbered both blacks and whites. It has been estimated that there were more slaves in India than in the entire Western Hemisphere.19 China during the era of slavery has been described as “one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world.”20 Slaves were a majority of the population in some of the cities in Southeast Asia.21 At some period or other in history, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, “almost every people, now civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves.”22

  When Abraham Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,”23 he was expressing an idea peculiar to Western civilization at that time, and by no means universally accepted throughout Western civilization. What seems almost incomprehensible today is that there was no serious challenge to the moral legitimacy of slavery prior to the eighteenth century. Christian monasteries in Europe and Buddhist monasteries in Asia both had slaves. Even Thomas More’s fictional ideal society, Utopia, had slaves.

  Although intellectuals today may condemn slavery as a historic evil of “our society,” what was peculiar about Western society was not that it had slaves, like other societies around the world, but that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery— and that it spent more than a century destroying slavery, not only within Western civilization itself, but also in other countries around the world, over the often bitter and sometimes armed resistance of people in other societies. Only the overwhelming military power of Western nations during the age of imperialism made this possible. Slavery did not quietly die out of its own accord. It went down fighting to the bitter end, in countries around the world, and it has still not totally died out to this day, in parts of the Middle East and Africa.24

  It is the image of racial slavery— white people enslaving black people— that has been indelibly burned into the consciousness of both black and white Americans today by the intelligentsia— and not simply as a fact about the past but as a causal factor used to explain much of the present, and an enduring moral condemnation of the enslaving race. Yet two crucial facts have been filtered out of this picture: (1) the institution of slavery was not based on race and (2) whites as well as blacks were enslaved. The very word “slave” is derived from the name of a European people— Slavs— who were enslaved for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. It was not only in English that the word for slave derived from the word for Slav; the same was true in various other European languages and in Arabic.25

  For most of the history of slavery, which covers most of the history of the human race, most slaves were not racially different from those who enslaved them. Not only did Europeans enslave other Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians, Africans enslaved other Africans, Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

  Moreover, after it became both technologically and economically feasible to transport masses of slaves from one continent to another— that is, to have a whole population of slaves of a different race— Europeans as well as Africans were enslaved and transported from their native lands to bondage on another continent. Pirates alone transported a million or more Europeans as slaves to the Barbary Coast of North Africa— at least twice as many European slaves as there were African slaves transported to the United States and to the thirteen colonies from which it was formed.26 Moreover, white slaves were still being bought and sold in the Islamic world, decades after blacks had been freed in the United States.

  What marked the modern era of slavery in the West was the fact that, as distinguished historian Daniel Boorstin pointed out, “Now for the first time in Western history, the status of slave coincided with a difference of race.”27 But to claim that race or racism was the basis of slavery is to cite as a cause something that happened thousands of year
s after its supposed effect. As for the legacy of slavery in the world of today, that is something well worth investigating— as distinguished from simply making sweeping assumptions. Too many assumptions that have been made about the effects of slavery on both blacks and whites will not stand up under scrutiny.

  Back during the era of slavery in the United States, such prominent writers as the French visitor and observer Alexis de Tocqueville, Northern traveler in the antebellum South Frederick Law Olmsted and prominent Southern writer Hinton Helper all pointed to striking differences between the North and the South, and attributed the deficiencies of the Southern region to the effects of slavery on the white population of the South.28 These differences between Northern and Southern whites were not mere “perceptions” or “stereotypes.” They were factually demonstrable in areas ranging from literacy rates to rates of unwed motherhood, as well as in attitudes toward work and violence. But attributing these differences to slavery ignored the fact that the ancestors of white Southerners differed in these same ways from the ancestors of white Northerners, when they both lived in different parts of Britain, and when neither had ever seen a black slave.29

  Does the moral enormity of slavery give it any more decisive causal weight in explaining the situation of blacks today than it did in explaining that of whites in the antebellum South? There is no a priori answer to that question, which must be examined empirically, like many other questions.

  The fact that so many black families today consist of women with fatherless children has been said by many to be a legacy of slavery. Yet most black children grew up in two-parent families, even under slavery itself, and for generations thereafter.30 As recently as 1960, two-thirds of black children were still living in two-parent families.31 A century ago, a slightly higher percentage of blacks were married than were whites.32 In some years, a slightly higher percentage of blacks were in the labor force than were whites.33 The reasons for changes for the worse in these and other patterns must be sought in our own times. Whatever the reasons for the disintegration of the black family, it escalated to the current disastrous level well over a century after the end of slavery, though less than a generation after a large expansion of the welfare state and its accompanying non-judgmental ideology.

  To say that slavery will not bear the full weight of responsibility for all subsequent social problems among black Americans is not to say that it had negligible consequences among either blacks or whites, or that its consequences ended when slavery itself ended. But this is only to say that answers to questions about either slavery or race must be sought in facts, not in assumptions or visions, and certainly not in attempts to reduce questions of causation to only those which provide moral melodramas and an opportunity for the intelligentsia to be on the side of the angels.

  Just as Western Europeans in post-Roman times benefitted from the fact that their ancestors had been conquered by the Romans, with all the brutality and oppression that entailed, blacks in America today have a far higher standard of living than most Africans in Africa as a result of their ancestors being enslaved, with all the injustices and abuses that entailed. There is no question that both conquest and enslavement were traumatic experiences for those on whom they were inflicted. Nor is either morally justified by whatever benefits might come of this to subsequent generations of their offspring. But history cannot be undone. Nor does conceiving of races as intertemporal abstractions have any such track record as to make it look like a promising approach to the present or the future.

  Chapter 8

  The Past and the Future

  What are the implications of the many facts, beliefs and controversies about race that we have explored?

  One fact that seems both blatant and inescapable is that social groups, whether racial or otherwise, have major differences in their outcomes, whether in educational institutions, in the economy or in other aspects of life. When the many factors that can influence group outcomes are considered— including geography, history, demographics, culture, happenstances and the other groups with whom they compete, whether in the market, in the schools, at the polls or on the battlefields— the probability that all these factors, and more, would work out in such a way as to produce the same end results for different groups shrinks to the vanishing point.

  Yet many leading twentieth century intellectuals tended to focus on one supposedly overwhelming factor behind these intergroup differences, whether genes in the early years of that century or discrimination in the later years. Why intellectuals would do this is a fascinating, but less consequential, question than what the results of such thinking have been in the past and are likely to be in the future.

  The consequences of genetic determinism have ranged from laws against racial intermarriage to eugenics to genocide. In our own times, an opposite presumption is that statistical differences in outcomes between groups imply discrimination— a presumption prevailing from the level of street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. However different current presumptions are from those of the past, the same intolerance prevails toward those who think otherwise as in the earlier era of genetic determinism. This is more than a coincidental footnote to intellectual history. Such dogmatism means that a whole society can paint itself into a corner when it comes to thinking about racial problems that have shown their potential to become explosive, both in the history of this country and in the history of other countries around the world.

  Whole cities, of which Detroit is a classic example, have been devastated physically, economically and socially by racial problems which simply cannot be discussed honestly by any elected official who wants to remain in office or by anyone in academia or the media who does not want to become a pariah. The price of this moral paralysis is paid in blood, mostly the blood of black people victimized by black criminals, though there is some democratization of degeneration, as mobs of young black thugs have in recent years launched violent attacks on whites in shopping malls, on beaches and in other public places in cities across the United States.

  Any use of force by the police, sufficient to stop these attacks, would be called “excessive” in the media and by politicians or “community leaders.” The path of least resistance, in the current climate of opinion, is for the authorities and the media to ignore or downplay these attacks or— where they are too widely known locally to go unreported— to refer to them as simply unspecified “young people” attacking unspecified victims for unspecified reasons. This is done even when the attackers loudly voice their hatred of white people, who have been widely depicted to them as the source of their problems and frustrations by politicians, the media and even educational institutions from the schools to the universities— all of whom say what is politically correct to say, in the corner into which they have painted themselves.

  Yet, in a sense, these racial problems are not ultimately racial. Remarkably similar degenerate acts plague Britain’s white lower class, as reported in such books as Life at the Bottom by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. What is similar on both sides of the Atlantic is a social vision that excuses barbarism by blaming society, thus allowing the intelligentsia to align themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. Here too the price of these self-indulgences is often paid in blood by those who do not have the luxury of theorizing from afar.

  THE FALSE DICHOTOMY

  Genetic determinism and discrimination are not just alternative hypotheses; together they create a false dichotomy with its own weighty consequences. Members of lagging groups who take this dichotomy seriously must either confess to being inherently and irretrievably inferior or else blame others for their lags. Members of more fortunate groups are left with a choice between arrogance and guilt, when confronted with the false dichotomy. History records the painful consequences of both such choices. While genetic determinism and discrimination have been presented as contrasting or even mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive beliefs, they are in a sense m
utually reinforcing— in the sense that the false dichotomy they represent paints people into a corner from which there is no apparent escape.

  Members of lagging groups, especially, face extreme choices. Within the terms of the false dichotomy, they must either admit that they, their loved ones and their whole race are inherently and incurably inferior for all eternity, or else they must see outsiders as implacable enemies responsible for unconscionably inflicting needless problems and suffering on them. People who might not have reached this latter conclusion in isolation, may not only seize that conclusion but hold on to it tenaciously, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, when they see no apparent alternative except one that is intolerable. Thus even otherwise reasonable people may succumb to racial paranoia.

  Even those who can manage to escape the false dichotomy, and its intolerable alternatives, would need to recognize that those who lag, for whatever reasons, face a daunting task of bringing themselves up to the level of the rest of society in knowledge, skills, and experience— and in the attitudes necessary to acquire this knowledge and these skills and experience. Particular individuals may be able to do so within their own lifetimes, but for millions of people from a lagging group to do so would be harder and take far longer, even if their leaders were urging them in that direction, and virtually impossible when their leaders are fiercely promoting the idea that their lags are due primarily— if not solely— to the malice of other people.

  The magnitude of the task, even without these ideological complications, may be suggested by considering how many centuries it took for Europe to catch up to China, technologically, intellectually and otherwise, or how many centuries Eastern Europe has lagged economically behind Western Europe, and still lags today, with a wider gap in per capita income between people in these two halves of Europe than the per capita income gap between black and white Americans. Whether within countries or between countries, the “gaps,” “disparities” and “inequities” that so preoccupy intellectuals are unlikely to disappear quickly, even under ideal conditions, especially when those who are more advanced keep advancing, while those who lag can continue to lag, relatively speaking, even when they are advancing as well.