Intellectuals and Race

by Thomas Sowell

  In the more general case of disparate impacts caused by differing standards of behavior or performance, those who are subjected to standards and those who create the standards are not necessarily the most important people affected by the results. Medical schools, for example, have standards— whether for admission or for passing courses— which affect innumerable people outside the medical profession, people whose health and survival depend on the quality of medical care they receive after medical school students become doctors.

  In the legal system, “disparate impact” dogma has been a gold mine for the race industry. When an employer’s mix of employees shows an “underrepresentation” of designated minorities (or women), either in general or in more advanced positions, that is taken as prima facie evidence of discrimination, whether deliberate or as a result of using criteria with a “disparate impact” on particular groups. Another way of saying the same thing is that different groups may fail to meet relevant standards for any number of possible reasons. But the burden of proof is put on the accused employer, rather than on those doing the accusing, contrary to legal practice in most other civil or criminal cases.

  No speck of evidence is required from those who implicitly assume that employee composition would be similar to population composition, in the absence of discrimination. Moreover, not one flesh-and-blood human being who even claims to have been discriminated against is necessary for “disparate impact” cases to go forward in a costly legal process. Statistics alone are sufficient to establish the “disparate impact” case that employers must rebut. Moreover, the vast financial resources available to government agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission means that, even if an employer is exonerated after a trial, the EEOC can keep appealing the decision in successive courts, in a process that can take years and drain millions of dollars in legal expenses from the accused employer.

  In a “disparate impact” case against the Sears department store chain, for example, legal processes dragged on for 15 years and cost Sears $20 million, even though there was not one past or present employee of Sears who claimed discrimination (sex discrimination in this case).18 All that the EEOC needed to keep this financially draining process going were statistics that did not match its preconceptions. Sears eventually won in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, but few employers can afford millions of dollars in legal costs, quite aside from years of bad publicity based on unsubstantiated charges of discrimination. A racial discrimination case against the Wards Cove Packing Company likewise dragged on for 15 years and, even though the Supreme Court refused to accept a lower court decision against Wards Cove, based on putting the burden of proof on the accused, Congress passed a law restoring the burden of proof on the employer in civil rights cases.19

  Given the enormous costs that can be imposed by charges of discrimination based on “disparate impact” statistics, even large employers usually find it prudent to settle such cases out of court on whatever terms they can negotiate. Although these out of court settlements are not an admission of guilt, they are widely cited by those in the race industry as damning evidence of pervasive discrimination requiring pervasive government intervention to protect supposed victims, even when there is not one identifiable victim even claiming to have been discriminated against.

  Where an employer is in an industry that is already one subject to government regulatory agencies, whose permission is necessary to engage in ordinary business transactions that unregulated businesses are free to make on their own, the leverage of the government is even more powerful. This means that wholly unsubstantiated charges of discrimination can paralyze the ability of a regulated firm to make transactions on which millions, or even billions, of dollars depend, until such indefinite time as the charges have been adjudicated to the satisfaction of the regulatory agency involved. Thus banks accused of either employee discrimination or discriminatory lending practices have had their plans for opening new branches, or merging with other banks, put on hold by government regulatory agencies at the sole discretion of these agencies, without any trial, much less proof, of the charges.

  Under these conditions, individuals like Jesse Jackson or organizations such as ACORN can make, and have made, charges of discrimination at virtually no cost to themselves, but which impose huge costs on the accused banks. Given these conditions, banks have paid millions of dollars to their accusers, who then withdraw their accusations, so that normal business processes can proceed in the regulated banks.20 One economist wrote an essay on this practice titled, “How to Rob a Bank Legally.”21

  Intellectuals may think of disparate impact theory as something to discuss around a seminar table or in academic journals but, in the real world, this theory— which serves as evidence, but for which no evidence is necessary to substantiate the theory itself— is powerful leverage for transferring vast sums of money from those who earned it to those in the race industry. In a decade, more than a trillion dollars have been extracted from financial and other business organizations by community activist organizations, using a variety of tactics, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.22

  However beneficial this may have been to the race industry, among the concessions that have been won from banks have been mortgage loans made to low income and minority borrowers who would not otherwise qualify under traditional lending standards. These loans in many cases ended up leaving these borrowers with foreclosed homes and ruined credit records. As in other contexts, the race industry benefits, even when the ostensible beneficiaries of their work do not.

  PROSPECTS AND PERILS

  A crucial fact about the theories and social visions of intellectuals is that the intelligentsia pay no price for being wrong. In an economy where mistaken business decisions can lead to bankruptcy and extinction, even for the largest corporations, and in a political system where individuals elected to high office on a wave of enthusiasm can find themselves unceremoniously voted out of office in disgrace at the next election, the insulation of intellectuals from paying a price for the consequences of their ideas on millions of other people is a remarkable situation— one buttressed by concepts, laws and traditions ranging from freedom of the press to academic tenure to libel laws that make it nearly impossible for “public figures” to seek legal redress for even outrageous and demonstrable falsehoods about themselves in the media.

  Whatever the pros and cons of these concepts, laws and traditions, the point here is simply that intellectuals are in a remarkably different position from that of other decision-makers, and that this is a fact to be taken into account when trying to understand the nature of their decisions, and especially the ability of their theories and visions to survive in defiance of empirical evidence.

  Quite simply, intellectuals pay no price for being wrong, no matter how wrong or with what catastrophic consequences for millions of other people. The sweeping acceptance of theories of genetic determinism by intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic in the early decades of the twentieth century had impacts on things ranging from immigration policies to compulsory sterilization policies to the Holocaust. Yet those who promoted these beliefs paid no price. Madison Grant’s death in 1937 spared him from even learning that millions of innocent men, women and children would be systematically murdered because his book impressed Hitler.

  From unaccountability to irresponsibility can be a very short step.

  The point here is to suggest nothing more draconian in response than a loss of the gullibility towards ideas in vogue among the intelligentsia that can make their speculations so dangerous to others. All sorts of competing notions can be free in the marketplace of ideas, without becoming dogmas backed by the power of government, just because these notions are currently ascendant among people with high IQs and prestigious degrees and honors. All sorts of ideas, whether on race or on war or on many other subjects, have prevailed among intellectuals with results now recognized in retrospect as having been as utterly invalid intellectually as they were
catastrophic in their human consequences. In other words, just because some people are justly renowned within their specialties, and may regard themselves as part of some larger class of “thinking people,” does not mean that the rest of us can neglect to think for ourselves or to demand hard evidence from those with soaring visions and impressive rhetoric.

  Among the ideas about race currently in vogue among the intelligentsia are some with enormous potential for needless personal and social tragedies. The apparently benign concept of “equality,” with its numerous and even mutually contradictory meanings, is a fertile source of dangers to individuals, races and whole societies. Equality of treatment by the law, for example, is very different from equality of economic outcomes, and equality of potentialities is very different from equality of developed capabilities. The ease with which many among the intelligentsia turn inequalities of results into “inequities” or “discrimination” might suggest that equality is so automatic that its absence is what needs to be explained— and corrected— despite the gross inequalities in achievements and prosperity that have been common in countries around the world and for centuries of recorded history, even in circumstances in which those more fortunate have had no power to discriminate against those who were less fortunate.

  The ultimate sources of these group differences in achievements can be many, and often originated in differences in skills, cultures and other circumstances inherited from past generations. But tracing these sources of intergroup differences can be an arduous and uncertain process, and one with little emotional or other payoff. Instead, those with good fortune have often attributed that good fortune to their own inherent superiority, while those less fortunate have often preferred to believe that their lesser place in the world is the result of evil done to them by others. Whole ideologies and movements can be, and have been, built on these premises— and whole nations ruined by them. Intellectuals have all too often played a major role in promoting a sense of grievance over inequalities.

  The kind of society to which that can lead is one in which a newborn baby enters the world supplied with prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same day. It is hard to imagine anything more conducive to unending internal strife and a weakening of the bonds that hold a society together. When history shows how hard it can be to maintain peace and cooperation among contemporaries, why would we take on the complex, divisive and ultimately futile task of redressing issues between our long dead ancestors or pass on to generations yet unborn the seeds of strife to blight their lives?

  The kind of equality being pursued by intellectuals is often the kind of equality that can be imposed unilaterally from the top down, an equality of outcomes— essentially an equality of effects without an equality of causes, or on sheer presumption of an equality of causes, in defiance of both history and logic. Even more ambitious are attempts to create equality of outcomes where differences in causes are acknowledged, but differences in effects are proposed to be eliminated by compensatory policies— a proposition advocated by Condorcet back in the eighteenth century and by Rawls in the twentieth century.23 The actual track record of group preference policies, whether in the United States or in other countries around the world, undermines the optimistic assumption that greater equality can be produced in that way, and raises painful questions about the polarization that has all too often been produced instead.

  Many people who advocate what they think of as equality promote what is in fact make-believe “equality.” In economic terms, taking what others have produced and giving it to those who have not produced as much (or at all, in some cases) is make-believe equality— as contrasted with real equality, which would be enabling the less productive to become more productive, so that they could create for themselves what they are trying to take from others. However, real equality is not only harder to achieve, it is something whose achievement cannot be created by outsiders, as redistribution can be, but requires the efforts of those who lag. Make-believe equality, by creating a sense of entitlement to what others have created, reduces the incentives to making efforts to produce for one’s self.

  Many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world— differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing. Apparently their theories, and the visions behind them, cannot be wrong.

  None of this means that economic or other inequalities must be supinely accepted. The rise of groups from dire poverty to affluence— the Chinese in Southeast Asian countries, the Lebanese in West Africa, and Jews in the United States, among many others— shows that history is not destiny. But these rises have almost invariably been achieved in mundane and often arduous ways that not only differ from the ways advocated by the intelligentsia, but have often been in ways directly opposite to the more dramatic and emotionally satisfying ways envisioned by the intelligentsia. Moreover, earned achievements, whether modest or spectacular, bring a self respect, as well as respect from others, that can seldom be gotten from even a successful playing of a parasitic role in the name of a make-believe “equality.”

  __________

  * Which do not include Asian Americans or Jewish Americans, for example.

  NOTES

  Epigraph

  G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942), p. 339.

  Chapter 1: Questions About Race

  1. Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 98; Raphael Patai, The Vanished Worlds of Jewry (New York: Macmillan, 1980), p. 57.

  2. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations: Selected Writings, edited by G. Franklin Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 274.

  3. Rochelle Sharpe, “Losing Ground: In Latest Recession, Only Blacks Suffered Net Employment Loss,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 1993, p. A12.

  4. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights and the Mortgage Crisis (Washington: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2009), p. 53.

  5. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Report to the Congress on Credit Scoring and Its Effects on the Availability and Affordability of Credit, submitted to the Congress pursuant to Section 215 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, August 2007, p. 80.

  6. Harold A. Black, et al., “Do Black-Owned Banks Discriminate against Black Borrowers?” Journal of Financial Services Research, February 1997, pp. 185–200.

  7. Daniel J. Losen and Jonathan Gillespie, Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School, The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at The Civil Rights Project, August 2012, pp. 7, 15.

  8. Sharon Noguchi, “Report: Ravenswood Has Nation’s Highest Suspension Rates for Asian/Pacific Islander Students,” Contra Costa Times (online), August 8, 2012.

  9. “Enrollment in California Public School Districts,” downloaded from the website of the California Department of Education at http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/dataquest.asp on August 10, 2012.

  Chapter 2: Disparities and Their Causes

  1. Charles Issawi, “The Transformation of the Economic Position of the Millets in the Nineteenth Century,” Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, edited by Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), Vol. I: The Central Lands, pp. 262–263.

  2. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 214.

  3. Yuan-li Wu and Chun-hsi Wu, Economic Development in Southeast Asia: The Chinese Dimension (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980), p. 51.

  4. R. Bayly Winder, “The Lebanese in West Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. IV (1961–62), p. 309.

  5. Charles Issawi, “The Transformation of the Economic Position of the Millets in
the Nineteenth Century,” Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, edited by Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, Vol. I: The Central Lands, pp. 262–263, 266.

  6. Winthrop R. Wright, British-Owned Railways in Argentina: Their Effect on Economic Nationalism, 1854–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974).

  7. John P. McKay, Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization 1885–1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 35.

  8. Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 139.

  9. Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile, 1890–1914 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), p. 68.

  10. S. J. Thambiah, “Ethnic Representation in Ceylon’s Higher Administrative Services, 1870–1946,” University of Ceylon Review, Vol. 13 (April-July 1955), p. 130.

  11. Lyle Spatz, The SABR Baseball List & Record Book (New York: Scribner, 2007), p. 335.

  12. Jean Roche, La Colonisation Allemande et le Rio Grande do Sul (Paris: Institut Des Hautes Études de L’Amérique Latine, 1959), pp. 388–389.

  13. James L. Tigner, “Japanese Immigration into Latin America: A Survey,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, November 1981, p. 476.