Thomas Sowell discusses his newest book, Intellectuals and Race

he holds degrees from columbia and the university of chicago but his undergraduate years at harvard hold a special place in his heart the principal advantage of a harvard education he has said is that you never again have to feel intimidated by anyone with a harvard education economist journalist and author dr thomas sowell uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson thomas soule has taught economics intellectual history and social policy at institutions including cornell ucla and amherst a fellow at the hoover institution at stanford university dr sowell is the author of more than two dozen books his most recent intellectuals and race tom sowell welcome i'm good to be here the progressives i'll quote intellectuals in race broadly speaking while in the progressive era socioeconomic differences were attributed to race in the liberal era such differences were often attributed to racism let's take each and turn the progressives and the liberals the progressives of course dominated the first several decades of the last century who were they and broadly speaking what did they believe about race they believed that differences in performances and outcomes between races were due to genetics and therefore that they they also believed in things like eugenics and they set the stage for ultimately became the holocaust and why did they call themselves progressives or why did they come to be called progressives well i guess they they seem to think that they alone were were interested in progress but of course everybody uh wants believes in some changes and they believe that those changes will be for the better so uh it's it's hard for me to understand how they could distinguish themselves from others by that that term but they believed they could and i guess that's what matters all right you quote h.l menken whom you call a prominent intellectual during the progressive era quote it is apparent that the negro no matter how much he is educated must remain as a race in a condition of subservience that he must remain the inferior therefore the effort to educate him has awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which in the very nature of things must go unrealized close quote it's that phrase in the very nature of things that gets to the view yes that was a pervasive view during that era and it is straightforward pure racism in the strict sense of believing that the races are materially different from one another yes um it's it's it's so it's so hard to uh one of the one of the problems with this way of thinking is that it eternalizes a set of circumstances that exist at the moment uh and when you realize how even a whole century is just a blink of an eye in the history of the human race and when you realize for example that the iq tests have only existed for about a century and by no means infallible uh you if you look back over the centuries and you see how the races that were on top at one time were now no longer on top i mean at one time the middle east was the leading civilization in the world and before them china for even more centuries was the leading civilization in the world and even within europe it was precisely the southern europeans who were so much more advanced than the people in britain or scandinavia back in the days of greece and rome greece and rome but what the people of that era did was take the different achievements of different groups and sort of freeze them in stone as if there was no past and there would be no future it's possible to dismiss menken menken is one one of the figures you mentioned here as a provocateur or a reactionary but you note that his views were shared by john maynard keynes h.g wells george bernard shaw woodrow wilson leading figures looked upon even today as leading intellectuals of the first years of the 20th century they weren't bad or malevolent people talk for a moment or two because they based as best i can tell from from the book the iq tests they believed that they actually had objective evidence they had proof of the differences between races arising from these intelligence tests that began to be given around the time of the first world war yes where do these tests come from well different places some from stanford chairman for example but uh one of the people brigham who was the author of the college board scholastic aptitude test uh made the argument that uh these tests disprove the idea that jews were very intelligent because they scored low on the army mental test in the first world war and now seven years later he finally comes out and said you know that admits that his conclusion was without foundation because many of the immigrants who took that test were raised in homes where people didn't speak english they didn't look into the data on on blacks whose my gosh the amount of education that blacks had at that time was pathetic and the quality was even worse so one of the ironies that i found in going through these things in detail was that if you look at the omni tests that blacks did much worse on very easy questions uh that required a knowledge of words than on much more difficult questions that did not uh and so for example the questions were tell which of the following are opposites and they had things like a black and white night and day up and down and blacks got wiped out on those tests and the reason is that how many of them knew what the word opposite meant at that point right but the but the other test for example requires you to look at pictures of stacks of blocks including some blocks you couldn't see but which you had to infer from the shape of the stack and count them and blacks didn't do nearly as badly on those tests got it you also note that certain cultural groups scored especially low on abstract reasoning it's not just african americans it's also gaelic speakers in the scottish hebrides it's indians in south africa it's working class children in rural england it's lower youngsters in venezuela it's a particular culture that is perhaps too poor to have the time as it were or the the the intellectual resources to devote to abstract reasoning i would look at it somewhat differently you would i would say that uh very often we try to explain for example why the irish didn't do as well as the english and the real question is well the real fact is that the irish were much more typical of people around the world than worthy english and the real question is why did the english do so much better why was there an industrial revolution on one island and not on the other side that's right uh and i think the same same thing here that uh if you go far enough back in history i suspect you'll find that most of the human race had no interest in abstractions and so the question becomes certain kinds of cultures do have have a desire for absolutely get into abstractions and that becomes an enormous advantage to them but uh i wouldn't try to explain why the others didn't do it because the others were unfortunately what the majority of people are like in the world even today all right liberals intellectuals and race if minorities were seen as the problem during the progressive era the majority was seen as the problem during the liberal era that began after the second world war the central premise of liberal intellectuals for decades was that the racial problem was essentially inside the minds of white people explain that tom well what grenadal who did the classic study on this uh said was that uh he you didn't even have to look at what blacks did you could only look at just look at what the white was whites were thinking and this suggests that uh that these random thoughts from nowhere what were the reasons reason for the problems the the problem was that different groups of people have been different in substance all around the world and for centuries and that blacks and whites in the united states are no are no exception to that and it's very hard to have a society where people with very different cultures coexist tom you quote in intellectuals and race the famous black writer james baldwin he's writing in 1960 quote people in harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else in a new housing project in harlem they naturally began smashing windows defacing walls and you'll forgive me but this is his language urinating in the elevators close quote what's wrong with his thinking oh my gosh you need a couple of hours but it so happens i grew up in harlem in the 1940s 1950s and you didn't expect to find people urinating in places where black people lived in fact there's very little attention given to the fact that the public housing of that era was radically different from the public housing of today i remember we had a relative of ours got into some public housing we were so proud because you had to have a certain character a record and so forth to get in uh these were not places where you had dumping grounds of people who were at the bottom of the pile there was no less discrimination in the 40s and 50s in the minds of white people toward black people when you were growing up in harlem that's right and yet harlem i was just thinking about this the other day that the great duke ellington classic take the a train yeah the a train was and remains as far as i know the subway train up the west side of manhattan that's what white people used to get to harlem heart was an attractive place it was a place of culture and excitement so what was it then if it wasn't in the minds of white people what what took place in harlem in the 60s i think the 60s was it was a period of general irrationality and wherever there's irrationality there are people who now know how to turn that irrationality to their benefit and you began to get some very opportunistic leaders who then began to say things that they knew to be false for which they knew it would advance their careers let me quote intellectuals and race one more time among the differences between the two eras that is to say the time you grew up in harlem and the 60s was that the intelligence of both black and white became more prone in the later period to make excuses for moral squalor and barbaric behavior your words here after such notions permeated the society barbaric behavior and moral squalor became accepted norms within some segments close quote so you are not merely making the argument i'm asking that the liberal view that what was in their minds dictated the behavior of african americans that you're not merely making the view that liberals were mistaken you're making the view that they're that they you're making the argument that they were culpable yes uh and and as i point out a few top places in the book you can go to england and see the very same pattern emerging including this this pattern where kids in school who are trying to do well get beaten up by other kids theodore doll rumple is a doctor in britain and he writes about the kids who come to who have to go to the hospital they're they're so badly beaten up simply because they're doing well in school and these are white kids uh lower class in britain so you see the very same pattern and all the things that are supposed to explain that pattern and explain it away among blacks are found among people who have none of those same factors but what's the same in both places is that the intellectuals have told them that the world is unjust that other people are keeping them down that the fact that they don't have what other people have is somebody else's fault and if you buy that vision then of course there's no reason for you to do well in school and you resent those who do do well because there they they've bought into the enemy's way of thinking multiculturalism first the progressive era in intellectuals and race then you deal with a liberal era and then comes the era of multiculturalism intellectuals and race quote the era of multiculturalism might be considered an extension of the liberal era but it has evolved its own characteristics multiculturalism is an insistence that the particular cultures found among less fortunate groups are not to be blamed for disparities in income or education or crime rates but are on net positive yeah close quote explain that well i i don't know how to say it differently um you you can't find any fault with any group that is uh less fortunate that no there are no there are no uh behaviors that they need to change in order to advance society needs to accept them as they are in other words the causes are to remain the same but the effects are to change and if the effects don't change then it's society's fault so for example the there was a period i'm trying to remember now i believe it was in the mid 70s when uh substandard english began to become a yes began to become viewed as a discipline of its own within linguistic studies and so forth and for all i know it was all perfectly legitimate that certain speech patterns would be traced back to various regions in africa and so forth and this is this is a language of its own it has its own validity but the argument your argument would be i don't really care what its validity is it's holding people back yes it's preventing them from participating in the wider society is that right absolutely and also none of these things went back to africa oh is that so no you can yes they did not go back to africa uh if you look at the piece for example using the word axe for ask and stuff like that all of that goes back to the south and the and it goes back to the parts of britain from which white southerners came so if you trace the calling uh hog entrails chitlins uh that was that that that was in a certain section of britain the section from which whites moved into the south and the people and they were known as rednecks and crackers in britain in centuries past before they ever set foot in the south uh so the whole thing is as phony as the three dollar bill all right once again intellectuals and race the key word among advocates of multiculturalism became diversity sweeping claims for the benefits of demographic and cultural diversity have prevailed without a speck of evidence being asked for or given name a few institutions in which diversity is championed without so without evidence guys the question would be a name one way well that isn't the case uh i would say the whole ivy league uh stanford uh berkeley corporate america yes it's really it's really miraculous almost i mean i can't think of a word that has gained such widespread use and which is utterly unchallenged without one speck of evidence if you look at societies that are diverse they have all they can do to avoid uh mutual bloodshed i mean india for example is very diverse and and you know the the barely coheres as the nations that's right when when india uh was given his freedom by britain and split into india and pakistan i mean the number of people slaughtered between hindus and muslims ran into the hundreds of thousands all right so this brings us to affirmative action of course and uh let's take a look at the 2003 supreme court case uh gruder versus bal bollinger in which the supreme court upheld the affirmative action admissions policy of the university of michigan law school writing for the majority justice sandra day o'connor the constitution quote does not prohibit the tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body close quote that's pretty high sounding yes what's wrong with that it would have been nice if she could produce one speck of evidence for it doesn't it feel intuitively correct though no that you put students together with other students of different backgrounds over the second volume that it is intuitively uh accepted that doesn't relieve you from having to look at the evidence to find out if that's true one of the things that uh when i was going around when i was taking my kids around to pick colleges i would go into the lunchroom at lunchtime and look around and if i found that all the black kids were at one table and all the white kids were at a different table i knew what the what the atmosphere was at that school i went to school in the in the 50s i never saw that so you you you say what what the benefits are going to be and then you come along and test it you don't just say that sounds so wonderful or there's no need to go in to go any further and and if you look at what has happened in these places you find that the polarization is far greater after these policies have followed than there were before so the test just never occurred to me before but i i think we've just invented the soul test well the test is not admissions the test is whether there's diversity at the lunch table well there's that or or people sitting with their groups of their own oh yes okay intellectuals and race quote a growing body of empirical data shows that black students mismatched with the colleges or universities they attend fail or drop out more often than other students the problem is not that these black students are unqualified the problem is that they are mismatched with the college or university that has admitted them for the sake of quote diversity now what do you mean by mismatched well i'll give a simple example when i was teaching at cornell back in the 60s the average s.a.t score of black students at cornell was at the 75th percentile the average s.a.t for the white students in liberal arts was the 99th percentile we all taught to the students who were at the 99th percentile students were at the 75th percentile had a hard time trying to keep up they didn't have the reading speed they didn't have the mathematical facility and so on had had these very same students gone to some place where the other students were the 75th percentile they'd have had no problem half the black students at cornell at that time were on academic probation it was even worse at mit the average black student when the study was done some years ago at mit scored in the top 10 percent nationwide in math they scored in the bottom 10 percent at mit so the point is there are a lot of very good schools in america where they could have gone and been right in the swim yes of elite institutions yes just not at mit that's right all right so we've established in intellectuals and race the progressives are obviously culpable they were racists they were straight forward racists under woodrow wilson you make the point it was under woodrow wilson that certain agencies in the federal government first begin to enforce segregation yes in washington so so culpable culpability on the part of the progressives you've just told us that the liberals by enunciating their views insisting on them in public again and again and again set up a kind of intellectual culture that made things worse not better again they're at fault and now you're saying that multiculturalists if only this example of bringing kids into institutions for which they're ill-qualified you take bright hard-working otherwise perfectly qualified students and put them in the wrong institution and you set them back in life yes and they're culpable as well they ought to know better yes intellectuals and race quote the intelligence you pay no price for being wrong i think that's the secret of their influence how was that well if you come up with a lot of wrong ideas and pay a price for it you're forced to think about it and to change your ways or else get eliminated but there's no such test the only test for most intellectuals is whether other intellectuals go along with them and if they all have a wrong idea then it becomes invincible tom you're coming pretty close to saying intellectuals aren't very smart they are very smart and very limited areas and they don't realize that it's the limited areas that's the problem i mean chess grandmasters are very smart i mean if you can stand there blindfolded and played three different players without looking at the board and beat them you're pretty smart so your argument would be that at an elite institution the folks in the physics department are really good physicists and the folks in the english department know everything there is to know about shakespeare and milton but there's no reason to suppose at all that they've done any work in or studied the evidence on affirmative action or any of the other policies by which they attempt to uh to deal with racial problems in this country and yet they all somehow or other believe the same things about it yes okay this is all very disconcerting tom you know cosmic justice intellectuals and race quote no individual or group can be blamed for being born into circumstances that lack advantages but neither can society be automatically assumed to be either the cause or the cure for such disparities close quote so what you're arguing is that despite despite centuries of uh several centuries of slavery for i'm talking now about after the african-american experience in this country slavery ends you've got decades of jim crow you've got policies that have created substandard conditions in one inner city in america after another to this day despite all of that for the african-american child born in inner city detroit tomorrow it just is what it is it's nobody's fault that that child is likely to have worse life expectations than the white kid born tomorrow in greenwich connecticut that's true uh you can't the the ease with which people draw connections between one thing and another is just amazing i mean it's like it's like i mean the the average of a black kid today i think is probably uh better off certainly materially than uh say ben ben carson was when he was growing up ben carson the famous surgeon at johns hopkins right right uh he was immensely accomplished in every way yes right uh i would say that um certainly the black kids who are growing up today have a higher material standard of living than i had the only the difference was that the schools were good when i came along they were especially good in new york at that time hard as that is to believe uh but the kids who grew up in that same place where i lived they will not get that same education now that can be blamed on somebody but it has very little to do with what happened uh 100 or 200 years ago and it's true in other countries i mean uh in nigeria for example there's a tribe of the ebos who are living in one of the least least fertile parts of nigeria who were in fact enslaved in centuries past by other tribes and so on uh when when the british moved in and set up schools the evos went for the schools by the time nigeria became independent the igbos had climbed above the other groups that had been ahead of them to begin with so but there are all kinds of cross-currents of factors uh the particular culture of the particular geography you run through the whole list of them here's you say in intellectuals and race you cite an observation by the intelligence expert iq scientist james flynn that just stopped me cold after the second world war you've got large numbers of american troops remaining in germany for that matter there's still several tens of thousands there today and both black and white american soldiers had children with german women and flynn discovered that those children growing up in germany showed no iq differences at all the the the black kids and the white kids the same quote quoting intellectuals and race professor flynn concluded that the reason was that the offspring of black soldiers in germany and now you're quoting professor flynn grew up in a nation with no black subculture close quote which means what which means they experienced exactly the same expectations is this the thing no no no the expectations are external the culture in which they grew up was was not the culture in which black kids grew up in america today so they had there's no gangster rep that was pervasively uh available in germany so here's what i'm getting there is something about black subculture in america today that holds african-americans themselves back yes in fact i went into this in a previous book on which about black rednecks and white liberals because that same stuff let's talk about two of your books here because that very same subculture held white whites in the south back as well that in the time this this mental testing in the first world war turned up among other things the fact that whites from various four five southern states scored lower on the middle test than than blacks from four or five northern states and so it really was a question of the subculture that was there which was a handicap to both all right and so whose job is it to say wrong subculture folks you're you're harming yourselves well i would think in an ideal world intellectuals might take on that task but the world we live in i've noticed is not not ideal all right what is to be done take a look at president lyndon johnson speaking at howard university in 1965. but freedom is not enough you do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying now you are free to go where you want and do as you desire and choose the leaders you please you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberating bringing up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair it's pathetic it's not a question of there's no you who has the control to be completely fair or completely unfair i mean the circumstances are so someone once criticized the middle tests on grounds of the tests were unfair and one and i think it was david riesman who said the tests are not unfair life is unfair and the tests are measuring the results but who has control of life who has control of the past who has control of the culture that people have in the present which they've inherited from the past so lyndon johnson he's in fact although good liberal that he was at least in regard lyndon johnson had a complicated career and changed positions on issues many times but good liberal though he was at that moment he was in fact engaging in a breathtaking arrogance yes on two counts one that white people were the ones who were responsible for where black people stood in the race that it was up to whites entirely that blacks as he described i mean it's devastating that's right that's right and then the second act of arrogance is the supposition that somehow the federal government could fix it yes it is staggering uh but if you wanted to be charitable you could say well he said this in 1965 but if you say all right why are people now repeating it in 2013 when we've had a nearly half a century of experience to the contrary and if you look within the black community those blacks who would escape what i call the black redneck culture they've moved on so but it is it's in it's it's it's the culture the different parts of the black community had they were they were different daniel patrick moynihan in his famous 1965 report entitled the negro family the case for national action close quote longest longish quotation but it gets to something i believe moynihan the fundamental problem is that of family structure the negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling a middle class has managed to save itself but for vast numbers of the unskilled and poorly educated the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated so long as this situation persists the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself close quote when moynihan wrote those words the illegitimacy rate among african americans was 25 percent today the illegitimacy rate among white americans is 36 among hispanics more than 50 percent and among african americans more than 70 percent aside from throwing up your hands in despair what what what is to be done first the first thing to be done is to understand that this was a result of policies begun in the 1960s this is not a legacy of what happened 100 years before the 1960s the breakdown of the black family is not a legacy of slavery no if you uh the classic study of this goes all the way back to the era of slavery and they find that most black kids even under slavery had lived with two parents and that was true all the way up until the 1960s and so you if you really want to find out what has happened what's changed it has changed since the 1960s and the fact that that whites now have a higher rate of illegitimacy than blacks had when moynihan wrote suggest that this is something that spreads out but but if you look at something else if you look at those blocks and look at black husband and wife families the poverty rate among such families has been in single digits ever since every year since 1994. and so it's so weird so if you look at the you look at the external causes why the the the husband and wife families and the welfare single mom families all are facing the same society and objective things but but the results are radically different because the cultures and values are different so you would you would roll back welfare i guess that's the principal policy you you let's okay so what would tom seoul do one you'd roll you'd eliminate welfare you'd reform welfare what would you do roll it back all right and what about affirmative action eliminate it just gone yeah colorblind policy completely all right what prospect for that do you see none no blessing no black leader of any standing i'm talking about political leader as opposed to an intellectual such as yourself you've got well there's you there's walter williams uh is there do you get the sense that there's a that that there's a growing generation a rising generation of african-american intellectuals who say enough of this i'm with tom sowell well i don't know if they'll go that far there's no point that would be right there's no point being reckless but uh i i think uh there are people like like uh shelby steele and many others uh larry ella you run through a long list and they're most like more such people now than they were say in the 1970s but in terms of political leaders all the all the incentives politically offer for black leaders to blame all problems in the black community on the larger society and that enables them to take on the role of being the defender of the black community against enemies which in turn uh creates the situation in which many blacks don't feel that anything that they do is gonna is gonna help themselves unless it's done politically as a group that there's no point i mean why would you if you believe what that's what they say why would you want to knock yourself out in the school knowing that the man is not going to let you get anywhere one of the most pathetic things i heard in recent years was a young black man saying that you know at one point he thought he would join the air force and become a pilot and then he says he realized that the white man is not going to let a black man become a pilot and he was saying this decades after the tennessee airmen had established their reputation in combat in europe you know but but the hopelessness hopelessness is one of the big products of the of the race industry that you have you have no chance i remember giving a talk at marquette and at the end of the talk among the questions it was asked a young again young black man got up and he said even though i am graduating from marquette a university what hope is there for me and having gone through college when i was in the 50s i don't remember any blacks on saying that in the 1950s when there was a lot more obstacles to overcome than there were when this guy is graduating from marquette but you but you have to produce that kind of feeling in order to serve the interests of those in the race industry final question then we can maybe we can think in terms of that young man at marquette let's put it this way somewhere watching this interview there's a young thomas soul there's an african-american who's smart and wants to do something with his life what seems to me i've al we've already got one piece of advice you'd offer to him is stay away from the from the races industry stay away from the what what advice race hustlers what advice would you give a young thomas soul how do you make something of yourself as an african-american in america today the way anybody else would you equip yourself with skills that people are willing to pay for all right thomas saul author of intellectuals and race and black rednecks and white liberals black rednecks and right white liberals and the author of another two dozen other books every one of them worth reading dr thomas soul thank you thank you for the hoover institution and the wall street journal i'm peter robinson you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 579,687

Rating: 4.8828244 out of 5

Keywords: Race Relations, Intellectuals and Race, Culture, Education

Id: H6ImP-gJvas

Length: 38min 27sec (2307 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2013

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[u/MartialEcology]

I don't agree with everything Sowell has to say, but this is an interesting interview. He gets into how Progressives (in the early 1900's) created both segregation and affirmative action. Essentially, HBD (which Sowell opposes) used to be the norm, but the arrogance of these liberals became so great that they began trying to dictate all racial relations in the USA.