Thomas Sowell - The Reality Of Multiculturalism

intellectuals in 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 you can't find an any fault with any group that is less fortunate that never note there are no behaviors that they need to change in order to advance society needs to accept them as they are the Lord's a the causes ought to remain the same with the effects of the 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 a 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 that 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 yeah it's preventing them from participating in the wider societies that right absolutely also none of these things went back to Africa oh that's all no yeah you can yes I did they did not go back to Africa if you look at the piece the example using the word acts for ask and stuff like that all of that goes back to the south and it goes back to the parts of Britain from which white Southerners came so if you trace the calling hog entrails chitlins that was that that was in in 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 and centuries passed before they ever set foot in the south so in the whole thing is as phony as a $3 bill once again intellectuals in 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 qoj the question we have a name one way what would that isn't the case I would say the whole Ivy League Stanford 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 mutual bloodshed I mean India for example is very diverse and and you know the know barely coherent nations that's right I went when when India was given his freedom by Britain and it split in two in 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 let's take a look at the 2003 Supreme Court case Gruder versus 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 it's likely that it would have been nice if she could produce one speck of evidence for it doesn't it feel intuitively correct though know that you put students together with other students of different backgrounds let's just remember the same volume that it is contort of Lee 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 the 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 the set one table and all the white kids were a different table I knew what the what the atmosphere was at that school I went to school in the 50s I never saw that so the 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 and there's no need to go in to go any further 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 they were before intellectuals in race quote a growing body of empirical data shows that black students miss matched 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 in the back in the 60s the average SAT score of black students at Cornell was at the 75th percentile the average SAT for the white students and liberal arts was the 99th percentile we all taught to 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 their mathematical facility and so on had to had these very same students gone in someplace where the other students were the 75th percentile they'd have had no problem half the black students at Cornell that time we're on academic probation it was even worse at MIT the average black student when this study was done some years ago at MIT scored in the top 10% nationwide in math they scored in the bottom 10% 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 yeah 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 straightforward racists under Woodrow Wilson you make the point it was under Woodrow Wilson that certain agencies and the federal government first began to enforce segregation in Milwaukee so so culpable culpability on the part of the progressives you've just told us that the Liberals by enunciated 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 the this example of bringing kids into institutions for which they're ill qualified you take bright hard-working otherwise perfectly well 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 that I think that's the secret of their influence how does that if you come up with a lot of wrong ideas and pay a price for it you're forced to think about it and and to change your ways or else get eliminated but there is 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 ver and very limited areas and they don't realize that it's the limited areas that that's the problem I mean chess grandmasters are very smart I mean you can stand there blindfolded and play three different players without looking at the board and beat them you're pretty small so your argument would be that it 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 in Milton but there's no reason to suppose at all that they've done any work in or study the evidence on affirmative action or any of the other policies by which they attempt to 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 time 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 now close quote so what you're arguing is that despite despite centuries of 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 the ease with which people draw connections between one thing and another is just amazing I was like like I mean the average of black kid today I think is probably better off certainly materially than say Ben ben Carson was when he was growing up Ben Carson the famous like surgeon at Johns Hopkins right right uh I was immensely accomplished in every way yes right uh I would say that certainly the black kids who growing up today have a higher material standard of living that I had the only the difference 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 but the kids who grew up that 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 100 or 200 years ago and it's true in other countries I mean in Nigeria for example describe the Evo's who are living in one of the least least Friedel parts of a Nigeria who were in fact enslaved in centuries past by other tribes and so on when when the British moved in and set up schools the Evo's went for the schools by the time Nigeria became independent the evos had climbed above the other groups that had been ahead of them to begin with so there but there are all kinds of cross currents of factors the particular culture of the particular geography you run through the whole list of them here's it you say in intellectuals and race you cite an observation by the intelligence expert IQ scientist James Flynn what they 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 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 that expectations are external the culture in which they grew up with was not the culture in which black kids grew up in America today so they had no gangster rap there was pervasively 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 sub let's talk about two of your books go ahead book because that very same subculture held white whites in the south back as well that in this time and this this mental testing in the First World War turned up among other things the fact that whites from various oh four or five southern states scored lower on the middle test and then 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 whose job is it to say wrong subculture folks your heart 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

Channel: undefined

Views: 681,538

Rating: 4.915556 out of 5

Keywords: multiculturalism, culture, crime, education, crime rates, advancement, society, discrimination, diversity, English, Africa, slavery, rednecks, crackers, India, Hindu, Muslim, Supreme Court, affirmative action, Constitution, quotas, college, Cornell, MIT, intellectuals, race, Woodrow Wilson, segregation, liberals, evidence, social justice, policy, IQ, soldiers, Germany, subculture, gangster rap

Id: 9ESlS2jrhXY

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/kchoze]

There's just a small section of the video about multiculturalism, but all parts are pretty good. I particularly like when he says that intellectuals claim some things are good, but the benefits of these things are never tested, there is no reckoning for when they're wrong, so they can keep saying something is good when it's not and they'll never have to apologize or lose credibility.

He also mentions mismatch theory, that affirmative action results in minority students getting dropped in academic environments where they are often massively unprepared for, while if they went to more regular universities, they would do much better. There's some data supporting it, but obviously there's a lot of resistance not just to the conclusion, but even to the mere act of collecting data on it. I know one of the academic researchers (Richard Sander) who seeks evidence to test it is frequently refused data by universities and other public organizations, only for journalists later on to claim that there is little to no data supporting it.

That being said, on the topic of multiculturalism itself, as a Québécois living in Canada, perhaps the first country to adopt an official multiculturalism policy (mainly as a way to fight against the Québec nationalist vision of the "two founding peoples" which would have justified greater autonomy for Québec and even supported its independence), I'd have a lot to say about it. I feel that, essentially, multiculturalism is an artifact of an imperialist world view which may also be a consequence of moral universalism. The fundamental idea of multiculturalism is that all cultures of the world can be ruled under the same government and the same law without any culture being positively or negatively impacted by this system. The result is that multiculturalism is quite anti-democratic in practice, because if there is a majority culture in democratic control of the government, then they're naturally going to influence law and policies to support their values, creating a society where their values are better represented and more adapted to that society, which goes against the idea of multiculturalism. So multiculturalism requires the creation of an autocratic elite utterly devoted to the idea of multiculturalism and hostile to the majority culture of a country.

For example, the full enforcement of multiculturalism in Canada came with the Canadian Charter in the 1982 Constitution which gave the Supreme Court supreme control over what laws should be in Canada, reversing the Parliamentary Supremacy of the earlier Westminster model and making the Supreme Court into the most important vector of social change in the country since 1982. Some call it "constitutional supremacy", but when the Constitution is vague and the courts can interpret it pretty much as it wants, rejecting textualism or originalism in the interpretation of the Constitution, then "constitutional supremacy" is just a cover for "judicial supremacy" because judges have the power to decide what the Constitution means and even to amend its articles by reinterpreting them. So the Canadian 1982 Constitution created an autocratic elite in the form of the judiciary to protect "multiculturalism" against democratic institutions.

[u/MuttonDressedAsGoose]

I'm just commenting so I can listen to this later.

I like this sub - stumbled across it and I find it really really interesting.

[u/PunkShocker]

Submission statement: Thomas Sowell talks about the negative effects of upholding multiculturalism as a virtue without evidence to support the conclusion. The interview is a few years old, but it's relevant to today's discussions on systemic racism. Towards the end of the clip, he talks about IQ which has been a popular landmine topic in IDW conversations.

[u/The_gray_ghost]

There were tons of channels on YouTube and different subreddits that in the past few years have all been shut down that talked about the racial IQ gap. Now people applaud censorship, what a shame

[u/scumbag760]

Really interesting when the interviewer painted an accurate portrayal of black racism in America, slavery, jim crowe, oppressive laws etc... then he goes on to assume all of that is the reason why a black child born tomorrow in Detroit will have a lower standard of living. Sowell's response was on point too, because it's astounding how big of a gap he bridged there with no facts.

“The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. … I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”

- Frederick Douglas

I understand hundreds of years of oppression will have an affect on people. But, telling generation after generation that the racism in the past has made you a target for police brutality and ensured you will live in poverty your whole life, is by far not the answer to repairing those feelings.

I believe Frederick Douglas had the right idea, providing for material things is no substitution for giving people their freedoms. I believe their freedoms are being taken away by society telling them they are victims and have a low standard of life, then giving them a 'solultion' of money.

[u/[deleted]]

Thomas Sowell is my spirit animal. Everything I've heard this man say makes so much sense.

[u/Pondernautics]

People downvoting Thomas Sowell on this sub lol

Edit: That’s more like it

[u/Merica911]

Another must watch. Milton Friedman

https://youtu.be/ORQtnQRqOKc

[u/ItsQera]

I hate these titles. Even tho i'ts on this sub it really triggers bullshit memories