Thomas Sowell vs. Critical Race Theory

‘I ntellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood,” wrote Thomas Sowell, who himself grew up in poverty and was orphaned in early childhood. Continuing the thought in Intellectuals and Society (2010), he reflected on the damage done by our supposedly smartest thinkers:

They have encouraged the poor to believe their poverty is caused by the rich — a message which may be a passing annoyance to the rich but a lasting handicap to the poor, who may see less need to make fundamental changes to their own lives that could lift themselves up, instead of focusing their efforts on dragging others down.

At 91 Sowell doesn’t participate in every cultural dustup that breaks into the news, but his books and other writings are a standing riposte to many zombie ideas that just won’t die. In particular much of his work is a kind of pre-buttal to the various forms of racial special pleading that have come to be collected in the public consciousness under the sobriquet of critical race theory.

In his intellectual biography Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley reminds us that most current controversies are simply repackaged old ones, and Sowell made a brilliant career out of exposing the sloppy thinking behind them. “When I think of his writing, I think of one word: clarity,” columnist Fred Barnes said of Sowell. One of the tricks used by CRT proponents is claiming that their postulates are so complicated that it would be folly to attempt to summarize them. Yet they boil down to a tired conspiracy theory about the supposedly all-consuming force of white supremacy and a call for race-based preferences and subsidies stretching into eternity. Sowell saw the likes of today’s race demagogues decades ago. “The black community has long been plagued by spellbinding orators who know how to turn the hopes and fears of others into dollars and cents for themselves,” Sowell wrote in Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972), in words that are even more apposite today:

The current militant rhetoric, self-righteousness and lifestyle are painfully old to me. I have seen the same intonations, the same cadence, the same crowd manipulation techniques . . . and I have seen the same hustling messiahs driving their Cadillacs and getting their pictures in the paper.

Sowell knew the indignities of segregation when he was growing up and later when he was studying in night school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in the early Fifties. There were restaurants where only white people were allowed to sit, and blacks were expected to eat standing up, at counters. He refused to patronize them. What he saw in the student body, though, also appalled him: Sowell attended the black university because he thought such an institution was where he could make the greatest contribution to his race, but everywhere he looked he saw “lazy, dishonest, rude and irresponsible” students whose misbehavior was indulged by a school that “panders to their worst habits.” He started to loathe condescending white instructors who made lots of “give-the-poor-kids-a-break arguments and you-can’t-expect-too-much warnings.” The racism of low standards isn’t new. Instead of herding black students into race studies where expectations would be understood to be minimal, he said universities should coax them into medicine, law, and business administration. He predicted black studies would become “merely a euphemism for black political centers housed on college grounds.”

In 1954 when the Supreme Court issued the Brown v. Board decision, Sowell said he was the only one in a class discussion who argued that ending segregation would be nothing like a panacea. “I saw the obstacles to the advancement of blacks as involving more than discrimination by whites,” he said. “It annoyed me that we seemed to be constantly seeking acceptance and validation by white people — any white people at all, anywhere.”

Policy prescriptions such as affirmative action and slavery reparations and the grievance-based activism that today rallies under the name Black Lives Matter all came from what Sowell thought was a nonsensical impulse for handouts and white validation. Nor did he see much point to exploiting the guilty feelings of white liberals. “The moral regeneration of white people might be an interesting project,” he said, “but I am not sure we have quite that much time to spare. Those who have fought on this front are very much like the generals who like to refight the last war instead of preparing for the next struggle.”

When Sowell won admittance to Harvard as a transfer student, one of his writing teachers, the poet Sterling Brown, told him, “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ’cause white folks were mean.” Sowell called that “the best advice I could have gotten.” In 1964 he wrote to a black graduate student, in a letter Riley quotes at length, that demands for “special treatment” were worse than useless. They were, and remain, counterproductive:

When all the laws have been passed and all the gates flung open, the net result will be one tremendous anticlimax unless there is a drastic change of attitude among Negroes.

Sowell warned prophetically that the Sixties’ push for equal treatment would morph into a demand for special treatment. He wrote in a letter to the New York Times Magazine in 1963, why creating different standards for blacks would be a mistake:

People who have been trying for years to tell others that Negroes are basically no different from anybody else should not themselves lose sight of the fact that Negroes are just like everyone else in wanting something for nothing. The worst that could happen would be to hold out hopes for getting it.

Riley notes that before the Sixties, this was standard advice. Black media outlets saw it as a central goal to raise the standard among blacks. Newspapers such as the Chicago Defender would publish periodic tips aimed at black internal migrants from the South: “Don’t use vile language in public places,” “Don’t loaf. Get a job at once.” Black intellectuals largely abandoned this focus on self-improvement in favor of a politics of victimhood.

Today, gentry white progressives and New York Times columnists call for defunding police while blacks vehemently disagree; one Minnesota poll found that while a third of white voters liked the idea of reducing the size of the police force, only 14 percent of blacks agreed. Decades earlier, Sowell singled out the NAACP for following the lead of “white liberals in the press and philanthropy” and “constantly taking positions the very opposite of the black community on crime, on quotas, on busing.” In a 1980 Washington Post interview Sowell used a startling term, “house n*****s,” for blacks who favored the gentry white-liberal views on such matters, seemingly turning their backs on rank-and-file blacks in pursuit of the cosseting of white thought leaders.

Sowell’s ideas, Riley notes, have deep roots. W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, would have had little patience with BLM. Du Bois noted in 1895 that in the post-slavery era, the world had “asked little” of blacks, and “they answered with little.” Exterminating bias wouldn’t make much difference unless blacks learned to “try harder” and dropped “the omnipresent excuse for failure: prejudice.” Frederick Douglass famously noted in 1865: “Everybody has asked the question . . . . ‘What should we do with the Negro?’” His answer, he said, had always been the same: “Do nothing with us! . . . If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs.” As Booker T. Washington put it in Up from Slavery, blacks must be accorded the full privileges of other citizens, “but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.” All of this sounds like radical conservatism today; for a century it sounded more like common sense.