This post reviews Thomas Sowell's book: "Intellectuals and Race." Many conservatives have hailed it- and on Amazon it maintains a robust 4 to 4.5 rating among the faithful. But many positive reviews are thick on uncritical applause, and thin on detail, and it is in many ways, a disappointing read: full of old examples, avoidance of much of contemporary debates in the area, and curiously, omits work Sowell himself has done on "Race and intellectuals" when it involves possible criticism of right-wing intellectuals and friends like conservative intellectual Charles Murray. It also, again quite curiously, avoids mention of how CONTEMPORARY RIGHT-WING INTELLECTUALS use and manipulate race, and interesting omission for a book that purports to analyze "intellectuals and race." The work of one of the most prominent, JP Rushton for example, articulates a number of propositions widely accepted by right wing intellectuals- such as that "altruism" and "law abidingness" brain size, etc prove that differences between the "races" reflect an "ordering" of the races from lower to higher. This is no mere isolated set of arguments- they are articles of faith among many on the right. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray brush off Rushton's critics, writing, "Rushton's work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot" (The Bell Curve- pg 642) . As we shall see below, Thomas "Studied Silence" Sowell, seems anxious in this book to avoid critically examining many of such propositions put forward by his libertarian, conservative or "hereditarian" brethren, including those that disparage blacks like himself. This pattern of avoidance involves:
--A focus on old news and examples rather than contemporary data
--Avoidance of discussing many contemporary right wing intellectuals views on race
--A focus on bashing "the liberals" and their sins but maintaining studied silence on right wing scholars
--Avoidance of discussion on the "cosmic solutions" on race that prominent right wing intellectuals endorse
--Omission of Sowell's own critical work where it would substantially call right wing claims into question
The curiously missing members of the right-wing intelligentsia..
Let's bash "the liberals" but Sowell's discussion of numerous right-wing intellectuals on race is curiously missing.
As far as right wing intellectuals for example he mostly stops any detailed analysis after about 1940, save for a few exceptions as we shall see. In Chapter 3, we read about Madison Grant, Robert Stoddard, and the racist remarks of H.L. Menecken for example but then Sowell suddenly stops when it comes to any significant analysis of CONTEMPORARY right-wing intellectuals. The exception is Charles Murray, but even when discussing the Bell Curve, Sowell spends some 5 pages talking about critics of Murray and their liberalism while omitting any serious analysis of the weaknesses in Murray's work. More on this below. Sowell does discuss Arthur Jensen, a dean of IQ and race studies, whose seminal 1969 work, established a post 1960s narrative leaning towards genetic determinism. Sowell tries several times to soften Jensen's determinism, citing various qualifying statements made by Jensen. This is not unreasonable, but he likewise skips over statements by Jensen on the opposite end of the pole.
To his credit, Sowell does mention the research of James Flynn, and his "Flynn Effect" and how IQ scores have been rising for years, not only among US blacks who have scores above "100-normal" if calibrated for 1950s scoring norms, but internationally across many nations and cultures as well. This [progress has been concealed by "test norming." This is solid stuff at last, not 2 pages of fluff about "black thugs" (see below). He also notes that Flynn pointed to possible negative influences of US black subculture in depressing IQ scores, since the children of black fathers reared in Germany post higher IQ scores than similar children in the US race environment. Sowell's observations on certain negative aspects of some urban black culture seems borne out by IQ patterns which in very young black children are not that much different from whites, but by high school, the blacks have slipped well behind Asians and Whites. Sowell also does mention over-achievement relative to IQ as with Asians with the same or lower IQ scores, and his discussion does cast doubt on geneticist claims. But its rather muted info. He is careful to spend more time bashing "the liberals" while going easy on right-wing geneticist colleagues. Notice that its Professor Jensen's "alternative genetic explanation" below versus "multiculturalist doctrine" below. Apparently Jensen and right-wing intellectuals like Rushton, Lynn, Micahel Levin or Gottfredson, or Dsouza do not have any "doctrine" to criticize. Quote:
"The importance of other factors besides IQ is not a blank check for downplaying or disregarding mental test scores when making employment, college admissions or other decisions. Although empirical evidence shows that Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans tend to perform better in educational institutions than whites with the same mental test scores as themselves, other empirical evidence shows that blacks tend to perform below the level of those whites with the same test scores as themselves.18 Clearly, then, with blacks as with Chinese and Japanese Americans, other factors besides IQs have a significant influence on actual educational outcomes, even though these other factors operate in a different direction for different groups.."
""Professor Jensen offers an alternative, genetic explanation for this pattern, but a similar pattern was also found among low-IQ European immigrant groups in studies in 1916 to 1920, and among white American children in isolated mountain communities studied in 1930 and 1940,70 so it is not a racial peculiarity in a genetic sense. Professor Flynn’s explanation of this same pattern is consistent with the data cited by Klineberg. But these data are completely inconsistent with the prevailing multiculturalists’ doctrine that all cultures are equal. Flynn’s cultural explanation of black-white differences in IQ is also consistent with the otherwise puzzling anomaly that the mental test scores of white soldiers from various Southern states during the First World War were lower than the mental test scores of black soldiers from various Northern states at that time."
--Sowell pages 107-128
Black IQ gains over time. Flynn cannot be said to be in the right-wing camp of scholars like Murray, Rushton or Lynn, and Sowell does skip over one of the notable findings of Flynn- that Black Americans have gained some 4 to 6 IQ points relative to non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002 on 4 major tests of cognitive ability. Dickens and Flynn (2006) make no claim that their finding covers all tests, and other instruments do not show as large a gain (2-3 points versus 4 to 6.) Nevertheless, depending on the test taken, gains small and large, relative to whites are real, and the range of years showing improvement covers the evils of the welfare state as well as the "evil" affirmative action years. Yet within this period, the gains were registered. Per Dickens and Flynn- QUOTE:
"It is often asserted that blacks have made no IQ gains on whites, despite relative environmental gains, and that this adds credibility to the case that the black/white IQ gap has genetic origins. Until recently, there have been no adequate data to measure black IQ trends. We analyze data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These suggest that blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of black cognitive ability."
--Dickens WT(1), Flynn JR. 2006. Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples. Psychol Sci. 2006 Oct;17(10):913-20
Black academic gains over time. Another narrative among the right wing faithful is of total failure of social policies- and blacks being worse off, having made no gains under dastardly "liberal" policies. But this theme too is debunked by hard data. One grand illustration of the "total fail" narrative was the ominous "A Nation At Risk" report put out under the Reagan regime, which portrayed all as almost lost in education. But some of the gloom and doom was overblown propaganda, and sleight of hand. For example invidious comparisons were made to high SAT scores prior to the mid 1960s, compared to later decline, but the golden age of high scores was when a limited number of relatively affluent college potentials took the test. Later years saw a large expansion of more test takers who were much more diverse. Of course this larger pool would not be as well positioned as the relative elites before them. The "total fail" narrative also conveniently glossed over positive indices such as rising graduation rates and top performances by US students internationally. Even more devastating, a more objective study by the neutral Sandia Labs some years later, (1990) found IMPROVEMENT in school performances over the years measured when all this alarming "decline" was supposed to be taking place, a study quickly downplayed and shelved by the post Reagan Republican regime then in power.
Much was, and has been made of the low "rock bottom" NAEP ("nation's report card") reading scores in 1992, when there was a 26 point achievement gap between black and white students. Some doom proponents quickly ginned up the failure narrative, but also glossed over the fact that this outcome had come to fruition under 8 years of the Reagan regime and 4 years of Bush I, a 12 year stretch PRIOR to the dastardly "liberals" of the Clinton era taking over in 1992. By 2015 the 26% had been cut to 19%, hardly a spectacular gain, but still a measurable gain, calling into question the alleged efficacy of Reaganism, or assorted "Bell Curve" claims that predicted continued gloom where resources spent would produce nothing but "failure." And long term NAEP trends show 9 and 13 year olds scoring higher in math and reading than they did in the mid-1980s "Reagan revolution." See link- (https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/29/604986823/what-a-nation-at-risk-got-wrong-and-right-about-u-s-schools). Combine this progress with the clear gains of blacks in IQ, reducing the "gap" to 10 points per Flynn (2006) mentioned above, and the data on hand debunks several "hereditarian" and right-wing assertions.
One ironic note. The dark alarm sounded over the nation's failing education system, also put a spike in the Reagan regime's plans to abolish the Department of Education. (Glen Seaborg- A Nation at Risk Revisited- http://www2.lbl.gov/Publications/Seaborg/risk.htm)
https://www.ewa.org/blog-educated-reporter/20-years-later-us-students-making-big-academic-gains
Asian advantages up to one-standard deviation. Such gains are in keeping with steadily rising IQs demonstrated by the "Flynn Effect." Even Rushton and Jensen (2005- Thirty Years of research on race differences in cognitive ability) found East Asians to hold a 6 point IQ advantage over whites (106 versus 100), with the strongest Asian performances on more abstract elements such as math. Where Asians are not hampered by a language barrier in comparison to whites such as in math, the East Asian advantage is on the magnitude of one standard deviation or more greater than whites. Per one study (Nisbett 2009):
".. math achievement of the Asian students was leagues beyond that of the U.S. students. The identical problems were given to Japanese, Taiwanese, and American children. By the fifth grade, Taiwanese children scored almost 1 SD better in mathematics than American children, and the Japanese scored 1.30 SDs better than American children..."
And this pattern of one-standard deviation repeats itself for US based East Asians in some studies- Quote:
"By the time they were in high school, the Chinese Americans were scoring one-third of a standard deviation higher than European Americans on achievement tests. At a given IQ level, the Chinese Americans performed one-half of a standard deviation higher on typical achievement tests, compared with European Americans. The overachievement was particularly great on mathematics tests. In tests of calculus and analytic geometry, the Chinese Americans surpassed European Americans by a full standard deviation.
--Richard E. Nisbett. 2009. Intelligence and How to Keep It. p 163-170
Asians post performances one standard deviation ahead of whites in things like math, but Asians can also concede whites several points in IQ overall to start, yet still outmatch them in university admissions and occupational status, as data from as early as the 1960s shows. PEr Flynn 2012:
".. young people whose parents had come from East Asia made a powerful impression on the public imagination. They were about 2% of the population, but 14% of those at Harvard, 16% at Stanford, 20% at MIT, 21% at Cal Tech, 25% at Berkeley (Flynn, 1991a). When journalists approached Arthur Jensen for an explanation, he said they did so well because they are smarter (Brand, 1987). Anyone who dines at a Chinese restaurant and sees a child sleeping over his school books wake up, stretch, and pick up a book knows that something other than intelligence causes the academic achievements of Chinese-Americans. Flynn (1991a) analyzed the class that graduated from high school in 1966. During their senior year, the Coleman Report confirmed that they had no higher IQs than their white counterparts. However, they could concede whites 4.5 IQ points and match them on the SAT, and concede them almost 7 IQ points and match them for high-school grades. This meant that they could secure entry to the same universities as whites despite lower IQs. In the fall of 1966, Chinese entering Berkeley had an IQ threshold 7 points below whites... When Chinese tell other Chinese that their child has failed, the first question is, a fail or a Chinese fail'? The latter usually means they did not top the class."
--James Flynn. 2012. Are We getting Smarter Yet. p 177
The gains above are worth noting, but Sowell has relatively little to say about them re blacks. But aside from such, also missing are numerous CONTEMPORARY right-wing intellectuals on race, such as J.P Ruston, (whose books have received supportive praise by the leading conservative publication National Review), Linda Gottfredson, Richard Lynn or Tatu VanHaven. These persons are scholars with advanced credentials. Indeed over 50 scholarly intellectuals such as Professor Linda Gottfredson signed a well publicized Manifesto in the 1990s, (drafted by Gottfredson and published in the prestigious Wall Street Journal) defending the methods of the Bell Curve book. Thomas Sowell somehow can't find room to mention many of these leading right-wing intellectuals, dealing directly with his topic, yet he does manage to find room to mention the finances of Jesse Jackson. He also conveniently skips over much less qualified, but quite prominent popular right-wing public intellectuals such as Dinesh Dsouza who has written prominently on race as in his own specific book on race- "The End of Racism." These are significant figures on the right-wing side of the racial intellectual spectrum. Dsouza for example (before his conviction for fraud) had well selling books out and a prominent media presence), yet Sowell ducks discussing them- a very curious skip in a book supposedly about "intellectuals and race." He has plenty to say about "the liberals" though- and their would be errors and fallacies on race, and their connection to various "politically correct" organizations, movements or institutions.
Such selectivity certainly serves an ideological function for Sowell. It avoids exposing the fallacies and errors on the other side of the intellectual fence- that is among right wingers. And while the liberals and their PC institutions are freely mentioned, such selectivity avoids the similar connections of the right-wingers to a well financed network of conservative or racialist think-tanks, journals, books, conferences, and Internet forums and websites- all energetically propagating a rightward racialist or even racist party-line. Sowell maintains a convenient "politic silence" on what his contemporary right wing buddies are writing, despite a book claiming to examine the wide impact, including the damaging impact of intellectuals on society.
Some popular contemporary right wing intellectuals want to roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1964- Sowell remains silent. Much touted right-wing intellectual Dinesh Dsouza for example, in his 1996 book "The End of Racism" calls for a rollback of numerous protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Quote: "Am I calling for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes. The law should be changed so that its nondiscrimination provisions apply only to government." (Dsouza, 1996. The End of Racism, p 544). Of course, given the close linkages of private parties and government in discrimination against blacks Dsouza's "call" is laughable
Other top mainstream conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley are on record as opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing measure of 1968. Buckley is on record as supporting white supremacy and black inferiority. Somehow, Thomas Sowell, who springs into action if its something "liberal" to bash, is silent. "In a 1957 editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail” (8/24/57), NR founder William F. Buckley cited the “cultural superiority of white over Negro” in explaining why whites were “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically.” OK well hey, segregation was OK, denial of voting rights was OK, and South African versions with their oppressive rule by a white minority was OK as well. White people were right to implement such oppressive systems. Buckley voiced little objection to the fact that whites were already doing so in areas where they were not the minority but the majority (which was most of the south as blacks moved north in the immediate decades after WW2), but in those local situations where they were a minority, the apartheid system was OK too with Buckley. This is consistent, for Buckley also supported the apartheid regime of the white minority in South Africa on similar grounds. Quote:
"The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”
Appearing on NPR‘s Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. “Well, I think that’s absolutely correct,” Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him." (http://fair.org/extra/william-f-buckley-rest-in-praise/). Buckely is an important public intellectual in his own right, though dedicated to conservatism. Yet, like JP Rushton, he does not even rate a mention in Sowell's book, supposedly about "intellectuals and race." As detailed above, the reasons are not hard to fathom.. Given the clear racialism of many right-wing intellectuals, and the weaknesses in their various claims, it is not surprising that Sowell hops and skips around to avoid putting the whole record on the table.
Africans' "failure" to domesticate the dangerous Cape buffalo is evidence of
their mental handicaps say some well known and cited right-wing intellectuals..
Some contemporary right-wing intellectuals seriously distort African history and culture and intellect- Sowell, the master of data analysis, remains silent. For example, in their 2002 book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, conservative scholars Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, advance a farrago of distortion including chastising Africans for "failing" to domesticate species such as the African Cape buffalo, one of the hugest, fiercest ungulates in the world. It should be noted that in Asia, similar fierce species have not been domesticated either- people opted for milder tempered cattle. But only Africans are condemned as "backward" with seemingly "low mental capacities" for the eminently sensible choice of avoiding large unpredictable, dangerous beasts that are apt to attack nearby humans.
Lynn and Vanhanen show a penchant for making remarkable claims off a flawed dataset and methodology. The estimate "national IQ" of several countries for example by simply using the scores of nearby nations- analogous to say taking New York IQ scores and using them to "represent" Canada. Sample sizes are small and unrepresentative in many cases. As one credible reviewer puts it:
"Of the 185 countries in the sample, ‘direct evidence’ of the ‘national IQ’ is available for only 81.. National IQs for 101 countries are simply estimated from ‘most appropriate neighbouring countries’, that is, the ‘known IQs’ (sic) of their ‘racial groups’ (p 72). But, even for most of the others, ‘direct evidence’ is putting it strongly, as even a cursory glance at the motley tests, dates, ages, unrepresentative samples, estimates, and corrections show. A test of 108 9–15-year olds in Barbados, of 50 13–16-year olds in Colombia, of 104 5– 17-year olds in Ecuador, of 129 6–12-year olds in Egypt, of 48 10–14-year olds in Equatorial Guinea, and so on, and so on, all taken as measures of ‘national IQ’... Their scheme is to take the British Ravens IQ in 1979 as 100, and simply add or subtract 2 or 3 to the scores from other countries for each decade that the relevant date of test departs from that year. The assumptions of size, linearity and universal applicability of this correction across all countries are, of course, hugely questionable if not breathtaking.
Flynn’s original results were from only 14 (recently extended to twenty) industrialised nations, and even those gains varied substantially with test and country and were not linear. For example99, recent studies report increases of eight points per decade among Danes; six points per decade in Spain; and 26 points over 14 years in Kenya (confirming the expectation that newly developing countries would show more rapid gains). It is obvious that larger or smaller corrections over larger or smaller numbers of years can transform relative scores and rank orders, especially if the gains are nonlinear. With the measures of GDP, L&V admit that estimates may be ‘highly unreliable for developing countries’ (p 83), excluding up to 50% of the workforce, with often huge differences between males and females, and thus often ‘not strictly comparable across regions’ (p 83). This whole empirical license becomes absurd when the correlation between ‘IQ’ and GDP is extended back to 1820, nearly a century before the IQ test was invented (yes, we just get more ’estimates’)."
--K.Richardson 2004. BOOK REVIEW: IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Heredity (2004) 92, 359-360
It should be noted that Lynn and Vanhanen are not random bloggers off the web, but highly educated degreed professionals, and professors at established universities. Theirs is a serious scholarly attempt to prove that that the great variation presently observed in the per capita wealth of the nations of the world can be explained largely as the effect of the differences in inherited mental capacity existing between prosperous and impoverished countries, capacities that are demonstrated in certain racial groups. If anything should call out for serious analysis in a book on "Intellectuals and Race" this book should, for Lynn and Vanhanen are widely cited and recognized for their "racial" work. Other conservative authors it should be noted have directly taken on the Lynn/Vanhanen claims and debunked them thoroughly. But curiously, Thomas Sowell is a no-show in this book, and does not even mention them in his copious footnotes, which find space for such marginal topics as Jesse Jackson's finances.
Again the pattern of selective cherry-picking and avoidance of anything that might significantly clash with other right wing scholars reveals itself. We will see this pattern repeated below on discussions of Charles Murray. Lynn and Vanhanen's work fits in quite well with the similar "IQ Supreme" arguments of right-wing and libertarian types, including Charles Murray. If anything is tailor-made for examination of "Intellectuals and Race" it is Lynn and Vanhaven's sweeping thesis and detailed statistics. Indeed some of their statistics are shaky- including the use of very small samples and "guessestimates" to make sweeping conclusions about African peoples. If "the liberals" showed such weaknesses, Sowell is on it, like white on rice. But where is Thomas Sowell when it comes to substantially examining such work by his right wing fellow travelers? He is a missing in action.
Woe to ye liberal oppressors and multiculturalists
In Chapter 4, Sowell discusses how intellectuals have ginned up race cards to oppress various minorities. His examples are fair- such as anti-Semitism in Europe, anti-Tamil agitation and violence in Sri Lanka, the expulsion of Asians in Uganda, and sandbagging of Chinese in Malaya. In these cases the more efficient or advanced "middleman minorities" were indeed oppressed, and Sowell is quick to point out that this oppression was the product of left-wing or "liberal"/left-influenced elements of those societies, such as those influenced by socialism. These are valid points, but the dominance of minorities such as Jews or overseas Chinese was a point of resentment (albeit less violently expressed) among conservative indigenous peoples before substantial left-wing prominence. And again, Sowell curiously has little to say about RIGHT-WING INTELLECTUALS and how they have ginned up race agitation to oppress minorities. Jews have been notable victims of right-wing intellectuals for example, but it is not only "advanced peoples" who have suffered. Right-wing intellectuals in the United States and South Africa have also ginned up massive brews of racism against groups like blacks. Such right-wing activities receive curiously little attention in a book that supposedly deals with Intellectuals and Race.
Negro crime. In Chapter 7- "Race and Cosmic Justice" Sowell slams liberal intellectuals for attempting to deliver "justice" to overturn circumstances caused by a wide variety of neutral factors and group behaviors. In short he argues, "the liberals" ignore real world differences between races, holding for example that all cultures are equally valid, and ominously- quote: "leaving nothing but an agenda of resentment-building and crusades on the side of the angels against the forces of evil." This is certainly true as to SOME "PC" venues- like some college campuses. But is it true that "liberals" consider all cultures to be equal and that they ignore "real world differences?" In fact a large number of complaints from American non-white or Third World activists cite exactly the opposite- charging that their cultures are seen as "backward" by liberals who seek to impose their agendas and solutions on indigenous or local peoples. Hence some American black activists have long criticized some local educational systems (run by liberals), on the topic of black education, and some Third World activists likewise decry tariff and "structural adjustment" regimes imposed by the liberal UN and "global governance" types. And speaking of "leaving nothing but an agenda of resentment-building and crusades on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.." this sounds pretty much like the strategy various right-wingers have used for years on the issue of race. Resentment? Crusades on the side of the angels? Oh no.. conservatives would never do such things would they? ..
Sowell next launches into a discussion of race and crime, where he cites racist author Colin Flatherty on black youths attacking whites as if this were the sum total of the "race and crime" universe, and opines that liberal "celebration of cultural differences" is part of the reason for such crimes or "condoning" of them. But such sophistry only illustrates Sowell's shaky strawman approach. No credible black legislator or civil rights leader "celebrated" or "condoned" the black on white attacks, nor attempted to "justify" them in the name of "diversity." As regards various "knockout" attacks carried out by black youths for example, people like the infamous Al Sharpton, the classic bogeyman himself, actually vigorously CONDEMNED them, but such is not mentioned by Sowell in his cherry-picked illustrations of "the liberals" and how they are "condoning" black crime. See: ("Knockout Games-The Biggest Form of Cowardice; by Rev. Al Sharpton". Huffingtonpost.com. 2013-11-25. Retrieved 2013-12-08)
Sowell then jumps to slavery and speaks extensively that black slavery was not the only type of slavery, slavery is an old phenomenon, and so on. Indeed, but all this is rather obvious. It it really news that there were huge numbers of slaves in the white Roman empire? And who is "denying" that blacks polities in Africa sold numerous blacks to Europeans to be slaves on Western Hemisphere plantations? Oh, and the word "slave" is derived from the Eastern European "slav." This is really fresh news. And then, suddenly the chapter ends. Sowell has little more to say. But if he were really examining race and justice, he would deal with such key issues as the unequal sentences and prosecutions meted out to black defendants compared to whites, for the same crimes, as detailed in numerous studies, and in books such as Michele Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Alexander's book and other related criminal justice and incarceration topics are tailor made for a critique and analysis. But in a chapter supposedly dealing with "race and justice" Thomas Sowell is again, strangely (and conveniently) silent.
Harsh, heavy-handed policing of allegedly inferior and inherently criminal communities of color- who were due to unleash a "wave" of "super-predators" on society.
Another solution Sowell ducks addressing in his "race and crime chapter is the right wing strategy of harsh, heavy-handed policing of black communities. The fallout from such policies is/was predictable including disparate and biased arrests, prosecutions, sentencing and imprisonment. As Professor James Vitale puts it:
Harsh policies that impinge on civil liberties
"Wilson, following Banfield, believed strongly that there were profound limits on what government could do to help the poor... Since the root of the problem was either an essentially moral and cultural failure or a lack of external controls to regulate inherently destructive human urges, the solution had to take the form of punitive social control mechanisms to restore order and neighborhood stability. Wilson's views were informed by a borderline racism that emerged as a mix of biological and cultural explanations for the "inferiority" of poor blacks. Wilson co-authored the book Crime and Human Nature with Richard Herrnstein, which argued that there were important biological determinants of criminality...
Broken-windows policing is at root a deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive, and restrictive forms of policing that involve more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately more violence. As inequality continues to increase, so will homelessness and public disorder, and as long as people continue to embrace the use of police to manage disorder, we will see a continual increase in the scope of police power and authority at the expense of human and civil rights..."
--James Vitale, 2017. The End of policing
Conservative (and later neo-liberal) analysts also got it wrong regarding an alleged massive future "wave" of negro "super predators". As Vitale's detailed study notes- Quote:
"First, conservative criminologist John Dilulio, along with broken-windows theory author James Q. Wilson, argued in 1995 that the United States would soon experience a wave of youth crime driven by the crack trade, high rates of single-parent families, and a series of racially coded concerns about declining values and public morality.4 He predicted that by 2010 there would be an additional 270,000 of these youthful predators on the streets, leading to a massive increase in violent crime. He described these young people as hardened criminals: "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches," and "have absolutely no respect for human life."5 Dilulio and his colleagues argued that there was nothing to be done but to exclude such children from settings where they could harm others and, ultimately, to incarcerate them for as long as possible. Dilulio's ideas were based on spurious evidence and ideologically motivated assumptions that turned out to be totally inaccurate. Every year since, juvenile crime in and out of schools in the US has declined."
--James Vitale, 2017. The End of policing
Disparate sentencing and prosecution
Police searches, arrests, prosecutions and imprisonments for drug activity falls mostly on blacks and Latinos who are less than 25% of all drug users (Wise 2008- Between Barack and a hard place) And on some drug counts, whites receive LESSER sentences involving use of powdered cocaine than black crack users or dealers. In fact, overall, it turns out that as far as blacks are concerned, they receive LONGER sentences than whites for the same crimes, with jail time in some cases 60% longer. And prosecutors are about twice as likely to impose mandatory minimums on black defendants as on white defendants. (Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences Rehavi and Starr, 2012). Sounds like a great deal for white people. Distorted windows.
It should also be noted that while right-wing advocates claim credit for crime reductions due to harsh "windows" policing methods, crime was already falling BEFORE such methods were implemented in key test bed NYC, as the cohort of people most likely to commit crimes fell (young persons between 18 and 30). Indeed crime was falling under the predecessor to Rudy Guillaini, Mayor David Dinkins's "Safe Streets" community policing initiative put thousands of new officers on the streets during his tenure. Right wing darling Guillani emerged to take credit for an already ongoing trend See: (Bernard E. Harcourt, 2001. Illusion of Order The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing).
All the above is a quite predictable outcome of the right-wing solution of heavy handed surveillance and harassment and policing of communities of color. But of course, Thomas Sowell, supposedly discussing race, justice and crime, maintains a mysterious silence.
More lenient treatment of whites.
Some statistics show whites MORE likely to be carrying weapons and contraband than blacks, but its blacks arrested and profiled more. Here indeed is a rich topic on "race and justice." Sowell remains silent. Strangely, data from both NY and Minnesota show blacks having LESS weapons or contraband on them than whites when stopped by police, yet they are targeted more and have force used against them to a greater extent.
And here's data direct from City of Minneapolis. The blacks were stopped almost 3 times as much as whites, and in addition, many of the blacks were stopped in higher crime hoods. Yet with the deck stacked in every way against the negro, it turns out that the whites stopped were carrying MORE contraband than Blacks or Latinos.
Curiously, Sowell skips over the cosmic solutions of right-wing intellectuals.. an IQ supremacist society with gutted or eliminated social programs such as disability insurance or unemployment insurance..
'Final" or "cosmic" solutions to the Race problem- Curious silence on the solutions of right-wing intellectuals.
Brave New World: Strangely missing- the "cosmic" right-wing solution of massive government cutbacks in social programs, including elimination of Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, and Worker's Compensation. Interestingly, as regards "cosmic justice" Sowell does not substantially discuss right-wing intellectuals and their search for "cosmic justice." Such intellectuals for example have invoked a number of "solutions" where blacks are concerned- ranging from deportation of blacks "back to Africa", to contemporary eugenics "culling" undesirables, to the systematic disenfranchisement and denial of basic rights and opportunities available to Afro-Americans. In south Africa, the white apartheid government initiated and implemented a "cosmic" solution to the race problem that was similar in some respects to the solutions' worked out in the ghetto segregation US model: develop segregated, widely fragmented "Bantusans" on a tiny fraction of the worse land, while whites controlled or owned almost 90% of the land, including the best parts. Apartheid regime organs cranked out detailed intellectual justifications for this "separate development" policy.
In the United States, Richard Herrenstein and Charles Murray worked out their own "cosmic solution" to the race problem. If IQ was such a strong predictor of life outcomes, why bother with all the social programs in place to help the poor, particularly poor blacks? Part of the cosmic solution package for these excessively dependent low IQ people would therefore involve the "tough love" advocated in earlier books such as "Losing Ground." The solution would involve - quote: "completely scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working aged persons, including AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Worker's Compensaion, subsidized housing, disability insurance and the rest." (Murray, Losing Ground, p 227-228).
While he later backtracked to generously posit some aid, such as food aid to hungry children, or a small level of unemployment insurance, Murray's core vision remains fundamentally unchanged in The Bell Curve. It should be noted also that Arthur Jensen regarded compensatory social programs as useless, given what he sees as fixed racial genetic capabilities. But curiously, Sowell has nothing to say about such right-wing "cosmic solutions" even though- they were put in place partially during the 1980s era Reagan cutback regime. In other words, they are/were actual policies in action, not mere intellectual "thought experiments." Since the bulk of the pain by the right wing "solutions" would be felt by blacks, the "solution" obviously has racial implications.
Roll back government- heaven forbid if minorities benefit from some government spending. The envisioned cutbacks of Murray and others is mirrored in attacks on government spending that might benefit some black folk. Assorted "dog whistle" campaigns have been active in this area for years. Oh those "parasitical" Negroes working for government, for example. But if white people are getting the benefit - hey, that's OK. In his book "The End of Racism" Dinesh Dsouza continues the party line. He condemns high levels of black employment in government as "parasitical", saying nary a word about high levels among whites, like white southerners, or groups like the white Irish, who fed and feed extensively from the government trough, and indeed used their control of municipal governments to discriminate against other groups. Indeed, as late as the early WW2 era, fully ONE-THIRD of the white Irish were working for government. As historians Bayor and Meager- 1996 show- quote:
"As a consequence, the public sector employed a full one-third of first, second and third-generation Irish Americans in 1930 compared with just 6 percent in 1900. This patronage helped produce a heavy concentration of Irish in jobs on the fire and police departments and in municipally owned subways, streetcars, waterworks and port facilities. Many of the city's Irish middle class worked on the public payroll, especially in the public schools, and thousands of others labored in construction jobs tied to city expenditures. For second-generation Irish-American women, jobs as schoolteachers were the most sought-after career. Such patronage policies would help to bind the Irish working class and much of the middle class Tammany Hall for another generation." --Bayor and Meagher 1996. The New York Irish, p. 313Compare one-third against the comparable black rate of 12.8%:
"..in 2011 women comprised 48.3 percent of overall employment, yet
accounted for 59.5 percent of employment in state and local government,
significantly higher than their 46.7 percent share of private-sector
employment.. in 2011, African Americans accounted for 10.9 percent of overall
employment, yet held 12.8 percent of state and local public-sector jobs
and 10.3 percent of private-sector jobs.."
Source:
Economic Policy Institute (2012) The Public Sector jobs crisis.
http://www.epi.org/publication/bp339-public-sector-jobs-crisis/
Various right-wing/libertarian "cosmic solutions" draw heavily on the research cited by Bell Curve authors Murray and Herrenstein, projects generously funded by the racialist, right-wing eugenics advocating Pioneer Fund, of which several key right-wing intellectuals have received money- such as Linda Gottfredson, a Pioneer Fund grant recipient
. Professor J.P. Rushton too, has benefited handsomely from the Pioneer Fund which funded the research and distribution of 35,000 unsolicited copies of his book Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective to psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists in Canada and the United States. A 2nd edition of the book (also abridged) was sent out, again unsolicited, to scholars in 2000." The Fund was set up in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a millionaire who advocated sending blacks back to Africa. The foundation's charter set forth the group's missions as "racial betterment" and aid for people "deemed to be descended primarily from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States." The charter was slightly toned down in 1985 in reaction to critical scrutiny but its controllers have never renounced its fundamental objectives completely. The racial basis of the "cut off spending on them" solutions is obvious, despite proponents attempt to veil it, and it has hearty endorsement by two of the leading right-wing intellectuals, Charles Murray and Richard Herrenstein, and even Arthur Jensen. Yet Sowell, while quick to condemn "the liberals," is curiously silent on such matters.
One key final solution of right-wing intellectuals- roll back or water down the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other key civil rights measures in voting and housing. Finally as noted above, one cosmic solution advanced by right-wingers and libertarians is to roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1964, applying it only to governments, as if such limiting will not have a damaging effect on African-Americans, and as if the benefits of "free market competition" will hold down abuses. Such arguments are laughable for anti-discrimination legislation has to tackle private bias as well, given the close intertwining of private and public parties in discrimination against Afro-Americans. This intertwining included as host of things, such as private restaurants refusing to serve blacks situated in government facilities that are supposed to be non-discriminatory, or government housing agencies collaborating with private real estate agencies in refusing to extend loans to blacks outside designated "ghetto" areas,. Such intertwining of public and private entities, demonstrated in a over century's worth of court cases, laws and executive decisions, make the notion of confining anti-discrimination measures to "public" entities an exercise in sheer nonsense.
There was plenty of "free marketism" AND Jim Crow operating together effectively for a long time prior to the Civil Rights Act. Under this right wing cosmic solution- if for example if a bus company or airline wants to treat blacks disrespectfully and relegate black passengers to the back, or exclude them altogether, too bad! Private employer wants to exclude blacks from certain jobs? Oh well, too bad for those blacks. Real estate agent wants to steer blacks only to crumbling ghetto properties? Ha ha- so solly, black people. Stores want to take black money but don't want them to use the restrooms, or try on clothes? Hey, those negroes can go elsewhere- such as their marginal stores that are "discouraged" from operating in profitable locations! We don't care. Black kids and adults can't get decent private hospital care? Ha ha, too bad black people - just die- and they did, prior to "evil" federal government "interference" that threatened to withhold federal funds for hospitals that practiced racial segregation. This saved numerous black lives as decent hospital care, including life-saving immunizations for children, finally began to go to black people. But libertarians and conservatives opposed such "evil" and in principle today, would simply wave away those black lives, and also, oppose government action in this area.
As regards civil rights, various right wing "solutions" are in play, such as how the right-wing judges weakened the Voting rights Act here. And note how right-wing regimes at the state and local levels use other dodges and manipulations to suppress minority voting here, such as deliberately inconvenient registration offices, and deliberately limited hours the distant registration offices are open, even as the alleged "abuses" suppression laws are designed to "fix" are mostly non-existent. Housing is discussed in other posts. Other rollbacks have occured under the right wing aegis, such as anti-discrimination enforcement in housing. Followed to its logical conclusion, this is the callous, racially biased unfair spirit that animates people like Dzouza and his right wing ilk. Left to them, America would still be partially an apartheid state.
Furthermore, individual whites are voters, and have every incentive to use governmental power to impose their racial preferences on others. This has damaging spillover effects. Routing black people to the back of the bus for example (sometimes physically assaulting them in the process- Rosa Parks for example was once physically thrown off a bus by a private sector bus employee) or excluding them from restaurants ends a message that blacks are not worthy of respect, or citizenship- a subtle and not so subtle demonization message, stoking a poisonous resentment and bitterness that still has not dissipated in America. Private real estate agents and bankers routing blacks to the worse, most toxic properties means that they do not have access to decent schools, good jobs located in the suburbs, and have less chance to acquire the major source of individual wealth in contemporary America- home ownership. It also means blacks will pay higher prices for things like substandard housing, This is precisely what has happened with housing in America as scholar Richard Rothstein so eloquent documents in his book The Color of Law (2017). The notion that merely banning "government" from discrimination would not have any damaging spillover effect on black folk is laughable, and shows callous, mean-spirited approach among contemporary right wing intellectuals- a spirit reflected not only among openly racist right-wingers, but more polite folk who embrace libertarian theorist Ayn Rand.
Propagandists wax indignant at civil rights "giveaways" to
blacks, but the main beneficiaries of civil rights laws are white women
credible scholars show..
Claims of stagnant black progress debunked. In 2002 Sowell, still continuing his pattern of trying to downplay the Civil Rights Act asserts:
"Additional blacks entered professional and other high-level positions in the five years following passage of the Civil Rights Act—but these additions were fewer than in the five years preceding passage of the Act. " --Sowell, A Personal Odyssey p 268-269
It is interesting that Sowell gives no supporting evidence to back this statement. But hard empirical data by other scholars shows the claim to be shaky. As scholars Devey and Stainback note:
"Even more striking is the rapid increase in white women’s access to managerial jobs after 1971. White women move from being underrepresented in managerial jobs by 70 percent to being underrepresented by only 12 percent at the turn of the century. While they have not yet reached parity, white women have made remarkable and consistent gains. Black males also have made gains in private sector managerial employment, although their advances are not as dramatic or consistent. Black males were barely represented among managers in this EEOC reporting sample in 1966, being underrepresented by 90 percent relative to their employment in the sector. They made sustained improvements through 1983, although they were still substantially underrepresented at –54 percent of their general labor market employment. No further progress was made through the 1980s, but progress began again across the 1990s."
[FROM: --Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Kevin Stainback. 2007. Discrimination and Desegregation: Equal Opportunity Progress in U.S. Private Sector Workplaces since the Civil Rights Act. Ann Amer Academ PolSci 609:49-84] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25097875?seq=1
The astute reader will notice that the biggest beneficiary from the Civil Rights Act is white women, but that the blacks, though still substantially underrepresented, did make measurable progress better than before the Act, for the managerial level jobs, debunking Sowell's claim. Other scholars noted below also show the same pattern of black gains after the Civil Rights Act. The Act did not "cause" ALL the gain- no one piece of legislation can claim that- but it did aid the large pool of qualified blacks who had been frozen out of the market before the Act. This pool of people is somewhat analogous to black baseball players before Jackie Robinson's era- more than qualified, and in some cases better qualified than whites, and/or more competitive,, but still locked out of the game by white racism and protectionism, despite a lot of hypocritical talk about "merit" and "free markets."
Doing the "prima facie" limbo..
COURTS AND THE LAW ON RACE- A MATTER OF "ELITES" ONLY? Sowell presents an alarming picture of "courts gone wild" on race- Quote:
"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... 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." (page 197)
But this is disingenuous, and shows Sowell's penchant for
cherry picking anecdotes, and/or misrepresenting complex issues to fit his
particular ideological basket. For one thing most disparate impact cases DO have a live body that has suffered discrimination. And who says you need a live victim to file a court case about something? Conservative right-wing types have oft filed suit against government action without there being any live "victims" such as against a new government tax or policy, aiming to stop the policy before it takes effect. What's this "shocking" live victim point supposed to be? But that brings us to the cases themselves, and the claim that "statistics alone" establish disparate impact. This is laughable.
Few sane employment discrimination plaintiffs show up in court with merely a "statistical" showing that say, blacks are underrepresented in a particular job. As any basic book on employment law shows or even personnel management textbook that discusses employment discrimination in detail shows, plaintiffs definitely have to bring more than "a speck" of proof. Plaintiffs also typically have to show such things as whether the employer has a history of discrimination, whether the employer's practices -such as white only "word of mouth" recruitment approaches were appropriate, and so on. Furthermore courts considering "disparate impact" have recognized that Plaintiffs must show a sufficiently large number of samples for any statistics proffered to be significant or credible (Haggard 2009-below). And contrary to Sowell, almost all of these cases do have warm body plaintiffs asking for redress for suffering or unfavorable treatment. They are not like paper cases designed to head off some sort of policy or tax..
Few sane employment discrimination plaintiffs show up in court with merely a "statistical" showing that say, blacks are underrepresented in a particular job. As any basic book on employment law shows or even personnel management textbook that discusses employment discrimination in detail shows, plaintiffs definitely have to bring more than "a speck" of proof. Plaintiffs also typically have to show such things as whether the employer has a history of discrimination, whether the employer's practices -such as white only "word of mouth" recruitment approaches were appropriate, and so on. Furthermore courts considering "disparate impact" have recognized that Plaintiffs must show a sufficiently large number of samples for any statistics proffered to be significant or credible (Haggard 2009-below). And contrary to Sowell, almost all of these cases do have warm body plaintiffs asking for redress for suffering or unfavorable treatment. They are not like paper cases designed to head off some sort of policy or tax..
Sowell footnotes the landmark Griggs versus Duke case in a
discussion of testing and job criteria but the very case he cites in his book debunks his "courts
gone wild" insinuations. In Griggs versus Duke, the plaintiffs had to show
up with proof of past discrimination practices, including how blacks were
sandbagged for years into lesser skilled positions, and how "new"
test requirements grand- fathered in all the whites into higher slots,
without them having to take any of the "new" tests. The Court in Griggs indeed
noted that just because a practice or policy has disparate impart on
minorities does not conclusively establish its illegality, and unintentional
discriminatory effects could be justified. Quote: "The touchstone is
business necessity.." Plaintiffs in Griggs showed up not with a
"speck" of "mere" statistics, but a virtual dump truck of
many types of proof.
Furthermore in Griggs, the Court found that new, allegedly "needed" job qualifications that served to sandbag black employees, did not bear much relation to job performance. The employer in this case suddenly implemented the "new" job requirements shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, ensuring that black workers would not derive substantial benefit. In view of such blunt realities, "disparate impact" can be a valid way (it is not a perfect mechanism) of ferreting out illegal employer behavior. In another important case, Albermarle Paper v. Moody (1975- over 30 years ago), the Supreme Court actually laid out a systematic three step process for proving disparate impact- relevant statistics, business necessity, and sufficient rebuttal by the Plaintiff that Defendant could use bona fide alternative practices not having disparate impact. All this is far from the "courts gone wild" picture insinuated by Sowell. (See such basic texts for example as Thomas R. Haggard. 2009 Understanding Employment Discrimination Law).
Furthermore in Griggs, the Court found that new, allegedly "needed" job qualifications that served to sandbag black employees, did not bear much relation to job performance. The employer in this case suddenly implemented the "new" job requirements shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, ensuring that black workers would not derive substantial benefit. In view of such blunt realities, "disparate impact" can be a valid way (it is not a perfect mechanism) of ferreting out illegal employer behavior. In another important case, Albermarle Paper v. Moody (1975- over 30 years ago), the Supreme Court actually laid out a systematic three step process for proving disparate impact- relevant statistics, business necessity, and sufficient rebuttal by the Plaintiff that Defendant could use bona fide alternative practices not having disparate impact. All this is far from the "courts gone wild" picture insinuated by Sowell. (See such basic texts for example as Thomas R. Haggard. 2009 Understanding Employment Discrimination Law).
Curses! Disparate impact agin! The end of Western legal tradition is nigh..
Sowell further insinuates race cases as peculiarly sinister to legal tradition - Quote:
"Not only in the American media and popular discourse, but in academic institutions and in courts of law— all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States— no burden of proof whatever is required for the presumption that disparate outcomes at a given institution constitute prima facie evidence of discrimination at that institution, which legally shifts the burden of proof of innocence to the accused, contrary to legal traditions in other contexts, where it is the accuser who has the burden of proof, whether in criminal or civil cases." (pg 34)
No burden of proof whatsoever? Huh? What about having credible sample sizes to make statistical claims or other items that are weighed by judges as detailed above? And is it really only where such race cases are concerned that accusers have an initially low burden of proof? Really? This is hyped drama. A relatively low prima facie
requirement is nothing unusual- such appear throughout the legal system. For
example, in patent cases, various materiality
rules are sometimes cited as just
such a low bar, likewise the same phenomenon occurs in domain
name registration cases. Interestingly enough, white Jews have made profitable use of statistical "disparity" arguments in opening up long denied opportunities- see for example- (Harold Wechsler. 2014. The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America). There is sometimes a reason for low bars, and they have been useful in cracking entrenched systems of discrimination in employment. As anyone who has learned something about discrimination law would know, a low bar
for a prima facie case is simply a first step. All a low bar does is stop
your case from being quickly thrown out initially. You still have to make a
convincing case before the judge(s), and meet numerous tests, per above.
Employment discrimination
plaintiffs almost always face a substantial uphill battle, and a big imbalance in power. This is another reason why courts may allow a modest initial bar. Employers have numerous
advantages, including the ability to simply wear down the typically unemployed
plaintiff by dragging out the legal process. Employers also have a favorable monopoly on many types
of evidence kept on company premises, and have a favorable lineup of witnesses
they control- usually other employees- some pressured to say what the Corporate or other Defendant wants them to say. Employers also are protected by the requirement for a minimum showing of credible
business necessity for a policy or practice- in which case the burden shifts to
the Plaintiff. Recognition of these disadvantages and imbalances of power is in
part, the reason courts or legislators set an initially low prima facie bar. But
that is only initially. And discrimination plaintiffs face a costly legal
process themselves- often unemployed, having to front lawyer's fees, paying various
admin costs, and waiting YEARS for resolution. And they don’t go to court
immediately, they first have to go through the EEOC bureaucracy which has a case
backlog measured in YEARS for those content to wait. Even those who obtain a streamlined EEOC release, still have to go to regular court and face years of legal struggle, with all their attendant costs. Does all the above mean that there have been no abuses of disparate impact or weak cases? NO of course not. But abuses and weak cases occur in every field of litigation- race discrimination cases are not any "unusual" phenomenon supposedly "destroying" the system. And as already shown above, modest prima facie requirements in legal conflicts are nothing special, and there is no
"easy" road requiring a mere "speck" of something, as
dramatically insinuated by Thomas Sowell.
Sowell also conveniently skips a key case, Washington versus Davis (1976) where the high court rejected the claim of black plaintiffs that a certain test required for police employment had a disparate impact, holding that said tests, neutral on face value were valid, unless enacted with discriminatory intent. This is a far cry from the "courts gone wild" insinuations of Thomas Sowell, who again, is careful to cherry pick his sources and examples to build a skewed argument. (Stevens and Scheb 2008. American Constitutional Law, Vol II, p 456)
Wither the Bell Curve? Sowell spends a lot of time lashing back at critics but mysteriously hops and skips around his own earlier analysis that revealed the weaknesses of the Bell Curve's arguments.
Up above it was noted that Sowell is mysteriously missing in action when it appears he might have to substantially critique the works of right-wing intellectuals. His discussion of Herenstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" may seem like an exception, but... He devotes almost 8 pages to it in chapter 5, much of the time defending the authors against the charge of being genetic determinists, But again, a curious omission. In the 1995 book, "The Bell Curve Wars," Sowell specifically discusses the book and while noting its strengths such as its statistics, also discusses a number of glaring weaknesses- including how the Flynn effect undermines certain Bell Curve arguments, and the naive use of statistical correlations. Amazingly, while Sowell has the time and space to devote 2 pages to "black thugs", and even works in Jesse Jackson's finances, he can barely muster 2 lines specifically addressing weaknesses in one of the most prominent books impacting the race issue by a public intellectual in the last 20 years. But that is not surprising since the intellectual is a right-wing author and a personal friend of Sowell. Sowell quickly ducks and runs, saying that he "elsewhere" addressed the Bell Curve. Now why such a curious omission when you have space for 8 pages of pro-Bell Curve deflection or argument, and at least 2 for "negro thugs"? Turns out that Sowell's critique highlights some arguments of his right-wing intellectual colleague in a very unflattering light. Let's quote what Thomas Sowell can't seem to find space for:
QUOTE:
"[Herrnstein and Murray] seem to conclude... that... biological inheritance of IQ... among members of the general society may also explain IQ differences between different racial and ethnic groups.... Such a conclusion goes... much beyond what the facts will support....
[T]he greatest black-white differences are not on the questions which presuppose middle-class vocabulary or experiences, but on abstract questions such as spatial perceptual ability.... [Herrnstein and Murray's] conclusion that this "phenomenon seems peculiarly concentrated in comparisons of ethnic groups" is simply wrong. When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s. So did canal boat children in Britain, and so did rural British children compared to their urban counterparts, at a time before Britain had any significant non-white population. So did Gaelic-speaking children as compared to English-speaking children in the Hebrides Islands. This is neither a racial nor an ethnic peculiarity. It is a characteristic found among low-scoring groups of European as well as African ancestry.. In short, groups outside the cultural mainstream of contemporary Western society tend to do their worst on abstract questions, whatever their race might be.."
While The Bell Curve cites the work of James R. Flynn, who found substantial increases in mental test performances from one generation to the next in a number of countries around the world, the authors seem not to acknowledge the devastating implications of that finding for the genetic theory of intergroup differences, or for their own reiteration of long-standing claims that the higher fertility of low-IQ groups implies a declining national IQ level. This latter claim is indeed logically consistent with the assumption that genetics is a major factor in interracial differences in IQ scores. But ultimately this too is an empirical issue--and empirical evidence has likewise refuted the claim that IQ test performance would decline over time.
...... quote by Sowell from the Bell Curve Wars (1995), continued..
"The implications of such rising patterns of mental test performance is devastating to the central hypothesis of those who have long expressed the same fear as Herrnstein and Murray, that the greater fertility of low-IQ groups would lower the national (and international) IQ over time. The logic of their argument seems so clear and compelling that the opposite empirical result should be considered a refutation of the assumptions behind that logic....
A man who scores 100 on an IQ test today is answering more questions correctly than his grandfather with the same IQ answered two-generations ago, then someone else who answers the same number of questions correctly today as this man's grandfather answered two generations ago may have an IQ of 85.
Herrnstein and Murray openly acknowledge such rises in IQ and christen them "the Flynn effect," in honor of Professor Flynn who discovered it. But they seem not to see how crucially it undermines the case for a genetic explanation of interracial IQ differences. They say:
"The national averages have in fact changed by amounts that are comparable to the fifteen or so IQ points separating blacks and whites in America. To put it another way, on the average, whites today differ from whites, say, two generations ago as much as whites today differ from blacks today. Given their size and speed, the shifts in time necessarily have been due more to changes in the environment than to changes in the genes."
...... quote by Sowell from the Bell Curve Wars (1995), continued..
"While this open presentation of evidence against the genetic basis of interracial IQ differences is admirable, the failure to draw the logical inference seems puzzling. Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ, and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are even partly racial?"
"Herrnstein and Murray do not address this question, but instead shift to a discussion of public policy.."
"Perhaps the most intellectually troubling aspect of The Bell Curve is the authors' uncritical approach to statistical correlations. One of the first things taught in introductory statistics is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten, and one of the most widely ignored facts in public policy research. The statistical term "multicollinearity," dealing with spurious correlations, appears only once in this massive book.
Multicollinearity refers to the fact that many variables are highly correlated with one another, so that it is very easy to believe that a certain result comes from variable A, when in fact it is due to variable Z, with which A happens to be correlated. In real life, innumerable factors go together. An example I liked to use in class when teaching economics involved a study showing that economists with only a bachelor's degree had higher incomes than economists with a master's degree and that these in turn had higher incomes than economists with Ph.D.'s. The implication that more education in economics leads to lower incomes would lead me to speculate as to how much money it was costing a student just to be enrolled in my course. In this case, when other variables were taken into account, these spurious correlations disappeared. In many other cases, however, variables such as cultural influences cannot even be quantified, much less have their effects tested statistically...."
ENDQUOTE
--Thomas Sowell, 1995. The Bell Curve Wars
Of course, there have been other Bell Curve critiques. Below is scholar Royce 2008 debunking the Bell Curve's claims of massive "correlation" between IQ and things like employment. Note Sowell's "missing in action" again. Sowell below, in a prior book he can't seem to quote- also criticizes The Bell Curve for its weak or sloppy correlations.
QUOTE:
"Herrnstein and Murray's conception of SES, in addition, to cite the strong words of one critic, is "unspeakably crude." They measure respondents' social environment by constructing an index of parental socioeconomic status consisting of four variables: mother's education, father's education, family income, and parents' occupational status. This index is limited even as a measure of family background; as an instrument for estimating the cumulative effects of "social and economic disadvantage." it is exceedingly narrow. It excludes an assortment of important social variables pertaining both to respondents' parental background anti to their own current social and economic circumstances, including family size and composition, quality of education, local employment opportunities, community and neighborhood characteristics, and quality of social contacts. Several replications of Herrnstein and Murray’s analysis using more refined measures of socioeconomic background find that The Bell Curve consistently underestimates the influence of the social environment relative to IQ on life outcomes.”
Perhaps the most serious problem with Herrnstein and Murray's argument is that their own data, buried in one of the appendixes to their book, reveal only very weak correlations between IQ scores and social outcomes.38 According to the statistics they report, IQ has at best a modest effect on how individuals live their lives; contrary to their central argument, it is not "a major predictor of income ." One team of economists, reanalyzing the data used in The Bell Curve, found that cognitive ability, even in combination with education and experience, explains "at most one third of the total variance in wages." Herrnstein and Murray, they report, 'dramatically overstate the degree to which differences in wages among individuals can be attributed to differences in cognitive ability.'10 This conclusion would not be so damaging if the objective of The Bell Curie were only to prove that IQ, along with many other variables, has some influence on life outcomes. But Herrnstein and Murray maintain that intelligence is the predominant force in people's lives, and this claim is refuted by their "small to middling" correlations.4 Though not entirely irrelevant to economic achievement, cognitive ability, inherited or not, does not play anything like the powerful role Herrnstein and Murray attribute to it."
Summary and bottom line
Notice how several points above contradict the Bell Curve. Sowell does not even bother to summarize his critique, just skips it altogether, though he has plenty of space for "negro thugs." All is not avoidance. Sowell in Chapter 5 does mention things such as the similarly low IQ scores for white people suffering from isolation or poverty. And he notes IQ gaps are not unusual among and within groups and yes, Asians do post higher IQs than whites. But all this is rather muted, as if Sowell does not want too much scrutiny applied to them, as compared to "the liberals." Among the "solutions" of Sowell's libertarian, racialist and right wing fellow travelers is repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and total elimination of many social programs and spending such as Medicare, unemployment insurance and workers compensation. Other arguments maintain black genetic inferiority and roll out numerous shaky statistics and methodology in support. Sowell avoids most of it, like his hero, black journalist and rabid John Bircher George Schuyler. Such ducking serves an important ideological function. It exempts RIGHT-WING intellectuals from too much scrutiny, particularly those to whom he is connected financially and ideologically. Given all the omissions, the result is a book that is much less useful than it could have been in understanding "Intellectuals and race."
While some of Sowell's work is still good, a significant slice of it must be taken with a grain of salt, considering the many libertarian and hereditarian ideological axes he grinds, the things he omits, and the right wing fellow-travelers he avoids. Modern day black libertarian types in this area like Zambian scientist Chanda Chisala seem to offer a more nuanced view, with more current data. Chisala seems not to mind taking on right-wing intellectuals, or "hereditarian" racialists here for example, where he demonstrates that the higher test performances of African immigrants undermines assorted "racial regression" claims.
To sum up, this article demonstrates the flaws in Sowell's work, including:
--Avoidance of discussing many contemporary right wing intellectuals views on race
--A focus on bashing "the liberals" and their sins but maintaining studied silence on right wing scholars
--Avoidance of discussion on the "cosmic solutions" on race that prominent right wing intellectuals endorse such as rolling back Civil Rights laws and eliminating numerous social programs like Medicaid, disability insurance, Worker's Compensation etc..
--Omission of Sowell's own critical work where it would substantially call right wing claims into question
See additional notes at bottom of page.
LINKS TO OTHER POSTS:
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2022/06/critical-race-theory-debunked-part-2.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2022/05/critical-race-theory-debunked-white.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/tchallas-wakanda-first-philosophy-looks.html
'AsiaRate' Lawsuit against Harvard shows dirty little secret- white quotas used at elite universities
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/06/asiarate-lawsuit-against-harvard-shows.html
Some gays find welcome home in the 'alt-right' as nationalist organizations step up recruitment
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/05/some-gays-find-welcome-home-in-alt.html
Racial discrimination is alive and kicking in employment, housing and credit markets
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/racial-discrimination-is-alive-and.html
Sowell 3- new data shows backward tropical evolution? Wealth and Poverty- An International Perspective in Trump era
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-3-new-data-shows-backward.html
Sowell 2- Wealth, Poverty and Politics- International Perspective - Trump era to bring these issues into sharper focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-2-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Sowell- Liberal intellectuals and hard questions about race differences- Trump era may force them to focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-liberal-intellectuals-and-hard.html
Trump properties discriminated against black tenants lawsuit finds
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-properties-discriminated-against.html
Stealing credibility- Dinesh D'souza has prison epiphany- after hanging with the homies- Hallelujah Hilary!
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/straining-credibility-dinesh-dsouza-has.html
Shame on you, and your guilt too- A review of Shelby Steele's 'Shame'
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-review-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Go with the flow 3- more DNA and cranial studies show ancient African migration to, or African presence in ancient Europe
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/04/go-with-flow-3-more-dna-and-cranial.html
Go with the flow 2- African gene flow into Europe in various eras
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/11/go-with-flow-2-african-gene-flow-into.html
DNA studies show African movement to Europe from very ancient times
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-studies-show-african-movement-to.html
Guilt3- Why the "white privilege industry" is not all there
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt3-why-white-privilege-industry-is.html
Guilt2- Media collaborates with guilt mongers - or how to play the white victim card
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt2-media-collaborates-with-guilt.html
How Obama plays on white guilt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-obama-plays-upon-white-guilt-hilary.html
Blacks oppose free speech- more ramshackle "research" from "the East"..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/blacks-oppose-free-speech-ramshackle.html
Hands off the Confederate flag
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/hands-off-confederate-flag.html
Despite much more wealth than blacks, whites collect about the same rate of welfare and are treated more generously
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
Why HBD or hereditarianism lacks credibility
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-hbd-or-hereditarianism-lacks.html
Leading Scientists criticize hereditarian claims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/leading-scientists-criticize.html
Thai me down - Thais fall behind genetically related southern Chinese, Tibetans below genetically related East Asians like Koreans and other Chinese
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/thai-me-up-thai-me-down.html
Time for liberals to respect "the south" ... in a way of speaking.. the south of Egypt that is..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-for-liberals-to-respect-south-in.html
Irony 2: touted High IQ "G-men" cannot reproduce themselves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/irony-2-higher-iqs-correlated-with_25.html
Unz and Sowell: Unz debunking Lynn's IQ and Wealth of Nations. Sowell debunking the Bell Curve
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/unz-and-sowell-unz-debunking-lynns-iq.html
Irony 1: touted High IQ types are more homosexual, more atheist, and more liberal (HAL)
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/irony-high-iqs-produce-more-atheists.html
Elite white universities discriminate against Asians using reverse "affirmative action"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/elite-white-universities-discriminate.html
Deteriorating state of white America
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/deteriorating-state-of-white-america.html
Racial Cartels (The Affirmative Action Propaganda machine- part 2
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
Hereditarian's/HBD's "Great Black Hope"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html
Exploding nonsense: the 10,000 Year Explosion
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
We need "rational racism"- Convicted felon Dinesh Dsouza becomes his own test case
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-need-rational-racism-proponent.html
The Affirmative Action Propaganda Machine- part 1
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-affirmatve-action-propaganda.html
Two rules for being "really" black- no white wimmen, no Republican
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-be-really-black-you-cant-have-white.html
The Axial age reconsidered
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axial-age-reconsidered.html
Cannibal seasonings: dark meat on white
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/12/i.html
"Affirmative Action" in the form of court remedies has been around a long time- since the 1930s- benefiting white union workers against discrimination by employers
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/09/affirmative-action-as-term-appears-in.html
Mugged by reality 1: White quotas, special preferences and government jobs
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/mugged-by-reality-1-white-quotas.html
Lightweight enforcement of EEO laws contradicts claims of "flood" of minorities "taking jobs"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post.html
Railroaded 3: white violence and intimidation imposed quotas
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-3-white-violence-and.html
Railroaded 2: how white quotas and special preferences blockade black progress...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-2-thow-white-quotas-and.html
Railroaded 1: How white affirmative action and white special preferences destroyed black railroad employment...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-how-white-affirmative-action.html
Affirmative action: primary beneficiaries are white women
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/04/affirmative-action-primary.html
7 reasons certain libertarians and right-wingers are wrong about the Civil Right Act
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
Assorted "Role models" debunked- hypocritical hereditarianism
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.html
Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-philosophy-of-thomas-sowell.html
Additional gene flow data... :)
Go with the flow 2- African gene flow into Europe in various eras
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/11/go-with-flow-2-african-gene-flow-into.html
DNA studies show African movement to Europe from very ancient times
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-studies-show-african-movement-to.html
Guilt3- Why the "white privilege industry" is not all there
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt3-why-white-privilege-industry-is.html
Guilt2- Media collaborates with guilt mongers - or how to play the white victim card
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt2-media-collaborates-with-guilt.html
How Obama plays on white guilt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-obama-plays-upon-white-guilt-hilary.html
Blacks oppose free speech- more ramshackle "research" from "the East"..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/blacks-oppose-free-speech-ramshackle.html
Hands off the Confederate flag
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/hands-off-confederate-flag.html
Despite much more wealth than blacks, whites collect about the same rate of welfare and are treated more generously
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
Why HBD or hereditarianism lacks credibility
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-hbd-or-hereditarianism-lacks.html
Leading Scientists criticize hereditarian claims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/leading-scientists-criticize.html
Thai me down - Thais fall behind genetically related southern Chinese, Tibetans below genetically related East Asians like Koreans and other Chinese
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/thai-me-up-thai-me-down.html
Time for liberals to respect "the south" ... in a way of speaking.. the south of Egypt that is..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-for-liberals-to-respect-south-in.html
Irony 2: touted High IQ "G-men" cannot reproduce themselves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/irony-2-higher-iqs-correlated-with_25.html
Unz and Sowell: Unz debunking Lynn's IQ and Wealth of Nations. Sowell debunking the Bell Curve
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/unz-and-sowell-unz-debunking-lynns-iq.html
Irony 1: touted High IQ types are more homosexual, more atheist, and more liberal (HAL)
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/irony-high-iqs-produce-more-atheists.html
Elite white universities discriminate against Asians using reverse "affirmative action"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/elite-white-universities-discriminate.html
Deteriorating state of white America
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/deteriorating-state-of-white-america.html
Racial Cartels (The Affirmative Action Propaganda machine- part 2
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
Hereditarian's/HBD's "Great Black Hope"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html
Exploding nonsense: the 10,000 Year Explosion
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
We need "rational racism"- Convicted felon Dinesh Dsouza becomes his own test case
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-need-rational-racism-proponent.html
The Affirmative Action Propaganda Machine- part 1
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-affirmatve-action-propaganda.html
Two rules for being "really" black- no white wimmen, no Republican
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-be-really-black-you-cant-have-white.html
The Axial age reconsidered
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axial-age-reconsidered.html
Cannibal seasonings: dark meat on white
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/12/i.html
"Affirmative Action" in the form of court remedies has been around a long time- since the 1930s- benefiting white union workers against discrimination by employers
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/09/affirmative-action-as-term-appears-in.html
Mugged by reality 1: White quotas, special preferences and government jobs
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/mugged-by-reality-1-white-quotas.html
Lightweight enforcement of EEO laws contradicts claims of "flood" of minorities "taking jobs"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post.html
Railroaded 3: white violence and intimidation imposed quotas
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-3-white-violence-and.html
Railroaded 2: how white quotas and special preferences blockade black progress...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-2-thow-white-quotas-and.html
Railroaded 1: How white affirmative action and white special preferences destroyed black railroad employment...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-how-white-affirmative-action.html
Affirmative action: primary beneficiaries are white women
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/04/affirmative-action-primary.html
7 reasons certain libertarians and right-wingers are wrong about the Civil Right Act
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
Assorted "Role models" debunked- hypocritical hereditarianism
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.html
Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-philosophy-of-thomas-sowell.html
Additional gene flow data... :)
Bogus "biodiversity" theories of Kanazawa, Ruston, Lynn debunked
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_1818.html
In the Blood- debunking "HBD" and Neo-Nazi appropriation of ancient Egypt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
early
Europeans and middle Easterners looked like Africans. Peoples returning
or "backflowing" to Africa would already be looking like Africans
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
Ancient Egypt: one of the world's most advanced civilizations- created by tropical peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/03/playing-greek-defence-review-of-thornton.html
Quotations from mainstream academic research on the Nile Valley peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/thread/15/basic-database-nile-valley-studies
OTHER LINKS
Race, IQ, and Wealth: What the facts tell us about a taboo subject By Ron Unz
HBD EVOLUTION, BRAIN SIZE AND NATIONAL IQ CLAIMS DEBUNKED
IQ claims and miscellaneous data
Race, IQ, and Wealth: What the facts tell us about a taboo subject By Ron Unz
HBD EVOLUTION, BRAIN SIZE AND NATIONAL IQ CLAIMS DEBUNKED
Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples ... -
Jelte Wicherts 2010
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
------------------------------------
Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of
intelligence - WIcherts, Borsboom and Dolan 2010
Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 91-96
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010.pdf
----------------------------- -------------
Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? by
JM Wicherts - ?2004
--Dolan, Wicherts et
al 2004. Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 32 (2004)
509-537
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2004.pdf
-------------------------------------------
LYNN AND VANHAVEN'S IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS DEBUNKED
---------------- -------
www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/Pdf/McB%20&%20Brooks%202000%20TRTW.pdf
------------------------
Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley
Montagu... By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
Race and intelligence: separating science from myth. By Jefferson
M. Fish. Routledge 2002. See Templeton's detailed article referenced above also
inside the book
http://books.google.com/books?id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&pg=PA64&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=7#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
------------------------
http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/what-they-mean.htm
---------------- -------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
For summary see: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-02-18/
---------------- -------
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
-----------------------------------------------------------
--S OY Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human
variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1455.pdf
--S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) *The Persistence ofRacial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence. AJPA, 99:3
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/WAURRSZQOE.pdf
---------------- -------
HBD RACE EVOLUTION CLAIMS DEBUNKED BY GENETICISTS
Alan Templeton. "The Genetic and Evolutionary
significnce oF Human Races." pp 31-56. IN: J. FiSh (2002) Race and
Intelligence: Separating scinnce from myth.
IQ claims and miscellaneous data
HBD RACE AND INTELLIGENCE CLAIMS DEBUNKED
J. FiSh (2002) Race
and Intelligence: Separating science from myth.
------------------------------------------
MORE HBD DEBUNKING
-------------------------------- ---------------------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
----------------------------------------------
Krimsky, S, Sloan.K (2011) Race and the Genetic Revolution:
Science, Myth, and Culture
-------------------------------
Wicherts and Johnson, 2009. Group differences in the
heritability of items and test scores
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/04/24/rspb.2009.0238.full
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/coming-apart-can-murrays-down-with.html
"SELECTION FOR"- "SELECT FOR" HDB
CLAIMS DEBUNKED- "SELECTION" IS NOT THE ONLY KEY FORCE DRIVING CHANGE
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/demic-diffusion-notes-and-tropical.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/08/cro-magnons-are-us-debunking-claims.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
"This writer, for example, is a devout Christian.."
--Afrocentric scholar Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization. 1974. pp. 334
--Afrocentric scholar Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization. 1974. pp. 334
--Joseph Graves, 2006. What We Know and What We Don’t Know:
Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/
J. Kahn (2013) How a Drug Becomes "Ethnic" - Yale
Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, v4:1
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=yjhple
------------------------------------ -----------------
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PageProofs-Graves_race.pdf
-------------------------------------------- ----------------------------
other links
Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples ... -
Jelte Wicherts 2010
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
------------------------------------
Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of
intelligence - WIcherts, Borsboom and Dolan 2010
Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 91-96
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010.pdf
----------------------------- -------------
Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? by
JM Wicherts - ?2004
--Dolan, Wicherts et
al 2004. Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 32 (2004)
509-537
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2004.pdf
-------------------------------------------
LYNN AND VANHAVEN'S IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS DEBUNKED
---------------- -------
www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/Pdf/McB%20&%20Brooks%202000%20TRTW.pdf
------------------------
Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley
Montagu... By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
Race and intelligence: separating science from myth. By Jefferson
M. Fish. Routledge 2002. See Templeton's detailed article referenced above also
inside the book
http://books.google.com/books?id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&pg=PA64&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=7#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
------------------------
http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/what-they-mean.htm
---------------- -------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
For summary see: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-02-18/
---------------- -------
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
-----------------------------------------------------------
--S OY Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human
variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1455.pdf
--S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) *The Persistence ofRacial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence. AJPA, 99:3
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/WAURRSZQOE.pdf
---------------- -------
HBD RACE EVOLUTION CLAIMS DEBUNKED BY GENETICISTS
Alan Templeton. "The Genetic and Evolutionary
significnce oF Human Races." pp 31-56. IN: J. FiSh (2002) Race and
Intelligence: Separating scinnce from myth.
HBD RACE AND INTELLIGENCE CLAIMS DEBUNKED
J. FiSh (2002) Race
and Intelligence: Separating science from myth.
------------------------------------------
MORE HBD DEBUNKING
-------------------------------- ---------------------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
----------------------------------------------
Krimsky, S, Sloan.K (2011) Race and the Genetic Revolution:
Science, Myth, and Culture
-------------------------------
Wicherts and Johnson, 2009. Group differences in the
heritability of items and test scores
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/04/24/rspb.2009.0238.full
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/coming-apart-can-murrays-down-with.html
"SELECTION FOR"- "SELECT FOR" HDB
CLAIMS DEBUNKED- "SELECTION" IS NOT THE ONLY KEY FORCE DRIVING CHANGE
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/demic-diffusion-notes-and-tropical.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/08/cro-magnons-are-us-debunking-claims.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
A common theme running through Sowell's work is to poo-poo or discount the efficacy of civil rights laws, court decisions, or executive reforms in helping along black progress. He says for example:
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 wrought dramatic legal and political changes across the South, its economic consequences were in fact a bitter anti-climax. Economic progress continued, but at no faster pace than in the past. Additional blacks entered professional and other high-level positions in the five years following passage of the Civil Rights Act—but these additions were fewer than in the five years preceding passage of the Act. "
--Sowell, A Personal Odyssey p 268-269
2) Second, most blacks had no "utopian" illusions that the mere passage of a civil rights bill would erase centuries of disadvantage and/or Jim Crow. In fact even ML King had no such illusions. To be sure, somewhere among some 20-25 million blacks there were some "utopianists" but both "responsible" civil rights leadership and surging "black nationalists" saw passage of the bill as only on step in a long process that had much more struggle to come. Neither Malcolm X (who mocked the bill as a fraud given white America's racism) or Stokely Carmichael are on record with any "utopian" visions, nor are people like the era's NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. See also the interview with ML King quoted above in 1967 which specifically disavows "utopianism."
3) The third distortion is Sowell's progress indicators. He says he expected no dramatic change in the relative economic position between blacks and whites as a result of the Act. OK, but who credible expected that massive economic advantages accrued by whites over blacks during 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow would be magically erased by a law on paper 1964? Or a 5 year span between 1964 and 1969? As already shown above, few credible civil rights leaders held such notions, nor most likely most serious competing black nationalist/militant leaders, or even most ordinary black citizens on the street. Hopeful yes. Expecting instant nirvana? Hardly.
4) Sowell then tries a 4th distortion as already seen above, claiming "bitter" economic consequences after the Act, that whatever legal or political changes gained, would yield only "bitter" economic fruit. Far from yielding "bitter" fruit however, the Civil Rights Act can be credited with rather beautiful blooms as huge swathes of opportunities were opened up for blacks. See the hard data above but also below by Gavin Wright and others for example, particularly in the South, refuting Sowell's attempt to confine Civil rights progress to only the legal and political spheres. Much of this hard data was around at the time or before Sowell's book, so he has no excuse for not dealing with it, except, in an all too common pattern, he avoid evidence contrary to his ideological theme, or resorts to cherry picked factoids or anecdotes-some of only limited relevance, scope or context.
It is also curious that Sowell chooses such a short time period to measure his alleged "bitter" fruit. His standard pattern is again revealing- he cherry picks his method of measuring the impact of the Civil Rights Act- making comparisons to 5 years before, with five years after. But why a mere 5 years before/after comparison given 100 years of Jim Crow? So in 5 years, the massive black disadvantages in education, employment etc imposed by whites was supposed to magically disappear? How is that even remotely supposed to be possible in the real world? Here again is the distorted strawman aspect of Sowell's work. By selecting a crude and short 5 year "before and after" comparison, the progress made can be obfuscated and downplayed. But some of the data in Sowell's own work shows the flaws in his argument. For example in an earlier book: "Civil Rights, Rhetoric or Reality," he points out that single continuously working black women had achieved wage parity with white women by 1969. How would this be possible under his alleged "bitter" fruit scenario of empty gains after the Act?
And assuming his before/after comparison is correct for the sake of argument, there were a number of factors that pulled black men out of the immediate workforce in the five years directly after the law, such as the Vietnam War which in the main began in 1965 for the US. And what about those black men leaving the Vietnam era army AFTER 1965 with their GI Bil education benefits, and VA housing loan benefits (still dogged by the discriminatory "redlining" policies of the federal government) in hand who began a new working life? Five years after 1964 is not enough time to fairly gauge how they fared in moving up into professional jobs given that such jobs need education and often years of experience. In fact, a black veteran taking 3-4 years out of the workforce to use his GI Bill benefits to get that education would NOT be counted in Sowell's magical professionals/high level category. One can see the disingenuousness of Sowell' selection of a 5-year "after" comparison- by choosing a brief 5 year span, he can, again obfuscate and downplay the progress made.
5) Sowell also conveniently skirts around the fact that civil rights "agitation" was a significant force PRIOR to 1964, that in fact, led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Progress made before 1964 is not ALL due to "rights agitation" - but such civil rights activism is itself, ALSO part of what stimulated progress.
This "civil rights agitation" was active in the 1940's, and it was necessary. IN WW2 time and time again whites went on strike, sometimes violently to block blacks from getting better paying defense industry jobs even though there was a war on. During the war, a significant slice of white people put blockading black employment AHEAD of defeating Nazi Germany or the Japanese, and ahead of so-called "free markets." When black folk got jobs due to "free market" hiring, whites moved to shut it down. When war production was urgently needed whites moved to shut this down too. Why, when production was urgently needed at the front to defeat the evil Axis enemies of democracy? Why? Because black folk were finally getting a tiny piece of the action. QUOTE:
"On May 24, 1943, Alabama Dry Dock employed nearly 7,000 black workers, none of them in skilled occupations. Suddenly, in compliance with a six-month-old directive from the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPc), the once-recalcitrant company upgraded 12 blacks to welding jobs. The next morning, after the twelve men had gone home, the yard erupted. Responding to cries to "get every one of them Niggers off this island," enraged whites assaulted their black co-workers with pipes, clubs, and other weapons from their workaday world. Some blacks sus-tained serious injuries in the melee, and virtually all of them experienced hours of terror, which ended only when United States Army troops from nearby Brookley Field arrived on Pinto Island to restore order." --FROM: Nelson, Bruce. 1993. Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II. The Journal of American History volume 80, issue 3
or:
"Many [strikes] were based on racism as whites objected to African Americans getting new jobs in defense plants. Perhaps the most shameful occurred in Baltimore, where black employees rose from 2 percent to 29 percent at a Western Electric plant in the first two years of the war.. 'twenty-two white women walked off their after one black woman was transferred into their formally all white department.' Their objection focused on integrated toilet facilities which previously had been segregated by race. When the War Labor Board ruled in favor of integration, 'about 70 percent of the company's workers' struck- a percentage that included almost all white workers both men and women.. Army troops took over the company for the first three months of 1944 -until the company gave into the white workers and re-segregated restrooms." -- Doris Weatherford 2009, American women during World War 2: An Encyclopedia. pg 436
Problems like this made A. Phillip Randolph threaten to lead a black March On Washington. Such a dangerous civil rights demonstration threat forced embarrassed white officials to begin opening up more defense jobs, and begin some halting anti-discrimination enforcement. After all how could they be boosting "democracy" against facism when they could not even guarantee basic decency for negroes in their own back yard, or keep war factories open? And so it went. In the 1940s it was civil rights agitation and lawsuits that helped force open defense industry jobs for blacks, and helped create the positive trend lines, including forcing southern state regimes to finally pay black teachers same as whites. It was civil rights agitation after black soldiers were attacked on buses that finally moved Truman to his landmark desegregation of the armed forces.
6) Sowell also skips over a common pattern that occurred when 1960s civil rights laws were passed. The "bitter fruit" experienced by some blacks was often a function of white INSTRANGIENCE AND OBSTRUCTIONISM when it came to IMPLEMENTATION of the law. Memoirs of blacks from this era, along with numerous government reports, lawsuits, etc all testify to this, and show some demoralized blacks lamenting that whites were not willing to wholeheartedly or in good faith implement the new laws. It took more marches, protests, lawsuits, federal arm-twisting and even threats of abandoning non-violence to get whites to live up to their responsibilities. Memoirs of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer for example show her not only lamenting that progress was so slow after the Civil Rights laws, but that fact of some whites, on both local and national levels, sandbagging and obstructing that progress. (See The Senator and the Sharecropper- The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer- By Chris Myers Asch 2011). Likewise histories of the famous Deacons For Defense and Justice (see Lance Hill, 2006. The Deacons For Defence) show bitter laments about white opposition including KKK assaults, beatings, shootings, and economic intimidation when blacks attempted to actually eat in restaurants or use local parks after 1964. It took armed self-defense and protest in some areas to eventually pressure the federal government to act and begin a tough crackdown on white terrorism, a crackdown that could have occurred years earlier. (See US vs Original Knights of the KKK, c 1965). The FBI however was too busy with other things to be bothered with domestic terrorism, what with surveillance even of conservative groups and leaders like the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, and never deployed its huge apparatus to build cases against or hound white terrorist leaders as it did against black organizations.
Even the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, hailed example of the post-war/post Brown civil rights era, failed to bring about substantial desegregation, for whites used both intimidation and subterfuge after the court decision, removing OPEN segregation ordinances and transferring enforcement to private bus companies whose drivers had full power, backed by the city, to regulate passenger seating. Southern cities using this manipulation, including Birmingham, could thus claim "plausible denial" when white bus drivers pushed around black passengers, including ordering them to the back of the bus. What can we do? said white officials piously.. It's a private company making private operating rules for "safety and efficiency"? Wink.. wink.. There even had to be follow-up lawsuits to get white people to live up to court rulings by white judges: (see Bowman vs Birmingham Transit 1962 - https://casetext.com/case/boman-v-birmingham-transit-compan) But this was not all. After the boycott victory, the local black organization imploded as the city declared all other services would remain segregated, and white terrorists unleashed a bombing and intimidation campaign that almost killed Martin Luther King. It was only until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that southern cities like Montgomery, or Birmingham, finally desegregated, despite well publicized protest campaigns, and even after 1964 some residual arm-twisting via protests and lawsuits was required for minimal compliance. There was thus plenty for blacks to be "bitter" about during and in the immediate post-civil rights era, but that bitterness was not necessarily any function of finding things too complicated to manage after removal of formal Jim Crow, but by continued white opposition, subterfuge and deception deployed to sandbag new black opportunities and rights. Sowell of course, conveniently skips this part of the story about "bitter" fruit.
7) Sowell is just plain wrong when how says that economic progress proceeded at no faster pace as in the past. Numerous credible scholars debunk this assertion as detailed below. Indeed it is only by using the distorted "5-year comparison" that Sowell can support his shaky assertion. Other right-wingers have attempted to extend a simplistic "before/after" model into the 1970s, but the 1970s were a time of GENERAL economic decline, recession, oil embargoes and stagflation- hence of course after the booming 1960s, a "decline" would set in, but this was a GENERAL economic decline for the ENTIRE economy not any "bitter" fruit of the Civil Rights Act. Let's look at hard, detailed evidence rather than simplistic, cherry-picked methods.
Civil Rights Laws had nationwide impact, but most significant, was their impact where discrimination was most severe- that is, the South. Sowell, who so often comes up with the most obscure factoids (such as suicide rates of Chinese in 1800s Cuba), carefully avoids even a basic regional comparison. Let's take a look at just one example among tens of thousands. In South Carolina for example blacks and whites were forbidden to work together in the same room or department - a nice deal for white people, who got to monopolize all the better paying, less dirty jobs in offices and factories. As one history notes:
"Heller’s company provided employment to hundreds of single and married women in Greenville, mostly employed as machine operators. Like all manufacturing plants in South Carolina, the company was segregated into departments by race, a policy established by state law. Custom dictated that even Christmas parties be segregated. In 1960, a local newspaper article pictured Heller presenting awards to several black female employees. The caption noted that a company party was held “Tuesday night for its Negro employees . . . A similar party will be held for White employees Friday at the plant..”
(--Hasia Diner 2018. Doing Business in America: A Jewish History)
While the boss of the above company, Heller, made the courageous decision to desegregate restroom facilities shortly before the civil Rights Act of 1964, other employers were less inclined. It took the coming of the Civil Rights Era and its forcing open of basic equal access and treatment, to make solid, ongoing progress. The CRA of course did not act alone- other factors such as the post-war economic expansion played a part, but both worked together to measurably improve black employment, income, education, and other crucial life variables like health. "Heckman and Payner (1989) use microdata from textile plants in South Carolina to study the effects of race on employment between 1940 and 1980, concluding that federal antidiscrimination policy resulted in a significant improvement in black economic status between 1965 and 1975." (Pager and Shepard 2008) Likewise detailed data such as Gavin Wright's Sharing the Prize (2013) illustrate the same point of significant black gains under after Civil Rights Laws, not only for things like employment, but in educational attainment, occupational status and even health. The forcing open of Jim Crow southern hospitals (through threat of withholding federal funds) for example was a boon to black health. See Gavin Wright's- Sharing the Prize for more detail.
Devy and Stainback show white women are the primary Civil Rights legislation gainers..
In addition, detailed analyses do show that the Civil Rights Movement era saw significant overall increases in black job growth and occupational status. As one scholarly study by Harvard Economics Professor Richard Freeman shows-QUOTE:
"(1) Relative demand for and income of black workers were raised in the postwar period by governmental and private antidiscrimination activity following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and possibly by a general societal decline in individual and market purchases of discrimination relative to levels of productivity.
(2) The black occupational distribution improved greatly in the 1960s as a result of the significant supply response of black workers to economic opportunities, as well as of the increased relative educational attainment of the black population. Black workers shifted occupations rapidly in response to reduced discrimination and improved opportunities.
(3) Black women advanced more rapidly relative to their white counter-parts than black men in part because declines in discrimination have greater effects on job markets, such as those for women, where on-the-job training and cumulated experience are less important and where gross turnover of the work force is rapid. Such markets allow older as well as younger workers to take advantage of new opportunities, and, moreover, they are the special province of women..."
and
".. the federal law extends to the South, accounts for one-half of black employment and exhibits the greatest differences between black and white incomes. One indication of the extent of the federal effort in the South is the fact that two-thirds of employer-union-agency cases before the EEOC in 1970 originated there, with Texas, Florida, and Louisiana having the largest number of charges investigated."
The reader should note the large gains in the South, where Civil Rights had more impact- something Sowell skips discussing substantively in multiple books. The data also shows a significant, measurable impact of Civil Rights Activity in the first 7-9 years after the CRA of 1964. QUOTE:
"The most important finding of Table 6 is that the post-1964 period did, in fact, witness an exceptional increase in black incomes, unaccounted for by previous trends, cyclical boom, or increased black educational attainment, and linked to civil rights activity. In regressions (1) and (4), the EEOC measure has a sizable significant coefficient, which implies that anti-discriminatory activity was responsible for increases in the black-white income ratio, from 1965 to 1971, of 15 percent for males and 27 percent for females, or 9 and 16 percentage points, respectively, from levels of about 60 percent in the early sixties."
--Richard Freeman, Economics Professor Harvard University, University of Chicago- 1973- Changes in the labor market for black Americans, 1948–72, Brookings Institution. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, No 1, 1973.
--Sowell, A Personal Odyssey p 268-269
But such claims have several weaknesses.
1) First, Sowell is ether ignorant of, or misrepresents data on black progress. It is interesting that he gives no supporting evidence to back his statement about indifferent or low civil rights gains. But hard empirical data by other scholars shows the claim to be shaky. As scholars Devey and Stainback note:
"Even more striking is the rapid increase in white women’s access to managerial jobs after 1971. White women move from being underrepresented in managerial jobs by 70 percent to being underrepresented by only 12 percent at the turn of the century. While they have not yet reached parity, white women have made remarkable and consistent gains. Black males also have made gains in private sector managerial employment, although their advances are not as dramatic or consistent. Black males were barely represented among managers in this EEOC reporting sample in 1966, being underrepresented by 90 percent relative to their employment in the sector. They made sustained improvements through 1983, although they were still substantially underrepresented at –54 percent of their general labor market employment. No further progress was made through the 1980s, but progress began again across the 1990s."
[FROM: --Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Kevin Stainback. 2007. Discrimination and Desegregation: Equal Opportunity Progress in U.S. Private Sector Workplaces since the Civil Rights Act. Ann Amer Academ PolSci 609:49-84]
and:
"Even more striking is the rapid increase in white women’s access to managerial jobs after 1971. White women move from being underrepresented in managerial jobs by 70 percent to being underrepresented by only 12 percent at the turn of the century. While they have not yet reached parity, white women have made remarkable and consistent gains. Black males also have made gains in private sector managerial employment, although their advances are not as dramatic or consistent. Black males were barely represented among managers in this EEOC reporting sample in 1966, being underrepresented by 90 percent relative to their employment in the sector. They made sustained improvements through 1983, although they were still substantially underrepresented at –54 percent of their general labor market employment. No further progress was made through the 1980s, but progress began again across the 1990s."
[FROM: --Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Kevin Stainback. 2007. Discrimination and Desegregation: Equal Opportunity Progress in U.S. Private Sector Workplaces since the Civil Rights Act. Ann Amer Academ PolSci 609:49-84]
and:
"In
the 1960s, for example, under the impact of sustained economic growth, the
civil rights movement, and government-sponsored affirmative action hiring
programs, there was a significant increase in the number of blacks in high-level
occupations. Between 1960 and 1969, the number of black men over twenty-five
years old in professional and technical occupations increased by 1.07 percent. In
managerial occupations, the number increased by 117 percent. Other large
increases occurred in employment as trade workers (52 percent) and sales
personnel (42 percent). All of these percentage increases were greater than the
percentage increase in black men over twenty-five years of age in the labor force
as a whole. During the 1970s, in a stagnant economy and a changed political
environment, these gains largely ceased."
--Conrad, Whitehead, Mason, and Stewart. African
Americans in the
gains-
quote:
"Black
men’s incomes from all sources—earnings, savings, property, stocks, government
benefits—had bounced between 47 and 55 percent of white men’s incomes for
years, from 1948 through 1966 (U.S. Bureau of the Census n.d.). Then, in the
late 1960s, black men’s incomes rose against white men’s to between 58 and 60
percent and stayed at that level through 1992, after which they rose to about 66
percent for several years. Black women had been making significant gains on
white women through the 1950s and early 1960s, but their incomes relative to
white women’s grew fastest during the late 1960s,"
--Conrad,
Whitehead, Mason, and Stewart. African Americans in the
2) Second, most blacks had no "utopian" illusions that the mere passage of a civil rights bill would erase centuries of disadvantage and/or Jim Crow. In fact even ML King had no such illusions. To be sure, somewhere among some 20-25 million blacks there were some "utopianists" but both "responsible" civil rights leadership and surging "black nationalists" saw passage of the bill as only on step in a long process that had much more struggle to come. Neither Malcolm X (who mocked the bill as a fraud given white America's racism) or Stokely Carmichael are on record with any "utopian" visions, nor are people like the era's NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. See also the interview with ML King quoted above in 1967 which specifically disavows "utopianism."
3) The third distortion is Sowell's progress indicators. He says he expected no dramatic change in the relative economic position between blacks and whites as a result of the Act. OK, but who credible expected that massive economic advantages accrued by whites over blacks during 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow would be magically erased by a law on paper 1964? Or a 5 year span between 1964 and 1969? As already shown above, few credible civil rights leaders held such notions, nor most likely most serious competing black nationalist/militant leaders, or even most ordinary black citizens on the street. Hopeful yes. Expecting instant nirvana? Hardly.
4) Sowell then tries a 4th distortion as already seen above, claiming "bitter" economic consequences after the Act, that whatever legal or political changes gained, would yield only "bitter" economic fruit. Far from yielding "bitter" fruit however, the Civil Rights Act can be credited with rather beautiful blooms as huge swathes of opportunities were opened up for blacks. See the hard data above but also below by Gavin Wright and others for example, particularly in the South, refuting Sowell's attempt to confine Civil rights progress to only the legal and political spheres. Much of this hard data was around at the time or before Sowell's book, so he has no excuse for not dealing with it, except, in an all too common pattern, he avoid evidence contrary to his ideological theme, or resorts to cherry picked factoids or anecdotes-some of only limited relevance, scope or context.
It is also curious that Sowell chooses such a short time period to measure his alleged "bitter" fruit. His standard pattern is again revealing- he cherry picks his method of measuring the impact of the Civil Rights Act- making comparisons to 5 years before, with five years after. But why a mere 5 years before/after comparison given 100 years of Jim Crow? So in 5 years, the massive black disadvantages in education, employment etc imposed by whites was supposed to magically disappear? How is that even remotely supposed to be possible in the real world? Here again is the distorted strawman aspect of Sowell's work. By selecting a crude and short 5 year "before and after" comparison, the progress made can be obfuscated and downplayed. But some of the data in Sowell's own work shows the flaws in his argument. For example in an earlier book: "Civil Rights, Rhetoric or Reality," he points out that single continuously working black women had achieved wage parity with white women by 1969. How would this be possible under his alleged "bitter" fruit scenario of empty gains after the Act?
And assuming his before/after comparison is correct for the sake of argument, there were a number of factors that pulled black men out of the immediate workforce in the five years directly after the law, such as the Vietnam War which in the main began in 1965 for the US. And what about those black men leaving the Vietnam era army AFTER 1965 with their GI Bil education benefits, and VA housing loan benefits (still dogged by the discriminatory "redlining" policies of the federal government) in hand who began a new working life? Five years after 1964 is not enough time to fairly gauge how they fared in moving up into professional jobs given that such jobs need education and often years of experience. In fact, a black veteran taking 3-4 years out of the workforce to use his GI Bill benefits to get that education would NOT be counted in Sowell's magical professionals/high level category. One can see the disingenuousness of Sowell' selection of a 5-year "after" comparison- by choosing a brief 5 year span, he can, again obfuscate and downplay the progress made.
5) Sowell also conveniently skirts around the fact that civil rights "agitation" was a significant force PRIOR to 1964, that in fact, led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Progress made before 1964 is not ALL due to "rights agitation" - but such civil rights activism is itself, ALSO part of what stimulated progress.
This "civil rights agitation" was active in the 1940's, and it was necessary. IN WW2 time and time again whites went on strike, sometimes violently to block blacks from getting better paying defense industry jobs even though there was a war on. During the war, a significant slice of white people put blockading black employment AHEAD of defeating Nazi Germany or the Japanese, and ahead of so-called "free markets." When black folk got jobs due to "free market" hiring, whites moved to shut it down. When war production was urgently needed whites moved to shut this down too. Why, when production was urgently needed at the front to defeat the evil Axis enemies of democracy? Why? Because black folk were finally getting a tiny piece of the action. QUOTE:
"On May 24, 1943, Alabama Dry Dock employed nearly 7,000 black workers, none of them in skilled occupations. Suddenly, in compliance with a six-month-old directive from the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPc), the once-recalcitrant company upgraded 12 blacks to welding jobs. The next morning, after the twelve men had gone home, the yard erupted. Responding to cries to "get every one of them Niggers off this island," enraged whites assaulted their black co-workers with pipes, clubs, and other weapons from their workaday world. Some blacks sus-tained serious injuries in the melee, and virtually all of them experienced hours of terror, which ended only when United States Army troops from nearby Brookley Field arrived on Pinto Island to restore order." --FROM: Nelson, Bruce. 1993. Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II. The Journal of American History volume 80, issue 3
or:
"Many [strikes] were based on racism as whites objected to African Americans getting new jobs in defense plants. Perhaps the most shameful occurred in Baltimore, where black employees rose from 2 percent to 29 percent at a Western Electric plant in the first two years of the war.. 'twenty-two white women walked off their after one black woman was transferred into their formally all white department.' Their objection focused on integrated toilet facilities which previously had been segregated by race. When the War Labor Board ruled in favor of integration, 'about 70 percent of the company's workers' struck- a percentage that included almost all white workers both men and women.. Army troops took over the company for the first three months of 1944 -until the company gave into the white workers and re-segregated restrooms." -- Doris Weatherford 2009, American women during World War 2: An Encyclopedia. pg 436
Problems like this made A. Phillip Randolph threaten to lead a black March On Washington. Such a dangerous civil rights demonstration threat forced embarrassed white officials to begin opening up more defense jobs, and begin some halting anti-discrimination enforcement. After all how could they be boosting "democracy" against facism when they could not even guarantee basic decency for negroes in their own back yard, or keep war factories open? And so it went. In the 1940s it was civil rights agitation and lawsuits that helped force open defense industry jobs for blacks, and helped create the positive trend lines, including forcing southern state regimes to finally pay black teachers same as whites. It was civil rights agitation after black soldiers were attacked on buses that finally moved Truman to his landmark desegregation of the armed forces.
Action on educational "trend lines" was also moving along in the years before the landmark Brown vs Board. Lawsuits forced equal pay for black teachers, and as Professor Michael Klarman, a sometime critic of Brown (See Michael J. Klarman - From Jim Crow to Civil Rights_ The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality-Oxford UPress (2004) shows, several southern states began to upgrade "colored" schools even before the court decision in the 1950s, acutely aware of the torrent of litigation in the pipeline attacking the fraudulent "separate but equal" doctrine which certainly was separate but never equal.. These long-delayed upgrades were designed to head off legal action or scrutiny by demonstrating that facilities were blacks were "equal" to those of whites, thus complying with Plesssy, and neutralizing court challenges. But by the 1950s it was too late to play the old games. Nevertheless, the upgrades of long neglected black southern schools, and the opening up of better access to blacks for educational opportunity via continual civil rights pressure did improve the pipeline of educated blacks, in a better position to take advantage of expanding post-war opportunities.
In short, civil rights activism, including the relentless filing of court cases, was a critical factor in forcing changes, over and above war needs, so that by the end of the war almost 9% of the defense industry's workers were black. (See- Black Labor and the American Legal System: Race, Work, and the Law By Herbert Hill, 1985). Civil rights pressure also forced out and improved educational opportunities, even under the laughable "separate but equal" formula, once state regimes realized that court challenges would severely shake the farcical "separate but equal" doctrine. Civil rights struggles complemented each other- lawsuits, marches, boycotts, lobbying and disruptive protests. Hearings by the FEPC during WW2 for example not only achieved individual complainant relief, but exposed far and wide the deception, hypocrisy and brutality of white segregationist practice, even in the face of wartime demands. This exposure furnished excellent ammunition to lobby for political support, undertake protests and file court cases. The famous Montgomery Bus Boycott is another example. The actual boycott was not only encouraged and fired up by a key court case- Brown vs Board- but in fact towards the end used the 14th Amendment arguments from Brown vs Board to keep the boycotters' lawsuit alive and before the district and the Supreme Court, without which their legal struggle would have been doomed. It was the Supreme Court decision in Browder vs Gayle that ended the boycott just in time to prevent the local Jim Crow authorities from using a state anti-boycott law to crush the boycott and its car-pool. Thus, "civil rights" did not begin with the 1964 CRA, but was an ongoing high-pressure struggle decades before, and it played a powerful part in moving the "trend lines" positively for blacks before 1964. Sowell's simplistic "before and after" comparison is designed to obfuscate this important point.
6) Sowell also skips over a common pattern that occurred when 1960s civil rights laws were passed. The "bitter fruit" experienced by some blacks was often a function of white INSTRANGIENCE AND OBSTRUCTIONISM when it came to IMPLEMENTATION of the law. Memoirs of blacks from this era, along with numerous government reports, lawsuits, etc all testify to this, and show some demoralized blacks lamenting that whites were not willing to wholeheartedly or in good faith implement the new laws. It took more marches, protests, lawsuits, federal arm-twisting and even threats of abandoning non-violence to get whites to live up to their responsibilities. Memoirs of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer for example show her not only lamenting that progress was so slow after the Civil Rights laws, but that fact of some whites, on both local and national levels, sandbagging and obstructing that progress. (See The Senator and the Sharecropper- The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer- By Chris Myers Asch 2011). Likewise histories of the famous Deacons For Defense and Justice (see Lance Hill, 2006. The Deacons For Defence) show bitter laments about white opposition including KKK assaults, beatings, shootings, and economic intimidation when blacks attempted to actually eat in restaurants or use local parks after 1964. It took armed self-defense and protest in some areas to eventually pressure the federal government to act and begin a tough crackdown on white terrorism, a crackdown that could have occurred years earlier. (See US vs Original Knights of the KKK, c 1965). The FBI however was too busy with other things to be bothered with domestic terrorism, what with surveillance even of conservative groups and leaders like the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, and never deployed its huge apparatus to build cases against or hound white terrorist leaders as it did against black organizations.
Even the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, hailed example of the post-war/post Brown civil rights era, failed to bring about substantial desegregation, for whites used both intimidation and subterfuge after the court decision, removing OPEN segregation ordinances and transferring enforcement to private bus companies whose drivers had full power, backed by the city, to regulate passenger seating. Southern cities using this manipulation, including Birmingham, could thus claim "plausible denial" when white bus drivers pushed around black passengers, including ordering them to the back of the bus. What can we do? said white officials piously.. It's a private company making private operating rules for "safety and efficiency"? Wink.. wink.. There even had to be follow-up lawsuits to get white people to live up to court rulings by white judges: (see Bowman vs Birmingham Transit 1962 - https://casetext.com/case/boman-v-birmingham-transit-compan) But this was not all. After the boycott victory, the local black organization imploded as the city declared all other services would remain segregated, and white terrorists unleashed a bombing and intimidation campaign that almost killed Martin Luther King. It was only until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that southern cities like Montgomery, or Birmingham, finally desegregated, despite well publicized protest campaigns, and even after 1964 some residual arm-twisting via protests and lawsuits was required for minimal compliance. There was thus plenty for blacks to be "bitter" about during and in the immediate post-civil rights era, but that bitterness was not necessarily any function of finding things too complicated to manage after removal of formal Jim Crow, but by continued white opposition, subterfuge and deception deployed to sandbag new black opportunities and rights. Sowell of course, conveniently skips this part of the story about "bitter" fruit.
7) Sowell is just plain wrong when how says that economic progress proceeded at no faster pace as in the past. Numerous credible scholars debunk this assertion as detailed below. Indeed it is only by using the distorted "5-year comparison" that Sowell can support his shaky assertion. Other right-wingers have attempted to extend a simplistic "before/after" model into the 1970s, but the 1970s were a time of GENERAL economic decline, recession, oil embargoes and stagflation- hence of course after the booming 1960s, a "decline" would set in, but this was a GENERAL economic decline for the ENTIRE economy not any "bitter" fruit of the Civil Rights Act. Let's look at hard, detailed evidence rather than simplistic, cherry-picked methods.
Civil Rights Laws had nationwide impact, but most significant, was their impact where discrimination was most severe- that is, the South. Sowell, who so often comes up with the most obscure factoids (such as suicide rates of Chinese in 1800s Cuba), carefully avoids even a basic regional comparison. Let's take a look at just one example among tens of thousands. In South Carolina for example blacks and whites were forbidden to work together in the same room or department - a nice deal for white people, who got to monopolize all the better paying, less dirty jobs in offices and factories. As one history notes:
"Heller’s company provided employment to hundreds of single and married women in Greenville, mostly employed as machine operators. Like all manufacturing plants in South Carolina, the company was segregated into departments by race, a policy established by state law. Custom dictated that even Christmas parties be segregated. In 1960, a local newspaper article pictured Heller presenting awards to several black female employees. The caption noted that a company party was held “Tuesday night for its Negro employees . . . A similar party will be held for White employees Friday at the plant..”
(--Hasia Diner 2018. Doing Business in America: A Jewish History)
While the boss of the above company, Heller, made the courageous decision to desegregate restroom facilities shortly before the civil Rights Act of 1964, other employers were less inclined. It took the coming of the Civil Rights Era and its forcing open of basic equal access and treatment, to make solid, ongoing progress. The CRA of course did not act alone- other factors such as the post-war economic expansion played a part, but both worked together to measurably improve black employment, income, education, and other crucial life variables like health. "Heckman and Payner (1989) use microdata from textile plants in South Carolina to study the effects of race on employment between 1940 and 1980, concluding that federal antidiscrimination policy resulted in a significant improvement in black economic status between 1965 and 1975." (Pager and Shepard 2008) Likewise detailed data such as Gavin Wright's Sharing the Prize (2013) illustrate the same point of significant black gains under after Civil Rights Laws, not only for things like employment, but in educational attainment, occupational status and even health. The forcing open of Jim Crow southern hospitals (through threat of withholding federal funds) for example was a boon to black health. See Gavin Wright's- Sharing the Prize for more detail.
Devy and Stainback show white women are the primary Civil Rights legislation gainers..
In addition, detailed analyses do show that the Civil Rights Movement era saw significant overall increases in black job growth and occupational status. As one scholarly study by Harvard Economics Professor Richard Freeman shows-QUOTE:
"(1) Relative demand for and income of black workers were raised in the postwar period by governmental and private antidiscrimination activity following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and possibly by a general societal decline in individual and market purchases of discrimination relative to levels of productivity.
(2) The black occupational distribution improved greatly in the 1960s as a result of the significant supply response of black workers to economic opportunities, as well as of the increased relative educational attainment of the black population. Black workers shifted occupations rapidly in response to reduced discrimination and improved opportunities.
(3) Black women advanced more rapidly relative to their white counter-parts than black men in part because declines in discrimination have greater effects on job markets, such as those for women, where on-the-job training and cumulated experience are less important and where gross turnover of the work force is rapid. Such markets allow older as well as younger workers to take advantage of new opportunities, and, moreover, they are the special province of women..."
and
".. the federal law extends to the South, accounts for one-half of black employment and exhibits the greatest differences between black and white incomes. One indication of the extent of the federal effort in the South is the fact that two-thirds of employer-union-agency cases before the EEOC in 1970 originated there, with Texas, Florida, and Louisiana having the largest number of charges investigated."
The reader should note the large gains in the South, where Civil Rights had more impact- something Sowell skips discussing substantively in multiple books. The data also shows a significant, measurable impact of Civil Rights Activity in the first 7-9 years after the CRA of 1964. QUOTE:
"The most important finding of Table 6 is that the post-1964 period did, in fact, witness an exceptional increase in black incomes, unaccounted for by previous trends, cyclical boom, or increased black educational attainment, and linked to civil rights activity. In regressions (1) and (4), the EEOC measure has a sizable significant coefficient, which implies that anti-discriminatory activity was responsible for increases in the black-white income ratio, from 1965 to 1971, of 15 percent for males and 27 percent for females, or 9 and 16 percentage points, respectively, from levels of about 60 percent in the early sixties."
--Richard Freeman, Economics Professor Harvard University, University of Chicago- 1973- Changes in the labor market for black Americans, 1948–72, Brookings Institution. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, No 1, 1973.
8) Finally a great theme of Sowell is to play up "free markets" as the antidote to or solution to discrimination. Hos argument has several weaknesses however.
a) Costs for sure
but willingly borne or shifted to others. He says there are costs to discrimination, which is certainly
true, but simply because there were costs does not endow "free
markets" with any magical properties to aid black progress. For one thing,
whites were quite willing to bear added costs to suppress black economic
progress when this suppression boosted white benefits, income and privilege.
Refusal to hire blacks could mean a company lost profits from hiring cheaper
black labor, but the greater gain was that whites monopolized all the better or
skilled jobs, boosting their incomes and asset acquisition opportunities, while
relegating blacks to the chump change leftovers. Costs did not mean the overall
system was not profitable, nor meet it objectives, for costs can always be
passed on to others. White consumers in some areas probably paid more for goods
or services produced by white union workers, but this was an acceptable
tradeoff, in view of maintaining income boosting white advantage and benefit.
b) Racial monopolies
or cartels certainly can shift costs easier, but individual white actors or
businesses can also shift the costs of discrimination. Sowell asserts that government, or
government regulated monopolies could afford to pass on costs of discrimination
to customers who have nowhere else to go. This too is true under certain
circumstances, but individual white businessmen ALSO passed on higher costs to
customers and still made decent profits. In fact many white customers (even in
the north) for housing, jobs, retail service, transportation, business
locations, and various merchandise insisted that blacks be pushed to the back
of the line so whites would reap foremost advantage. In these cases,
businessmen, logically, simply passed on the higher costs to white customers,
meeting their customers' market demands.
But it was not
only whites to whom costs were shifted. Higher costs were also passed on to
blacks by white enterprises and individuals, as the blacks had to pay similar
prices as whites for inferior facilities, amenities, goods and
services. Black riders for example, could be bundled to the back of
buses or streetcars while paying the same fare as better-treated whites. Having
nowhere else to go but with the white transport system monopoly, they were
forced to pay the same price for worse service. Desperate Blacks looking to
escape overcrowded ghetto zones were forced to pay a higher price for older, more
run down properties. White real estate
agents brokers and bankers could thus unload second-tier assets for a premium
price, again locking in white advantage and profit. White realtors for
example made nice profits from manipulative "blockbusting" and white
home-owners could unload less than sterling properties for premium prices that
many blacks would pay. See for example (Mehlhorn 1998. "A Requiem for
Blockbusting: Law, Economics, and Race-Based Real Estate Speculation". Fordham
Law Review. 67: 1145-1161.)
c) Racial cartels
don't only apply to governments or utilities, but to discriminatory systems as
a whole. Momopolies include
the monopoly held by white society on better jobs, education, assets, etc. The
entire system was/is a monopoly geared to white benefit, and blacks often paid
higher prices for lesser service, assets or goods, because they were
subordinated by the white monopoly, or the racial cartels like unions, or real
estate brokers that made up its subdivisions. Whites ensured that they
controlled the board. Laws for example crushed or blocked black attempts to get
decent business locations, learn or practice a skilled trade, get a good
education, own productive land in competition with whites, etc. If laws did not
work then subtle or hidden manipulation, such as zoning controls to keep out or
suppress black mobility were put in place. Sometimes outright violence was used
to maintain racial cartels or monopolies. Local racial cartels like white
homeowners associations saw increasing property values if blacks were kept out.
White workers in union cartels benefited from higher wages, and better
education. The system of racial cartels worked on multiple levels and meant
multi-general white wealth as blacks were frozen out of home-ownership, and out
of job marketplaces due to second tier education in "colored" or
"negro" schools.
d) Costs don't threaten the overall system or make it unprofitable, as the system can be tweaked or incrementally adjusted to contain cost threats, while preserving the whole. Where there were actual monopolies like bus lines, railroads or street car lines, some costs could simply be shifted to blacks. Blacks, most of whom were too poor to afford cars or extended taxi service, and needing quick transportation in urban areas to work, had no choice but to use segregated streetcars or bus lines where they were treated atrociously. Companies did not need to add duplicate vehicles for blacks to ride in. They simply relegated blacks to the back, or margins of existing stock vehicles, holding down costs while still mistreating captive black patrons. Tweaks could also use time profitably. In housing, Blacks could be corralled into overcrowded ghettoes bursting at the seams, but when undue pressure threatened the system, allowances could be made for them to spill over into older white areas. Since many of these "transitional" areas had older, more dilapidated housing stock, the tweak not only eased the pressure points and preserved the overall system of white monopoly benefit, but actually boosted white profits, as desperate blacks were willing to pay more than whites would for such lesser properties
e) Far from simply
being a negative cost factor, discrimination systems can/could be profitable as
an indication of social status and exclusivity- "we're too good to let
blacks live, play or try on clothes they purchase here" for example. In fact restaurants, housing
developments, clothing stores, department stores, clubs and other venues could
gain a competitive advantage with white customers by emphasizing how special
or exclusive their brand was- and one of the easiest ways to
do that was to reject blacks. Far from being a burdensome cost,
discriminatory policies could be a positive good for some businesses. Once
again, tweaking the system could ease pressure points and yield
double-benefits. Many restaurants for example refused to let blacks eat among
the good white folk, but still took black money around the back at a takeout
window. White stores could reject blacks that attempt to try on a clothing
purchase (earning the approval of white customers for this exclusivity), but
still took black money around the back by off-hours "special
arrangement." In other words, discrimination could roll along at a merry
clip, with enough flexibility built into the system to overcome various cost
downsides, and even gain profits..
f) Discriminatory
costs or lost profits were/are sometime irrelevant to the maintenance of
psychic and societal benefits of whiteness, and such costs and losses are a
function of private cultural mores and customs, not necessarily government.White employers also wanted to maintain a
good name in the local community among their fellow white citizens and
neighbors, and keep labor peace with white employees. The profits foregone from
refusing to hire or service blacks could often be deemed acceptable by most
whites, in view of the white goodwill among fellow whites- which had some
economic value. The PRIVATE opposition of white citizens or customers against
hiring blacks for example, or allowing blacks to operate a business at a
particular location could create so much social or cultural hassle for an
employer that it was not worth the time or trouble, whatever the theoretical
"lost profits" due to discrimination. During the bitter union busting
conflicts between white streetcar union workers and Houston businessmen in the
early1900s for example, employers avoided bringing in black strikebreakers to
take the place of whites, who monopolized all the skilled and better
semi-skilled jobs, even though the cheaper blacks that could do these jobs
would certainly have helped break the union, while lowering costs. But tough as
they were against the union “agitators” and “communist elements”, employers
knew that if they brought in negroes to do “white men’s jobs” public opinion
would turn overwhelmingly against them. It was better to use more expensive
white “scab” labor.
Socio-cultural hassles did not necessarily mean loss of overall white advantage however. The many petty PRIVATE socio-cultural hassles and barriers laid on blacks or on black- white interaction, such as the need for separate restrooms, eating places, ticket windows, work stations and a host of other such impedimenta, created so much hassle for employers that they found it better NOT to hire blacks in the first place. In short, petty PRIVATE segregation, along with that imposed by government, created the incentive to NOT hire blacks. This suited white racial cartels just fine. Locking blacks out of expanding segments of the modern economy was the end result of such PRIVATE socio-cultural preferences. This of course meant higher white incomes and greater asset acquisition, due to the sandbagging of potential black competition. In short, "government interference" was not the exclusive imposer of racial barriers. Social mores, norms and cultural preferences all worked to ensure white advantage.
g) Time could be
manipulated profitably to shift costs of discrimination and enhance white
advantage. In the
h) Black attempts to organize
alternative "free market" operations to escape mistreatment by racial
cartels were usually quickly crushed, locking in white monopoly profits and
power. Black
attempts to form competing transport operations with better service for example,
were hounded and harassed out of existence by whites. In
i) Costs and profit losses were also not simply a function of evil government interference in "free markets" but also the function and outcome of white cultural preferences and desires that suppressed black progress. Both businesses and individuals discriminated against blacks without any government requirement or prompting. Whether these desires and preferences were expressed politically or culturally made little difference as far as economic disadvantage imposed on blacks.
Numerous "Jim Crow"or apartheid practices were in put in place by PRIVATE businesses and entities PRIOR to actual government laws or enforcement. Sowell uses the example of streetcar discrimination and cites the Plessy case where white companies, unwilling to bear the costs of compliance with government ordinances mandating segregation, helped Plessy sue for relief. This is accurate and certainly allows creation of a stirring narrative: the white companies- models of "free market" alternatives, fighting the good fight against dastardly government "interference." But typical of his cherry-picking approach, Sowell does not tell the whole story. Some segregation practices on street cars for example, were put in place WITHOUT any government mandate to do so. Segregation was based on white cultural preferences, and it also occurred in the supposedly more "enlightened" North. The abolitionist Frederick Douglas for example was assaulted and beaten repeatedly by whites in the "liberal" north when he dared ride in a railroad carriage with the good white folk. And when government mandates were imposed, this was done at the behest of white consumers and clientele, expressing their preference to hold back blacks, via the political process. But segregation was already being imposed BEFORE government made it "official", and this is in fact what caused Congress (not "activist judges") to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
The landmark “Civil Rights Cases” of 1883, in which the US Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1975, and its provisions for non-discrimination in public accommodations is an excellent illustration. The Black Plaintiffs brought suit not against “politicians" or "government bureaucrats” but against white owned businesses: hotels, theaters, transit companies etc that had excluded them from facilities where whites were served, even though these businesses were supposedly open to the public. The white business owners contended in court that they were exercising their private property rights to discriminate against negroes, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and argued that the Act should be invalidated. The white court overwhelmingly agreed in an 8-1 decision, and stripped blacks of these civil rights protections enacted by Congress in 1875. This pro segregation "activism" set the stage for state and local regimes to enact a slew of “official” Jim Crow laws.. A decade later the same court drove home the final nail of white privilege and advantage, and declared segregated “separate but equal” the official law of the land in Plessy vs Ferguson. This decision, which scholar Randall Kennedy calls "a unique brand of American corruption and hypocrisy" relegated blacks to over half a century of legal second class citizenship, and paved the way for over a century of unrest and turmoil, including weakening of America’s credibility overseas during the Cold War, on the civil rights issue. Justice Harlan dissented, noting among other things that white companies like railroads were common carriers that had an obligation to serve all the public equally. But the decision allowed them to continue flouting even such minimal standards, now with the blessing of the government.
j) At street level PRIVATE white actors and businesses implemented discriminatory treatment, not only without government sanction, but sometimes IN DEFIANCE OF government policies.
At the national
level noted above, private entities flouted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and
got the highest court to agree. At the street level, they continued the same
discriminatory practices despite contrary government mandates. The celebrated
1854 case of Elizabeth Jennings in
It should also be noted that this company policy ran "colored" cars, - an additional cost- but still was doing brisk business, calling into question whether the costs of discrimination were all that harmful to the white discriminators. In fact, companies shifted costs to blacks, who were to use crowded "colored" cars, and if not, were made to ride on the dangerous, exposed outside steps and platforms of the "white" cars IF no white customers objected, while paying the same fare as whites for lesser service. Sowell's selective cherry-picking of course, a hallmark of his work, does not mention such things, as they would tend to undermine his arguments. PRIVATE "free market" white entities ALSO had incentives to segregate because this is what their white clientele often demanded.
Scholar Howard Rabinowitz 1978, (Race Relations in the Urban South- 1865-1890) shows in detail that the post reconstruction era was not one of growing white goodwill towards blacks but frequent hostility that sought white benefit and black disadvantage. Even Blacks themselves under such leaders as Booker T Washington pushed for a "separate but equal" type development (see "Atlantic Compromise" 1895- before Plessy), to avoid the lash of white opposition, and this accomodationism was indeed often supported by white Republican "friends of the negro", who were only too happy to subsidize Washington's segregated approach. Thus hostile or supremacist white sentiments, expressed politically, were in place FIRST, and led later to the creation of "official" Jim Crow laws. It is true that SOME streetcar companies fought against these laws because they raised costs, (See for exsmple: Roback, J. (1986). The Political Economy of Segregation-The Case of Segregated Streetcars. The Jrnl Econ Hist. V46, I4, pp. 893 - 917 ) a) and it is also true that the record does not show mass petitions or marches by ACTUAL white streetcar or railroad customers clamoring to ban blacks, though some viciously attacked blacks like Frederick Douglas for daring to ride alongside whites in railroad carriages.
But nevertheless, there were streetcar operations that imposed segregation without an order from the government, and whites expressed their desires politically in the revanchavist ferment that accompanied the end of Reconstruction, and these preferences were put in place via Jim Crow laws, and court decisions like Plessy. Ironically, blacks like Jennings were winning a number of court victories against private companies practicing segregation before the Supreme Court intervened on the side of segregationists. White business enterprises ultimately reconciled themselves to the Jim Crow dispensation, and found ways to shift or buffer costs. Ultimately, it was government "interference" via the civil rights struggle, not "free markets" that corrected and reversed government's earlier injustices, often against bitter white opposition, and changed this across the board for all black citizens. See (Blair L. M. Kelley - Right to Ride_ Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010).) . In fact, supposedly bad government action in some cases RESTORED “free markets” so that blacks and whites could transact business freely and equally, over the opposition of private white individuals or entities.
k) Conclusion- costs of discrimination did not and do not necessarily stop systematic discrimination from rolling merrily along to the profit, advantage and benefit of whites- the ultimate goal in view. White businesses at times fought higher costs, but also, without government compulsion, willingly implemented discriminatory policies with the supposed “higher costs” and “lost profits.” Costs however can be shifted or profits still gained, even as the system is tweaked to preserve the overall structure.
This reality calls into question Sowell's "free-market" superiority insinuations as regards black progress. He asserts that white actors in the private and public sectors had different incentives and constraints. This is true, but it made little difference in view of the bottom line overall goal of discriminatory systems- white benefit and advantage. An individual business might oppose higher costs imposed by discriminatory government laws or policies, but such costs can usually be shifted to system beneficiaries. Whites historically for example are usually willing to pay higher prices for housing in neighborhoods where the black presence is suppressed or minimized. Private entities like real estate brokers or mortgage companies have often welcomed this, as it means higher commissions and more profitable loan volumes for them. The higher costs borne by white consumers turns out to be profitable for these white private entities, who can and did turn around at a later time ro unload older or less attractive housing stocks at premium prices, on minorities looking to move out of their segregated zones. Both private and public sector white entities engaged in extensive manipulation, deception, and sometimes even violence, to achieve and maintain the overall goals of the system. And as shown above, the incentives for discrimination often sprang not from "bureaucrats" imposing laws, but from white cultural desires to suppress black progress, or maintain the psychic benefits of whiteness. The system did not/does not have to function perfectly, at all times and in all transactions, to work.
The use of time limited concessions to blacks- toleration of "out of place" work until whites needed to reassert or reclaim profits or benefits, aided the white cause. The use of discrimination as a way to build brands of white exclusivity or status, as in some commercial establishments, also kept the privilege machinery humming along. And the systematic lockout of blacks from decent education or job opportunities, or the ability to acquire assets such as good homes, of course hindered their competitiveness and ensured white advantage all down the line, for multiple generations. These adjustments absorbed or fended off threats, while preserving the overall goal of the system- white benefit, profit and privilege. Sowell's highlighting of "lost profits" or "higher costs" due to discrimination is indeed true under certain conditions, but time and again, in view of the larger material benefits to whites, such losses, if any, were often gladly borne. And on top of the material benefits, were the psychic benefits of whiteness- of NOT being black. Being white brought with it a suite of privileges and benefits that reinforced the psychic rewards.
The notion that "free markets" would lead to a withering away of racial discrimination in housing, credit, job and consumer markets is not borne out by the overall record. Nor are some parts of various "taste for discrimination" models, which posit that discrimination would eventually disappear in an ideally competitive market because competition would make it too costly. Unfortunately few such ideally competitive markets have ever existed where blacks are concerned. In the real world, to the contrary, racial discrimination did not and will NOT disappear, where:
(a) controllers of the
overall system (whites) benefit from discrimination,
(b) substantial costs can be
shifted to the victims of discrimination (inferior goods and services foisted
on blacks),
(c) customers or clientele of the dominant group willingly pay more
in view of their greater overall system benefit and psychic benefits of
whiteness (hiring whites for all but the most menial jobs for example increases white
income, opportunity and happiness at being white),
(d) private entities can profit from the
shifted costs (like real estate brokers and mortgage lenders profiting from
both white and black price premiums) and
(e) discrimination
can be made additionally profitable in terms of brand exclusivity and status. Examples include a restaurant that gains prestige by keeping out "lesser breeds"-
i.e. blacks, or a real estate broker gaining higher commissions from
unloading lower quality housing on anxious black buyers, and/or gaining from
the higher premium whites were willing to pay for neighborhoods without or with
very few blacks. Far from discrimination "withering away" it was/is a
lucrative source of white profit in several ways.
In short, discrimination is not simply a matter of firms or individuals acting randomly in a market. It is an entire system geared for white benefit, advantage and privilege. This reality undermines Sowell's argument that the private sector was, or is such a good alternative to government, or that racial discrimination will wither away due to various costs.
As Harvard professor D. Roithmayr puts in her study of racial discrimination as a system of white-benefit cartels: http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
"How did white workers earn higher wages from discriminating? Classic collective action explains these wages as a sort of monopoly profit. By forming a union that excluded black workers and by pushing employers to hire whites only, white railroad workers could drive up wages relative to their black and brown counterparts.
Employers also profited from discrimination in their fight against unions. By dividing the labor market in two, railroads maintained a ready-made stable of black strikebreakers perpetually on call to undercut the power of the white union. For railroad and workers alike, then, discrimination was win-win. And those benefits came at the expense of black workers, in the same way that cartels displace the costs of their profits onto someone else."
--Daria Roithmayr. 2014. Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage. pg 25-37
"But the lock-in story of racial disparity highlights a number of things about racial inequality that conventional explanations obscure. First, the lock-in model highlights the profits that whites earned from racial exclusion during Jim Crow. Economics scholars have always assumed that racism would die out because discriminating was too costly. On the contrary, the lock-in model demonstrates that racism can pay off, and did so handsomely during Jim Crow.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe the profit-maximizing behavior of Jim Crow 'racial cartels': - homeowners' associations, labor unions, political parties, school districts, and other groups that worked to generate monopoly profits by excluding competitors. By coordinating to keep the neighborhood pure, white homeowners' associations were able to keep for themselves the best houses, in the best neighborhoods, with the wealthiest neighbors. By excluding black and brown children from public schools, whites monopolized the best public education from themselves. By dividing the labor market into two racially identifiable segments, white unions earned the highest wages, in the most prestigious jobs. In the South, whites had a monopoly lock on political power for decades. As these chapters illustrate, during the era of Jim Crow, discrimination paid off quite well."
--Daria Roithmayr. 2014. Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage. pg 25-37
Employers also profited from discrimination in their fight against unions. By dividing the labor market in two, railroads maintained a ready-made stable of black strikebreakers perpetually on call to undercut the power of the white union. For railroad and workers alike, then, discrimination was win-win. And those benefits came at the expense of black workers, in the same way that cartels displace the costs of their profits onto someone else."
--Daria Roithmayr. 2014. Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage. pg 25-37
Roithmayr also notes how profitable these racial cartels were and are as the gains made earlier are carried forward and passed down:
"But the lock-in story of racial disparity highlights a number of things about racial inequality that conventional explanations obscure. First, the lock-in model highlights the profits that whites earned from racial exclusion during Jim Crow. Economics scholars have always assumed that racism would die out because discriminating was too costly. On the contrary, the lock-in model demonstrates that racism can pay off, and did so handsomely during Jim Crow.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe the profit-maximizing behavior of Jim Crow 'racial cartels': - homeowners' associations, labor unions, political parties, school districts, and other groups that worked to generate monopoly profits by excluding competitors. By coordinating to keep the neighborhood pure, white homeowners' associations were able to keep for themselves the best houses, in the best neighborhoods, with the wealthiest neighbors. By excluding black and brown children from public schools, whites monopolized the best public education from themselves. By dividing the labor market into two racially identifiable segments, white unions earned the highest wages, in the most prestigious jobs. In the South, whites had a monopoly lock on political power for decades. As these chapters illustrate, during the era of Jim Crow, discrimination paid off quite well."
--Daria Roithmayr. 2014. Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage. pg 25-37
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2020/11/teflon-dons-coating-in-trouble-can-he.html
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The Teflon Don- Covid-era approval rating may signal November success
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https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2020/04/would-biden-win-be-any-big-loss-for.html
Tchalla's "Wakanda First" philosophy looks a bit like Donald Trump's "America First" approach
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/tchallas-wakanda-first-philosophy-looks.html
Significant EEOC Race-Color Cases- Covering Private and Federal Sectors
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/blog-post.html
'AsiaRate' Lawsuit against Harvard shows dirty little secret- white quotas used at elite universities
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/06/asiarate-lawsuit-against-harvard-shows.html
Some gays find welcome home in the 'alt-right' as nationalist organizations step up recruitment
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/05/some-gays-find-welcome-home-in-alt.html
Racial discrimination is alive and kicking in employment, housing and credit markets
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/racial-discrimination-is-alive-and.html
Sowell 3- new data shows backward tropical evolution? Wealth and Poverty- An International Perspective in Trump era
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-3-new-data-shows-backward.html
Sowell 2- Wealth, Poverty and Politics- International Perspective - Trump era to bring these issues into sharper focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-2-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Sowell- Liberal intellectuals and hard questions about race differences- Trump era may force them to focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-liberal-intellectuals-and-hard.html
Trump properties discriminated against black tenants lawsuit finds
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-properties-discriminated-against.html
Stealing credibility- Dinesh D'souza has prison epiphany- after hanging with the homies- Hallelujah Hilary!
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/straining-credibility-dinesh-dsouza-has.html
Shame on you, and your guilt too- A review of Shelby Steele's 'Shame'
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-review-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/04/go-with-flow-3-more-dna-and-cranial.html
Go with the flow 2- African gene flow into Europe in various eras
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/11/go-with-flow-2-african-gene-flow-into.html
DNA studies show African movement to Europe from very ancient times
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-studies-show-african-movement-to.html
Guilt3- Why the "white privilege industry" is not all there
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt3-why-white-privilege-industry-is.html
Guilt2- Media collaborates with guilt mongers - or how to play the white victim card
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt2-media-collaborates-with-guilt.html
How Obama plays on white guilt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-obama-plays-upon-white-guilt-hilary.html
Blacks oppose free speech- more ramshackle "research" from "the East"..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/blacks-oppose-free-speech-ramshackle.html
Hands off the Confederate flag
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/hands-off-confederate-flag.html
Despite much more wealth than blacks, whites collect about the same rate of welfare and are treated more generously
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
Why HBD or hereditarianism lacks credibility
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-hbd-or-hereditarianism-lacks.html
Leading Scientists criticize hereditarian claims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/leading-scientists-criticize.html
Thai me down - Thais fall behind genetically related southern Chinese, Tibetans below genetically related East Asians like Koreans and other Chinese
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/thai-me-up-thai-me-down.html
Time for liberals to respect "the south" ... in a way of speaking.. the south of Egypt that is..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-for-liberals-to-respect-south-in.html
Irony 2: touted High IQ "G-men" cannot reproduce themselves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/irony-2-higher-iqs-correlated-with_25.html
Unz and Sowell: Unz debunking Lynn's IQ and Wealth of Nations. Sowell debunking the Bell Curve
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/unz-and-sowell-unz-debunking-lynns-iq.html
Irony 1: touted High IQ types are more homosexual, more atheist, and more liberal (HAL)
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/irony-high-iqs-produce-more-atheists.html
Elite white universities discriminate against Asians using reverse "affirmative action"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/elite-white-universities-discriminate.html
Deteriorating state of white America
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/deteriorating-state-of-white-america.html
Racial Cartels (The Affirmative Action Propaganda machine- part 2
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
Hereditarian's/HBD's "Great Black Hope"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html
Exploding nonsense: the 10,000 Year Explosion
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
We need "rational racism"- Convicted felon Dinesh Dsouza becomes his own test case
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-need-rational-racism-proponent.html
The Affirmative Action Propaganda Machine- part 1
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-affirmatve-action-propaganda.html
Two rules for being "really" black- no white wimmen, no Republican
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-be-really-black-you-cant-have-white.html
The Axial age reconsidered
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axial-age-reconsidered.html
Cannibal seasonings: dark meat on white
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/12/i.html
"Affirmative Action" in the form of court remedies has been around a long time- since the 1930s- benefiting white union workers against discrimination by employers
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/09/affirmative-action-as-term-appears-in.html
Mugged by reality 1: White quotas, special preferences and government jobs
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/mugged-by-reality-1-white-quotas.html
Lightweight enforcement of EEO laws contradicts claims of "flood" of minorities "taking jobs"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post.html
Railroaded 3: white violence and intimidation imposed quotas
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-3-white-violence-and.html
Railroaded 2: how white quotas and special preferences blockade black progress...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-2-thow-white-quotas-and.html
Railroaded 1: How white affirmative action and white special preferences destroyed black railroad employment...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-how-white-affirmative-action.html
oh did we mention that the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are white..
Affirmative action: primary beneficiaries are white women
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/04/affirmative-action-primary.html
7 reasons certain libertarians and right-wingers are wrong about the Civil Right Act
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
Assorted "Role models" debunked- hypocritical heriditarianism
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.htmll
Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-philosophy-of-thomas-sowell.html
Additional gene flow data... :)
Go with the flow 2- African gene flow into Europe in various eras
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/11/go-with-flow-2-african-gene-flow-into.html
DNA studies show African movement to Europe from very ancient times
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-studies-show-african-movement-to.html
Guilt3- Why the "white privilege industry" is not all there
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt3-why-white-privilege-industry-is.html
Guilt2- Media collaborates with guilt mongers - or how to play the white victim card
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt2-media-collaborates-with-guilt.html
How Obama plays on white guilt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-obama-plays-upon-white-guilt-hilary.html
Blacks oppose free speech- more ramshackle "research" from "the East"..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/blacks-oppose-free-speech-ramshackle.html
Hands off the Confederate flag
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/hands-off-confederate-flag.html
Despite much more wealth than blacks, whites collect about the same rate of welfare and are treated more generously
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
Why HBD or hereditarianism lacks credibility
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-hbd-or-hereditarianism-lacks.html
Leading Scientists criticize hereditarian claims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/leading-scientists-criticize.html
Thai me down - Thais fall behind genetically related southern Chinese, Tibetans below genetically related East Asians like Koreans and other Chinese
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/thai-me-up-thai-me-down.html
Time for liberals to respect "the south" ... in a way of speaking.. the south of Egypt that is..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-for-liberals-to-respect-south-in.html
Irony 2: touted High IQ "G-men" cannot reproduce themselves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/irony-2-higher-iqs-correlated-with_25.html
Unz and Sowell: Unz debunking Lynn's IQ and Wealth of Nations. Sowell debunking the Bell Curve
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/unz-and-sowell-unz-debunking-lynns-iq.html
Irony 1: touted High IQ types are more homosexual, more atheist, and more liberal (HAL)
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/irony-high-iqs-produce-more-atheists.html
Elite white universities discriminate against Asians using reverse "affirmative action"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/elite-white-universities-discriminate.html
Deteriorating state of white America
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/deteriorating-state-of-white-america.html
Racial Cartels (The Affirmative Action Propaganda machine- part 2
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
Hereditarian's/HBD's "Great Black Hope"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html
Exploding nonsense: the 10,000 Year Explosion
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
We need "rational racism"- Convicted felon Dinesh Dsouza becomes his own test case
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-need-rational-racism-proponent.html
The Affirmative Action Propaganda Machine- part 1
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-affirmatve-action-propaganda.html
Two rules for being "really" black- no white wimmen, no Republican
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-be-really-black-you-cant-have-white.html
The Axial age reconsidered
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axial-age-reconsidered.html
Cannibal seasonings: dark meat on white
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/12/i.html
"Affirmative Action" in the form of court remedies has been around a long time- since the 1930s- benefiting white union workers against discrimination by employers
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/09/affirmative-action-as-term-appears-in.html
Mugged by reality 1: White quotas, special preferences and government jobs
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/mugged-by-reality-1-white-quotas.html
Lightweight enforcement of EEO laws contradicts claims of "flood" of minorities "taking jobs"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post.html
Railroaded 3: white violence and intimidation imposed quotas
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-3-white-violence-and.html
Railroaded 2: how white quotas and special preferences blockade black progress...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-2-thow-white-quotas-and.html
Railroaded 1: How white affirmative action and white special preferences destroyed black railroad employment...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-how-white-affirmative-action.html
Affirmative action: primary beneficiaries are white women
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/04/affirmative-action-primary.html
7 reasons certain libertarians and right-wingers are wrong about the Civil Right Act
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/better-nutrition-led-to-increases-in.html
Assorted "Role models" debunked- hypocritical heriditarianism
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.htmll
Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-philosophy-of-thomas-sowell.html
Additional gene flow data... :)
Bogus "biodiversity" theories of Kanazawa, Ruston, Lynn debunked
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_1818.html
In the Blood- debunking "HBD" and Neo-Nazi appropriation of ancient Egypt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
early Europeans and middle Easterners looked like Africans. Peoples returning or "backflowing" to Africa would already be looking like Africans
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
Ancient Egypt: one of the world's most advanced civilizations- created by tropical peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/03/playing-greek-defence-review-of-thornton.html
Quotations from mainstream academic research on the Nile Valley peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/thread/15/basic-database-nile-valley-studies
OTHER LINKS
Race, IQ, and Wealth: What the facts tell us about a taboo subject By Ron Unz
HBD EVOLUTION, BRAIN SIZE AND NATIONAL IQ CLAIMS DEBUNKED
IQ claims and miscellaneous data
Race, IQ, and Wealth: What the facts tell us about a taboo subject By Ron Unz
HBD EVOLUTION, BRAIN SIZE AND NATIONAL IQ CLAIMS DEBUNKED
Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples ... - Jelte Wicherts 2010
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
------------------------------------
Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of intelligence - WIcherts, Borsboom and Dolan 2010
Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 91-96
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010.pdf
----------------------------- -------------
Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? by JM Wicherts - ?2004
--Dolan, Wicherts et al 2004. Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 32 (2004) 509-537
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2004.pdf
-------------------------------------------
LYNN AND VANHAVEN'S IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS DEBUNKED---------------- -------
www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/Pdf/McB%20&%20Brooks%202000%20TRTW.pdf
------------------------
Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley Montagu... By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
Race and intelligence: separating science from myth. By Jefferson M. Fish. Routledge 2002. See Templeton's detailed article referenced above also inside the book
http://books.google.com/books?id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&pg=PA64&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=7#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
------------------------
http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/what-they-mean.htm
---------------- -------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
For summary see: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-02-18/
---------------- -------
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
 |
-----------------------------------------------------------
--S OY Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1455.pdf
--S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) *The Persistence ofRacial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence. AJPA, 99:3
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/WAURRSZQOE.pdf
---------------- -------
HBD RACE EVOLUTION CLAIMS DEBUNKED BY GENETICISTS
Alan Templeton. "The Genetic and Evolutionary significnce oF Human Races." pp 31-56. IN: J. FiSh (2002) Race and Intelligence: Separating scinnce from myth.
IQ claims and miscellaneous data
HBD RACE AND INTELLIGENCE CLAIMS DEBUNKED
J. FiSh (2002) Race and Intelligence: Separating science from myth.
------------------------------------------
MORE HBD DEBUNKING
-------------------------------- ---------------------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
----------------------------------------------
Krimsky, S, Sloan.K (2011) Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture
-------------------------------
Wicherts and Johnson, 2009. Group differences in the heritability of items and test scores
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/04/24/rspb.2009.0238.full
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/coming-apart-can-murrays-down-with.html
"SELECTION FOR"- "SELECT FOR" HDB CLAIMS DEBUNKED- "SELECTION" IS NOT THE ONLY KEY FORCE DRIVING CHANGE
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/demic-diffusion-notes-and-tropical.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/08/cro-magnons-are-us-debunking-claims.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
--Joseph Graves, 2006. What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/
J. Kahn (2013) How a Drug Becomes "Ethnic" - Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, v4:1
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=yjhple
------------------------------------ -----------------
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PageProofs-Graves_race.pdf
-------------------------------------------- ----------------------------
other links
Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples ... - Jelte Wicherts 2010
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
------------------------------------
Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of intelligence - WIcherts, Borsboom and Dolan 2010
Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 91-96
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010.pdf
----------------------------- -------------
Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? by JM Wicherts - ?2004
--Dolan, Wicherts et al 2004. Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 32 (2004) 509-537
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2004.pdf
-------------------------------------------
LYNN AND VANHAVEN'S IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS DEBUNKED---------------- -------
www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/Pdf/McB%20&%20Brooks%202000%20TRTW.pdf
------------------------
Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley Montagu... By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
Race and intelligence: separating science from myth. By Jefferson M. Fish. Routledge 2002. See Templeton's detailed article referenced above also inside the book
http://books.google.com/books?id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&pg=PA64&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=7#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
------------------------
http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/what-they-mean.htm
---------------- -------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
For summary see: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-02-18/
---------------- -------
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
-----------------------------------------------------------
--S OY Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1455.pdf
--S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) *The Persistence ofRacial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence. AJPA, 99:3
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/WAURRSZQOE.pdf
---------------- -------
HBD RACE EVOLUTION CLAIMS DEBUNKED BY GENETICISTS
Alan Templeton. "The Genetic and Evolutionary significnce oF Human Races." pp 31-56. IN: J. FiSh (2002) Race and Intelligence: Separating scinnce from myth.
HBD RACE AND INTELLIGENCE CLAIMS DEBUNKED
J. FiSh (2002) Race and Intelligence: Separating science from myth.
------------------------------------------
MORE HBD DEBUNKING
-------------------------------- ---------------------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
----------------------------------------------
Krimsky, S, Sloan.K (2011) Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture
-------------------------------
Wicherts and Johnson, 2009. Group differences in the heritability of items and test scores
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/04/24/rspb.2009.0238.full
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/coming-apart-can-murrays-down-with.html
"SELECTION FOR"- "SELECT FOR" HDB CLAIMS DEBUNKED- "SELECTION" IS NOT THE ONLY KEY FORCE DRIVING CHANGE
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/demic-diffusion-notes-and-tropical.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/08/cro-magnons-are-us-debunking-claims.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
--Joseph Graves, 2006. What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/
J. Kahn (2013) How a Drug Becomes "Ethnic" - Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, v4:1
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=yjhple
------------------------------------ -----------------
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PageProofs-Graves_race.pdf
"troubled youth..."
Misc data:
Data from New York and Minnesota show that blacks stopped had LESS weapons or contraband on them than whites, yet blacks were disproportionately stopped, searched and experienced more use of police force against them.
Data from the city of Minneapolis itself. The blacks were stopped almost 3 times the rate of whites, and were in higher crime hoods, yet whites stops yielded MORE contraband than blacks or Latinos..
Data on extremist murders of US police officers
Data from the city of Minneapolis itself. The blacks were stopped almost 3 times the rate of whites, and were in higher crime hoods, yet whites stops yielded MORE contraband than blacks or Latinos..
Data on extremist murders of US police officers
Most murders of law enforcement by domestic extremists are by white right-wing groups
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