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Jewish World Review / July 16, 1998 / 22 Tamuz, 5758
Thomas Sowell
WHEN I FIRST SAT DOWN to begin preparing an international study of racial and cultural
differences back in April 1982, in a London hotel room, there was no way I could have
imagined that the final volume in that study -- my recently published Conquests and
Cultures: -- would come out in the midst of a "national dialogue on race," based on
assumptions wholly contradicted by everything I had found in countries around the
world.
Jews, for example, have prospered in countries seething with anti-Semitism. The
Chinese have never had equal rights in Indonesia or Malaysia, but they have had higher
incomes than the Indonesians or the Malays. Much the same story could be told of the
Lebanese in West Africa, Indians and Pakistanis in East Africa, Greeks in the Ottoman
Empire, Germans in czarist Russia -- and on and on around the world.
None of this would be possible if discrimination were the be-all and end-all explanation
of intergroup differences in incomes, occupations or other measures of success.
Groups differ in their skills and cultures and always have. More fundamentally, there
was never any reason to expect them to be the same, in the first place.
How could Eskimos have acquired the knowledge, skills, and experience to grow
pineapples or other tropical crops? How could the peoples of the Himalayas have
learned to navigate on the high seas?
Geography alone is enough to prevent all groups, nations or civilizations from having
the same skills. The British created the industrial revolution, but there was no way that
the peoples of the Balkans could have done so, since the Balkans lack both the raw
materials needed and any economically feasible way of transporting those materials
there.
Man may discriminate but nature discriminates on a scale that dwarfs what human
beings can do. Too many people take "nature" to mean genes but geography is also
nature and it is by no means egalitarian.
For most of history in most of the world, people living in cities have been more
advanced than people of the same race living in the hinterlands or up in the mountains.
But cities do not arise at random in all geographic settings. Most cities arise on
navigable waterways, which have been as plentiful in Western Europe as they have
been scarce in sub-Saharan Africa, leaving Western Europe one of the most urbanized
regions of the world and tropical Africa the least.
Add to geographic differences the differences in demography, history and other factors
-- and the conclusion becomes virtually inescapable that there was no reason to have
expected equality of inputs or outcomes in the first place.
Is discrimination one of these other factors? Of course. But can we automatically make
discrimination the reason for all intergroup differences? Not if we are serious, as
distinguished from being political.
The most that we can hope for is equality of opportunity. But when different individuals
and groups do not even want the same things, how can they be expected to achieve the
same things?
Focussing on discrimination is fine if you are more interested in smiting the wicked
than in advancing the less fortunate. Laying a guilt trip on people who are more
successful is fine if your goal is to score political points and maybe get a few crumbs
from their table. But don't expect to advance a whole race that way.
We have to understand the past if we are serious about preparing for the future. You
can re-run all the pictures you want of marches on Selma or firehoses and police dogs
in Birmingham in the 1960s. But the cold, hard fact is that blacks were rising
economically more rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s than after the civil rights revolution
of the 1960s.
The civil rights revolution was right and overdue but let us not confuse a moral
necessity with an economic cause. We have to fight today's problems, not yesterday's, if
we want a better
Do 'minorities' really
have it that bad?
The social dogma that is still being endlessly repeated is that disparities in incomes,
occupations and other kinds of success are all due to "stereotypes" that lead to
discrimination against minorities. Yet some minorities are doing better than the
majority that has been doing the discriminating. Certainly that is true of Japanese
Americans and it has been true of other minorities in other countries around the world.
7/14/98: Race dialogue: same old stuff
7/10/98: Honest history
7/09/98: Dumb is dangerous
7/02/98: Gun-safety starts with
parental responsibility
6/30/98: When more is less
6/29/98: Are educators above the law?
6/26/98: Random Thoughts
6/24/98: An angry letter
6/22/98: Sixties sentimentalism
6/19/98:Dumbing down anti-trust
6/15/98: A changing of the guard?
6/11/98: Presidential privileges
6/8/98: Fast computers and slow antitrust
6/3/98: Can stalling backfire?
5/29/98: The insulation of the Left
5/25/98: Missing the point in the media
5/22/98: The lessons of Indonesia
5/20/98: Smart but silent
5/18/98: Israel, Clinton and character
5/14/98: Monica Lewinsky's choices
5/11/98: Random thoughts
5/7/98: Media obstruction of justice
5/4/98: Dangerous "safety"
5/1/98:
Abolish Adolescence!
4/30/98: The naked truth
4/22/98: Playing fair and square
4/19/98: Bad teachers"
4/15/98: "Clinton in Africa
"
4/13/98: "Bundling and unbundling
"
4/9/98: "Rising or falling Starr
"
4/6/98: "Was Clinton ‘vindicated'?
"
3/26/98: "Diasters -- natural and political"
3/24/98: "A pattern of behavior"
3/22/98: Innocent explanations
3/19/98: Kathleen Willey and Anita Hill
3/17/98: Search and destroy
3/12/98: Media Circus versus Justice
3/6/98: Vindication
3/3/98: Cheap Shot Time
2/26/98: The Wrong Filter
2/24/98: Trial by Media
2/20/98: Dancing Around the Realities
2/19/98: A "Do Something" War?
2/12/98: Julian Simon, combatant in a 200-year war
2/6/98: A rush to rhetoric
