Orange County Regsiter, CA
June 5 2005
Sowell’s ethnic wisdom
Alan Bock
Sr. editorial writer
The trouble with reviewing a book by Tom Sowell is that it is usually
packed with so much startling information and analysis that you’re
tempted simply to make your review nothing but long quotes. His new
book, which sums up much of what Sowell, a senior fellow at
Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has learned over several decades of
unrelentingly honest research into issues of race and ethnicity, in
the process shattering cherished myths, is no exception.
The present book consists of six extended essays on related but not
necessarily directly connected topics. The longest, from which the
book takes its title, should spur debate for years to come.
In it Sowell argues that present-day black people in much of urban
America are carriers of some less attractive aspects of Southern
culture they absorbed during the long period of slavery and living in
the South after slavery ended.
“More is involved here than a mere parallel between blacks and
Southern whites,” he writes. “What is involved is a common subculture
that goes back for centuries, which encompassed everything from ways
of talking to attitudes toward education, violence and sex – and
which originated not in the South, but in those parts of the British
Isles from which white Southerners came. That culture long ago died
out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American
South. Then it largely died out among both white and black
Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of
the urban black ghettos.”
The tragedy is that the culture, created in British borderlands that
were chaotic for centuries and including exaggerated manliness, a
willingness to fight at a hint of disrespect and a disdain for books,
business and long- range planning, is now considered “authentically
black” and not to be tampered with, however self-defeating it might
be.
The chapter titled “Are Jews Generic?” notes that Jews are not the
only minority hated for economic success. A range of ethnicities –
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, overseas Indians and Chinese,
Lebanese in Africa – have served as what Sowell calls “middleman
minorities,” intermediaries between producers and consumers, either
as retailers or lenders. Typically they start with little capital,
put the whole family to work and eventually prosper – only to be
resented by others in the society whose functioning they have done so
much to facilitate. Sowell suggests that this economic role, more
than other factors, accounts for much historic anti-Semitism.
The chapter on slavery notes that it was not a unique imposition of
Western whites on blacks, but existed in every culture, society and
ethnicity from the dawn of recorded history – and was ended because a
consensus developed in Western civilization in the 1700s that it was
wrong. A chapter on Germans in history suggests that it was not
something inherent in German culture that made them ripe for Nazism,
but rather that the totalitarian temptation can afflict even a
generally civilized and tolerant society.
Sowell’s chapter on black education shatters numerous misconceptions.
He describes a number of schools, like Dunbar in Washington, D.C.,
that took poor blacks and sent them to college and professional
careers in disproportionate numbers. But such successful models are
ignored by modern education bureaucrats.
If you’re attracted to independent thought and open to learning some
new things, you’ll love this book.