Intellectuals and Race: Getting it Wrong from Eugenics to 'Social Justice'

Intellectuals and Race" can help bring us back to a serious examination of a question which has not received the empirical examination it deserves.

(WASHINGTON DC) - Intellectual theories, which have largely bypassed complex reality, have had a dramatic influence upon the way Americans view race---and racial differences.

In an important new book, "Intellectuals And Race" (Basic Books, 2013), Professor Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow for Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, tests the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed among intellectuals and which have led to a variety of crusades from eugenics in the early 20th century to multiculturalism and affirmative action at the present time.

Dr. Sowell, who is black, is the author of such well regarded books as "Intellectuals and Society," "A Conflict Of Visions," "Basic Economics," and "The Vision of the Anointed." He has studied race and race relations not only in the U.S. but in India, Malaysia, Africa and throughout the world.

"For better or worse," he writes, "intellectuals have played a large role in racial issues in many countries...In the U.S., they have played opposite roles on racial issues in the early 20th century as contrasted with the late 20th century."

Disparities in achievements between different racial groups are, Sowell points out, to be found throughout the world: "Sometimes minorities are on the short end of disparities (as in the U.S., Britain and France), and sometimes it is the majority that lags behind (as in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Ottoman Empire). Sometimes the disparities are blamed on discrimination, sometimes on genes, but in any event the disparities are treated as oddities that need explaining, no matter how common such supposed oddities are in countries around the world or in how many centuries they have been common."

In cases where minorities outperform politically dominant majorities, Sowell argues, "it is difficult to make the case that discrimination is the cause. A study of the Ottoman Empire...found of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul in 1912 not one bore a Muslim name. Nor was even one of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul a Turk. Of the capital assets of 284 industrial firms employing five or more workers, 50 percent were owned by Greeks and another 20 per cent by Armenians. In the 17th century Ottoman Empire, the palace medical staff consisted of 41 Jews and 21 Muslims."

Different groups pursue different career paths because of culture, geography and other historical factors----which have little to do with either genetics or discrimination by the larger society. As early as 1887, Sowell shows, more than twice as many Italians as Argentines had bank accounts in the Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, even though most 19th century Italian immigrants arrived in Argentina destitute and began working in the lowest and most menial jobs. "In the U.S.," writes Sowell, "knowledge of the frugality of Italian immigrants and their reliability in repaying debts, even when they had low incomes, caused a bank to be set up to attract this clientele in San Francisco under the name, 'Bank of Italy.' It became so successful that it spread out to the larger society and eventually became the largest bank in the world under its new name, 'Bank of America.' The frugality of Italians was not simply a 'perception' or a 'stereotype,' as A.P. Giannini well knew when he set up this bank."

People from different parts of the world have had different historical experiences and,as a result, have developed different skills, work habits, and respect for education. "Different races," Sowell points out, developed in different parts of the world, in very different geographic settings, which presented very different opportunities and restrictions on their cultural evolution over a period of centuries. There is no way, for example, that the patterns of economic and social life which originated and evolved in Europe could have originated among the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, where the horses that were central to everything from farming to transportation to warfare in Europe simply did not exist in the Western Hemisphere when the European invaders arrived and began transplanting horses across the Atlantic to the New World....There were no wheeled vehicles in any of the economies of the Western Hemisphere when the Europeans arrived...Regardless of which race lived in Europe or in the Western Hemisphere, they would have faced very different opportunities or restrictions as regards their economic and cultural development..."

Geographic differences between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa are even more numerous. In addition to severe geographic restrictions on the production of wealth due to deficiencies of soil and unreliable rainfall patterns, there was a dearth of navigable rivers as well as a dearth of natural harbors, as well as the difficulty of maintaining draft animals because of the disease-carrying tsetse fly and the vast barrier of the Sahara desert. "Isolated peoples," writes Sowell, "in many parts of the world have for centuries lagged behind others, whether the isolation has been caused by mountains, deserts or islands far from the nearest mainland...As the distinguished cultural historian Oscar Handlin put it: 'Men are not blank slates upon which the environment inscribes a culture which can be readily erased to make way for a new inscription.'"

Our intellectuals, Sowell shows, never understood these complexities. In the early 20th century, Progressive era thinkers, the "liberals" of their time, ascribed racial and ethnic differences to heredity. Madison Grant's book, "The Passing of the Great Race" (later hailed by Hitler) expressed fears of a loss of hegemony by whites in general and Nordics in particular. The Progressive era was the heyday of eugenics, the attempt to prevent excessive breeding of the "wrong" kind of people. Eugenicists---such as pioneer birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, feared that people of lower mental capacity would reproduce on a larger scale than others. THE NEW REPUBLIC, a prominent liberal voice, lamented "the multiplication of the unfit, the production of a horde of unwanted souls."

Consider a close friend of Madison Grant, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-renowned paleontologist who coined the term "tyrannosaurus Rex." Osborn said, in the wake of mental testing, "We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us." Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive intellectual of his time, imposed segregation upon employees of the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving---and had a private showing of the movie 'The Birth Of A Nation," which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House.

Intellectuals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries no longer advance the idea that certain groups are lagging behind in certain areas because they are genetically inferior. Now, differences between groups are blamed on discrimination by the larger society. The politically correct solutions at the present time are programs of multiculturalism and affirmative action.

In Sowell's view, "Intellectuals who made genetic determinism the overriding explanation of inter group differences in outcomes in the early 20th century, and discrimination the overriding explanation of these differences in the latter part of the 20th century, have in both cases made the prevailing belief of the day obligatory for anyone who wanted to be taken seriously, if even to avoid being stigmatized as a shallow 'sentimentalist' in the early part of the century, or a despised 'racist' in the latter part...A crucial part about the theories and social visions of intellectuals is that the intelligentsia pay no price for being wrong...The sweeping acceptance of theories of genetic determinism by intellectuals...had impacts on things ranging from immigration policies to compulsory sterilization policies to the Holocaust. Yet those who promoted these beliefs paid no price. Madison Grant's death in 1937 spared him from even learning that millions of innocent men, women and children would be systematically murdered because his book impressed Hitler."

As he always has, Thomas Sowell attempts to understand---and explain---the reality of racial and ethnic relations in all their cultural, historic and geographic complexity. He has done a notable service, for no problem facing us can be resolved if it is not properly understood. Unfortunately, too much of our discussion of this issue is dominated by empty cliches, which have clearly led us astray. "Intellectuals and Race" can help bring us back to a serious examination of a question which has not received the empirical examination it deserves.

Salem-News.com contributor Allan C. Brownfeld received his B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary, his J.D. degree from the Marshall-Wythe School of Law of the College of William and Mary and his M.A. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland. He has served on the faculties of St. Stephen's Episcopal School, Alexandria, Virginia, and the University College of the University of Maryland.

The recipient of a Wall Street Journal Foundation Award, Mr. Brownfeld has written for such newspapers as THE HOUSTON PRESS, THE RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH, THE WASHINGTON EVENING STAR and THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER. For many years he wrote three columns a week for such newspapers as THE PHOENIX GAZETTE, THE MANCHESTER UNION LEADER, and THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER. His weekly column appeared for more than a decade in ROLL CALL, the newspaper of Capitol Hill. His articles have appeared in such journals as THE YALE REVIEW, THE TEXAS QUARTERLY, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, ORBIS and MODERN AGE.

Mr. Brownfeld served as a member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and was the author of that committee's 250-page study of the New Left. He has also served as Assistant to the Research Director of the House Republican Conference and as a consultant to such members of Congress as Reps. Phil Crane (R-Il) and Jack Kemp (R-NY) and to the Vice President of the United States.

He is a former editor of THE NEW GUARD and PRIVATE PRACTICE, the journal of the Congress of County Medical Societies and has served as a Contributing Editor AMERICA'S FUTURE and HUMAN EVENTS. He served as Washington correspondent for the London-based publications, JANE'S ISLAMIC AFFAIRS ANALYST and JANE'S TERRORISM REPORT. His articles regularly appear in newspapers and magazines in England, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands and other countries. You can write to Allan at abrownfeld@gmail.com