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Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

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Although a slim volume, Sowell's Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? is one of the most important books on the subject ever written. One by one, the standard platitudes about discrimination and poverty fall before Sowell's relentless statistical assault. Discrimination causes poverty? How about the Chinese minority in Southeast Asia? Discrimination against the Chinese minority is actually written into the Malaysian constitution. And yet the Chinese minority still dominates the economy. Likewise, Japanese-Americans were discriminated against so badly that 120,000 of them were forcibly relocated during World War II. Yet by 1959 they had equaled whites in income, and by 1969 were earning one third more. Politics is the only way for a minority group to advance? To the contrary: the general pattern in the United States has been for a group to become wealthy first and only then to enter politics (if at all). The Irish, on the other hand, who placed such emphasis on political action, lagged behind other ethnic groups.

The book is absolutely filled with information like this. Moreover, Sowell also discusses the perils of attributing income disparities to "racism" and "discrimination." I had to laugh when I read the critical reviewer below who claimed that Sowell's book was "simplistic." Whatever criticism one might make of it, no one who actually read the book could describe it that way. In fact, I'm a college professor who assigned the book to my students, and their general complaint was actually that it was too complicated! Sowell's whole point is that it is the current "civil rights" establishment that is simplistic-all statistical disparities between groups can have only one cause: discrimination. Sowell demonstrates how utterly untenable-and, yes, simplistic-such a suggestion is.

Finally, the suggestion that because Sowell holds such views he can't "really" be black: that's an accusation this brave scholar has had to endure his whole life. Apparently, all blacks are supposed to hold the same opinions. I'd say that's pretty simplistic.

In short: I am not aware of any other book on this subject that is so relentless in its demolition of tired myths about affirmative action and civil rights.

Thomas Sowell is one of the most articulate and intelligent authors today. His books are well-researched, politically unconventional, and highly persuasive. In this work, Mr. Sowell confronts the "rhetoric" of the civil rights establishment and contrasts it with the "reality" of American society and American law. The liberal establishment, according to Mr. Sowell, made a key blunder in the late 1960s. After the civil rights revolution became public policy, many assumed that there would be "statistical equality" between whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in all categories from family income levels to loan-acceptance rates. Needless to say, this did not happen during the heady days of the civil rights revolution. Even in the year 2000, this equality still has yet to occur. The only explanation, according to activists, is systematic racism. It would be nearly impossible for Americans to believe that - nearly 50 years after the Brown decision - we still live in a systemically racist society. But that is precisely the rhetoric that is force-fed to the American public. Mr. Sowell, on the other hand, states that discrimination does not explain the statistical variance. For example, Asian-Americans outperform Anglo-Americans on virtually everything from SAT scores to PhDs. Surely no one would claim that American society discriminates against whites in favor of Asians. We must take other factors into account if we are to explain this mystery. Family size, age, educational courses chosen, and savings rates are just some of the myriad ways that our races distinguish themselves. When we control these factors, there is absolutely no divergence between the races. An African-American male and an Asian-American male of the same age, with the same education, in the same occupational field earn the same amount of money. The same is true of Hispanic men and white men. Incredibly, these statistics have been consistent since the 1960s when America was still supposedly a "racist" country. Of course, there were racists in the 1960s just like there are racists today. But Mr. Sowell points out that our nation is - contrary to the conventional wisdom- remarkably color-blind. This would shock most Americans initially but is largely consistent with daily experience. The vast majority of Americans are not racist and would resist the suggestion that they are secretly prejudiced. Mr. Sowell's studies reflect this hidden truth. The author also makes important points concerning the feminist movement. Once you control for all other factors, a man and woman earned the same income during the 1960s, even before the feminist movement. Men and women still earn the same paycheck today, even amidst the whirlwind concerning "pay inequality." If there is a moral to Mr. Sowell's story it is that the original civil rights movement has become a hideous deformation of itself. The original movement was fought for the right reasons - equality before the law - and was remarkably successful as these statistics reveal. But - like most revolutions - this one didn't know when to quit. The political goal of "equality of opportunity" became perverted into "equality of results." The prescription of affirmative action, largely unnecessary, has only alienated the vast white majority and did nothing to close the quality-of-life gap between whites and blacks (crime, drug use, single-parent families, etc.) On the other hand, it has certainly fattened the wallets and enhanced the profiles of public figures who make a healthy living denouncing the racism of American institutions, bullying private corporations, and winning elections. In their hearts, most Americans - white, black, Asian, and Hispanic - suspect that these activists are wrong. This book will solidify their conclusions and renew their pride in our multicultural and progressive society.

Although written 20 years ago, Thomas Sowell's book about the Civil Rights Movement reads like it was penned last month. Unlike many academics that simply take social policy at face value and support any policy that sets out to help, Economist Dr. Sowell measures the success of initiatives against their purported intentions. This is a great formula for honest education, but it doesn't win many friends in academia.

Sowell demonstrates how discrimination alone does not result in poverty. He points out the success of the Chinese minority in many Asian countries where discrimination against the Chinese is written into the constitution. He also points out the many hardships put towards Jews in history and their accumulation of wealth despite the hardships.

He shows some curiosity in how striving for equal opportunity in America eventually became affirmative action. He has the same curiosity about how de-segregation became busing. He then takes a hard look at the special cases of women and blacks.

Since the book was set at the 30th anniversary of Brown v. The Board of Education and the 20th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sowell examines the conditions of education and economics before and after those important dates. He finds just the kinds of facts that will be detested by the Civil Rights industry.

Dr. Sowell concludes that Civil Rights have become an easy way to gain favor with whatever new initiative someone might design. Now everything is a Civil Right and every new plague known to man is not usually the result of a denial of Civil Rights.

The question no one but Sowell asks is how can we expect an equal outcome in the world when humans all have different experiences and abilities? His conclusion is that the Civil Rights movement was important when Jim Crow insured unfair treatment, but now the term Civil Rights has been perverted to mean anything that gains some group or another power. In essence, the current reality of Civil Rights is, in fact, rhetoric.

You may not understand the full impact of what Civil Rights mean today if you don't read these 140 pages. It gave me a new outlook.

Sowell uses rigorous, but eminently readable logic in dispelling one affirmative action myth after another. He starts with an explanation of the unifying "vision" underlying affirmative action, then proceeds to isolate and obliterate liberal shibboleths such as the disparate impact fallacy, "comparable worth" nonsense, and many more specific points. He sometimes takes an economic perspective, as when he shows that paying a worker less than she is worth creates an economic opportunity for your competitor. Capitalistic competitive pressure is therefore an agent for equal employment opportunity. He then follows with "The Special Case Of Blacks", and "The Special Case of Women", where he deals specifically with Black and Female civil rights issues. Finally, what is best about this book, and what sets it apart from most other Affirmative Action tomes, is that it is neither overly academic or legalistic. However, it is uncompromisingly empirical, unforgivingly objective, and unabashedly candid. Lastly, and this it what makes it a 10 on my scale, is that it is simply "one good read"!

Sowell, yet again, displays remarkable skill crafting what is probably the best short work on contemporary discrimination, civil rights and racial and ethnic differences. It is wonderfully rational and empirical in an age where discussion of the topic is more likely to result in irrational anger and appeals to emotional rather than logical arguments. He is a wonderful purveyor of the great maxim: "Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it."

Thank God we still have rational, thoughtful voices such as Sowell's in our current wilderness of political emtionalism.

In Civil Rights, Sowell looks at the effectiveness of civil rights legislation. He looks at how ethnic minorities have been able to suceed without civil rights legislation and how civil rights legislation and other legislation designed to help minorities such as minimum wage laws have not been as helpful as the designers have planned. Also Sowell looks at how civil rights legislation has expanded beyond provided equal opportunity to such programs as affirmative action and busing which have had questionable success. He also looks at such factors as the quality of education received and cultural attributs of ethnic groups across borders to help explain differances such as how ethnic Germans have higher rates of professional jobs then Hispanics not only in the United States but Hispanic countries as well and overseas Chinese have dominated science and engineering in several countries.

Probably the best part of the book is Sowell's conclusion where he tries to debuke his critis and those that misterpret his views such as those saying that eliminating differences in IQ and education between ethnic groups would automatically eliminate economic differances but factors such as quality of education and choice of careers play important roles as well.

If you just read one book by Thomas Sowell, then read this. It is a short 140 pages, but still sustains the case that "There is neither evidence nor pretense of evidence for the proposition that all groups are prepared to make the same sacrifices to achieve the same ends." In other words: culture matters.

Sowell begins by documenting the differences in outcomes between cultural groups. Chinese only make up five percent of the population of Malaysia, but they are about twice as wealthy as Malaysians (page 20). Furthermore, Chinese have achieved this despite being the victims of institutional discrimination that is actually written into the Malaysian Constitution. The Malaysian government also has an affirmative action program comparable to what we have in America. But after a decade there has been no effect; Chinese still are about twice as wealthy (page 111). You cannot attribute this to under enforcement since Malays make up the vast majority of the population and the Chinese are only a small minority.

The success of the Chinese is no accident. They work hard. In the lower classes, Chinese did most of the work in mining and industrial occupations. They were later imported to South Africa to do similar work, but were then expelled because white workers could not compete. Most rickshaw pullers in Siam were Chinese because the Siamese would not stoop to doing that work. In Bangkok the Chinese were known for waking the earliest and working the longest hours. In the United States, Chinese workers did much of the railroad construction; it is rough, physical work that Whites typically refused (page 27). At the higher socioeconomic classes, Chinese are disproportionately likely to engage in fields with rigorous mathematical demands such as engineering and the hard sciences. Chinese outnumber Malays eight to one in science and fifteen to one in engineering. Similar patterns are found in the United States.

This pattern is not unique to the Chinese. Jews have outperformed the native populations just about everywhere. This is also true of Armenians in the Middle East and Africa, and Italians in Argentina (page 20), and German farmers in the United States (page 47). (In Race and Culture: A World View Sowell provides many other examples such as the Gujaratis from India).

Sowell then concentrates on the role of blacks in the United States. The "equality of opportunity" civil rights movement (not to be confused with "equality of outcomes" movement that employees income redistribution) has been meaningful and profound. For example, college educated black males with six years of work experience have seen their earnings rise from 75% of whites to 98% of whites (page 52). In 1969, the economist Richard Freeman examined black and white homes with comparable rates of library cards and magazines, as well as for comparable schooling, and found no difference in earnings (page 80). This was before programs like affirmative action were put into place. In 1984, blacks of West Indian descent earn 94% of what whites make, compared to 62% for blacks as a whole (page 77). This is hard to reconcile with racism; a racist does not care about the about the cultural background of someone with dark skin. In a similar vein, married, two-income black couples make slightly more than comparable white couples (page 52). College educated black males with six years of work experience make 98% of what comparable whites make.

The "equality of outcomes" civil rights movement has not been effective. From 1969 to 1984, earnings for Puerto-Ricans, Mexicans-Americans, and blacks all slightly declined (page 51).

Another section of the book focuses on civil rights for women. At the time the book's publishing in 1984, women only made 59% of what men made. But that pay gap does not withstand scrutiny. Never-married women made 91% of what comparable never-married men made (page 92). And the remaining nine percent difference should not be put on discrimination because at higher levels of education women are less likely to pursue high paying technical careers in engineering and the sciences. At lower levels women are less likely to pursue (or be physically suited to) high paying work in construction, mining, and other physically demanding fields. Finally, single women who become mothers will have to make tradeoffs at work that will affect their earnings. This is shown by the fact that even in 1971, women who stayed single into their 30's and worked continuously had higher incomes than comparable men (page 93). The conclusion is that marriage allows men to work hard because their wives take on a disproportionate share of the housework and childrearing. But marriage and childrearing causes women to work less. Even when women reenter the workforce, their skills have become partially obsolete, and thus they receive lower pay.

Finally, it should be noted that racism without institutional oppression is self-defeating. Racist attitudes in the early 20th century caused Japanese to get lower pay than whites. But as it became clear that the Japanese worked harder, that trend actually reversed and Japanese became more highly paid than whites (page 114). Paying whites more money put farmers with white workers at a competitive disadvantage. It was either hire Japanese, or go out of business. The biding war for Japanese labor stopped when Japanese were paid their fair wage - more than whites. When profits collide with racism, profits usually win. This is why racists usually seek to put their attitudes into law. That way you can stop people from backsliding and paying Japanese more money to lure them away from their current job. The same principle applies to discrimination against women. Hiring men would nearly double the cost of labor. Someone who is either less sexist (or more profit-driven) could make a killing by hiring women at almost half the price. Paying men above and beyond their market rate is the fast track to bankruptcy.

Another book that I would recommend is The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by James Q. Wilson. It directly tackles the research showing the primary cause of poverty is the breakdown of marriage. Also consider No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning

This work was written over twenty years ago yet it remains as relevant as ever, which is either a testament to Sowell's genius or it's a sad indicator of how little we've moved towards becoming a color-blind society.

The Civil Rights movement is arguably the most important social movement in the history of the U.S. Sowell's mission is to examine its vision, question its assumptions and assess its results. In his typical iconoclastic fashion Sowell parses through the conjecture dispelling myths, shedding light on why many of the promises of the movement have yet come to fruition.

One of Sowell's main points is that discrimination is not the sole explanation for differences between groups. In addition Sowell explains how the movement ran into problems when it shifted its focus from fighting for equal opportunity to equality of results.

Sowell jam packs wisdom and head hurting logic in this slim volume. This work is highly recommended for anyone who not only wants to understand the major events and ideas of this social movement, but also wants a perspective free from the usual dogma and colorful rhetoric.

This book gives a good look into the misconceptions that many people have about the Civil Rights movement. Sowell keeps his examples simple and easy to follow. Anyone who reads this book will come away with a better understanding of what the Civil Rights movement was all about. What makes this book even better is the reader will come away with a better understanding of how the topic of Civil Rights is often manipulated for political gain.

When heavy artillery is needed in the fight against collectivist propaganda, then it's time to wheel out Thomas Sowell. Now in his late seventies, this distinguished economist and political philosopher has devoted much of his career to combating the myths of political correctness.

A prime example is his 1984 book, "Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality." In this monument to common sense, Sowell examines the disastrous turn in the American civil rights movement from equality of opportunity to equality of results.

Equality of opportunity is represented by the landmark 1954 lawsuit, Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in the public schools. The spirit of equal opportunity also was present in the formulation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sowell brings several examples of Congressional sponsors of the bill (such as Hubert Humphrey) assuring their colleagues and the public that the legislation would not introduce quotas, preferences, or any other results-oriented mandate. The only target was to be intentional discrimination, and the burden of proof would be on the complainant.

It did not take long, however, before the Supreme Court began its crusade to re-introduce racial considerations into education and other spheres of American life. In the 1968 case of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, the Court ruled that a Virginia school district was in violation of the Brown decision because its schools were still either predominantly white or predominantly black--even though families now had the choice of sending their children to any school they desired. In other words, racial barriers had been dismantled, and equal opportunity was in force.

But the results of the school district's new rules were not in keeping with the vision of Brown, said the Court. And thus the decision in Green paved the way for that great social catastrophe, the forced busing of children to achieve racial balance.

Three years later, in 1971, we witness the advent of quotas, as the Department of Labor issued "goals and timetables" to

"'increase materially the utilization of minorities and women'...Employers were required to confess to 'deficiencies in the utilization' of minorities and women whenever statistical parity could not be found in all job classifications, as a first step toward correcting this situation. The burden of proof--and remedy--was on the employer. 'Affirmative action' was now decisively transformed into a numerical concept, whether called 'goals' or 'quotas'."

This approach was soon rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court in the Weber case, in which the Civil Rights Act was stretched and distorted to allow affirmative action as we now know it.

All of this, asserts Sowell, was latent from the outset in the "civil rights vision of the world," which interprets statistical disparity as the work of discrimination and various "root causes." According to this view, the so-called under-representation of blacks (or women or Hispanics or the victim group du jour) in a given domain is ipso facto evidence of discrimination, regardless of the intent of the authority in question. If a department of physics at a major university does not have a single black faculty member, then racism is lurking somewhere, even if no qualified black person ever submitted a resume.

Sowell thoroughly deconstructs the madness behind this obsession with statistical disparity and its endless harvest of victim claims. Aggregate statistics on income prove nothing about underlying causes. An ethnic group can be poor in conditions of complete equality, or well-to-do in conditions of extreme adversity. The émigré Chinese communities are a classic case. Says Sowell:

"Throughout southeast Asia, for several centuries, the Chinese minority has been--and continues to be--the target of explicit, legalized discrimination in various occupations, in admission to institutions of higher learning, and suffers bans and restrictions on land ownership and places of residence...Yet in all these countries, the Chinese minority--about 5 percent of the population in southeast Asia--owns a majority of the nation's total investments in key industries...In Malaysia, where the anti-Chinese discrimination is written into the Constitution, is embodied in preferential quotas for Malays in government and private industry alike, and extends to admissions and scholarships at the universities, the average Chinese continues to earn twice the income of the average Malay."

Sowell also tackles the myth that women are underpaid and targets of discrimination in the workplace. When all the feminist hype is stripped away, we see that women are paid the same wages for the same work. True, women on average earn less then men, but this is due to (a) their greater tendency to work part-time; (b) interruptions in career due to the demands of motherhood; and (c) type of chosen profession.

If we compare apples to apples, that is, men who have never married to women who have never married,

"...an entirely different picture emerges. Women who remain single earn 91 percent of the income of men who remain single, in the age bracket from 25 to 64 years old. Nor can the other 9 percent automatically be attributed to employer discrimination, since women are typically not educated as often in such highly paid fields as mathematics, science, and engineering...This virtual parity in income between men who never marry and women who never marry is not a new phenomenon, attributable to affirmative action. In 1971, women who had remained unmarried into their thirties and who had worked since high school earned slightly higher incomes than men of the very same description. In the academic world, single women who received their Ph.D.'s in the 1930s had by the 1950s become full professors slightly more often than male Ph.D.'s as a whole."

A particularly biting testament against the travesty of affirmative action comes from Sowell's own personal experience. In the book's epilogue, he answers his critics. One of their many attacks is that Sowell (who is black) allegedly benefited in his own career from affirmative action. The fact that a scholar of Sowell's stature must rebut such a demeaning slander is a chilling reminder of the extent to which the apostles of the victim industry--from Supreme Court Justice William Brennan to Senator Barack Obama--have polluted American culture with their intellectual dross.

We can only sigh with Thomas Sowell as he writes:

"If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many Americans so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever."