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Intellectuals and Race by [Thomas Sowell]

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Thomas Sowell

Intellectuals and Race Kindle Edition

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Thomas Sowell's incisive critique of the intellectuals' destructive role in shaping ideas about race in America

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light.

The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras.

Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence -- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism.

In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.

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March 12, 2013
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Lamenting the tendency toward one-dimensional analysis of race status in the U.S., Sowell explores the various perspectives that intellectuals have brought to race on how racial groups have affected and been effected by the sociopolitics of their era. He analyzes the early twentieth-century notions of genetic determination, or biology as destiny, which evolved into the eugenics movement and the foundation of Nazism, and he juxtaposes this with the late twentieth-century intellectual assessment of discrimination as the dominant cause of race status. Sowell digs beneath the intellectual arguments to offer more nuanced and complex consideration of attitudes on race and racism. For example, he notes that white project dwellers in Britain “act out” in ways similar to those of black American ghetto dwellers and that, at the turn of the twentieth century, black northerners were not segregated until the arrival of southern black migrants, whom they criticized nearly as much as whites did. Through myriad other observations, Sowell analyzes the significance of class in perspectives on race and considers how intellectuals themselves are driven to their positions. --Vernon Ford --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

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"Sowell brings an all-too-rare perspective to whatever he writes about -- that of a conservative black intellectual, especially valuable for this book's topic."―Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

"After reading Dr. Thomas Sowell's latest book, Intellectuals and Race, one cannot emerge with much respect for the reasoning powers of intellectuals, particularly academics, on matters of race. There's so much faulty logic and downright dishonesty."―New American

"I plunged into Thomas Sowell's latest book, Intellectuals and Race, immediately upon its arrival, but soon realized that I needed to slow down. Many writers express a few ideas with a great cataract of words. Sowell is the opposite. Every sentence contains at least one insight or fascinating statistic -- frequently more than one."―Mona Charen, Creator'sSyndicate --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00BAH8D6K
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (March 12, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 12, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 440 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 194 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #348,939 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #45 in Minority Studies
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Patrick L Boyle

Wrong on the Big Points but Interesting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 10, 2013

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I liked this book although it presents bad arguments and reaches wrong conclusions.

There are any number of anti-racists writing books today. But three of them are real scholars as well as best selling authors:
* Steven Jay Gould
* Jared Diamond
* Thomas Sowell

Gould is dead now but he still has many books in print. Diamond is very popular and honored. He not only has won a Pulitzer Prize but his books have been the basis of TV shows. Thomas Sowell is the darling of conservatives and is black.

I have read the last three big best sellers by Diamond. I can't remember how many books by Sowell and Gould I've read but quite a few. I read these guys because they are all excellent writers and their books tend to be packed with facts.

Gould was a paleontologist specializing in snails. He was a self proclaimed Marxist. He wrote a popular science column for years. His main topics were evolution - a field in which he made major contributions - and race issues - a field in which he lied and deceived. Unlike the other two, Gould can not be trusted.

Diamond is an academic geographer, a cultural anthropologist and a bird watcher. He is a good honest academic scholar and a reliable witness although most of his major conclusions are IMHO wrong.

Sowell is a semi-retired and politically active economist. He is attacked because he is a black conservative but in general is well respected and his work is trustworthy albeit wrong on racial issues.

I bring these other writers up because Sowell seems to adopt some of the stratagems and methods of Gould and Diamond.

Why did I read so many of Gould's books? Because he is a very entertaining writer. His principal stylistic ploy is to write extended historical anecdotes. He often recounts how some Victorian had such and such to say about Darwin. Only after he has hooked the reader with his colorful history lesson does he relate it to the actual subject at hand and give you his take on the issue.

Sowell applies a similar method when he describes the careers of eminent but nowadays obscure intellectuals. For example he tells us about the race opinions of Osborn (of the Osborn-Cope Dinosaur Wars). He tells us the politics of a number of nineteenth and early twentieth century writers and scientists. It seems that a century ago everyone had ideas on race and were as yet unguarded in their expression. They were almost all what we would call today racists.

Sowell's intention seems to be to discredit intellectuals, but he succeeds more in discrediting modern racial attitudes. Gould used to describe some early scientist's ideas and include their personal adherence to some now obsolete ideas in order to discredit the person in question. For example he might tell how a prominent 19th century anti-Darwinist was also a believer in spiritualism. Sowell does something like this but less personally.

Sowell gives many examples of people like H. L. Mencken saying blacks are inferior in very candid language. He documents that a century ago at the height of the Progressive and the Eugenics movement every intellectual believed blacks to be inferior. Sowell seems to think this is an indictment against intellectuals but it's just as easy to interpret these quotations as indictment of blacks. Every intellectual was a racist back then. Sowell interprets this fact as proof that intellectuals can be wrong and we should not be too eager to trust them. He comes down hard on sociologists but seems to be rather kinder to economists. I share Sowell's contempt for sociology, but maybe the universal racism then means that the best minds had long ago figured out the correct take on race issues and that the new liberalism that swept in in the sixties just suppressed ancient truths.

Another example is his treatment of anti-Semitism and anti-Irish attitudes of long ago. He presents anecdotes as to how intellectuals of the past fought against the immigration of Jews because they were so stupid and the Irish because they were so ill behaved. That was certainly true, but the remarkable fact for most modern readers is that Jews are certainly not stupid today nor are the Irish all out of control drunks and violent criminals as they once were. If the Jews were ever really stupid - a doubtful notion - they certainly have made progress. The Irish were undoubtedly disagreeable and undesirable but are also not so now. The real race question today is why are blacks so stupid and criminal. Why if every other group has improved, have blacks not also done so?

Diamond's method is to explain away modern day national and racial disparities as being merely the result of random geographical and ecological conditions. Sowell does much the same thing for much the same reason.

Jared Diamond is famous for his assertion that white Westerners are no better inherently than the darker equatorial people. They were just lucky to get guns, survive germs and use steel first. Much of that head start he attributes to the simple geographical fact that Asia is a wide continent and Africa and the Americas are more tall narrow continents. There is something to this idea but it is never presented in a quantitative fashion. So it is impossible to say how relevant it is.

I first read this idea in one of Sowell's books but Diamond now is identified with the argument. The idea is that innovations like domesticated animals and plants spread easily across the same latitude but only with difficulty from north to south. So plants that first were cultivated in Mesopotamia spread rapidly to the east and the west. But not so quickly up and down the Americas or Africa. Innovations from the Fertile Crescent were soon in China and Europe but it took much longer for them to spread to the Cape of Good Hope.
Both Sowell and Diamond argue that Africa doesn't have many good harbors of navigable rivers. Sowell mentions the Tsetse Fly. All this is true of course but was it decisive or merely contributory? As an economist and an economic historian Sowell knows the history of the Industrial Revolution. England had iron, coal, and harbors. So it soon got steam power and railroads too. These factors gave it its head start - no question. But other nations have subsequently caught up. The relevant revolution for the race question would be at least the Neolithic revolution and probably earlier. Iraq was the site where the Neolithic Revolution began. They had a tremendous head start at one point but have not kept it. Early initial advantages of geography and water transport are also likely to fade with time. The same is true for domesticated animals. Horses were introduced to the rest of the world from the Ukraine or Southern Russia. They had a big impact like the Hyksos invasion of Egypt but that advantage faded when the Egyptians also learned how to make chariots and breed horses. Almost all technological innovations only impart advantages in the short run so it's hard to believe in many explanations that rely on long standing differences.

Africa is relatively isolated from the Middle East by the Sahara desert as Sowell writes - but so is Japan. If Japan is only half as far from the cradle of civilization as South Africa all things considered, we would still expect less of a civilizational difference. Japan had a complex stone architecture a thousand years ago. No African group ever managed to build so much as a square cut rock wall before Western contact. The difference in cultural level is just too large for the kind of weak geographical effects that Sowell and Diamond offer up as an explanation.

Races are known to have split off from the African root stock more than 100,000 years ago. This is plenty long enough for environmental differences to be reflected in genetic differences. It is true that if you cast your grain on good land you will get more grain than if you cast it on poor soil. But if the soil is too dry after awhile you will get grain adapted to dry conditions. Similarly those peoples who happened by chance to land in a favorable region eventually evolved to maximize their advantage. After a few thousand years the qualities of the environment become reflected in the genes of the inhabitants.

So time is a factor. If Africa is inimical to human development that can explain why Africans lag other races who happened to have been luckier. But over a longer period bad conditions must lead to bad or inferior people. The poor conditions and geography argument can excuse or explain African primitiveness in the short run but from a longer perspective they prove just the opposite. Poor conditions leads to poor people.

Human development history isn't really all that mysterious anymore. Sowell seems to deliberately trying to obfuscate many of the issues. For example he cites early Muslims who commented that the further north one went the lighter the skin and the more primitive the people. Sowell makes it sound as if the most advanced peoples were randomly found over time and space. But that's not true.

Australian Aborigines have never had a high civilization. At one time Italy was more advanced than Sweden or Germany. Today that's reversed. True, but not a mystery. The explanation is simple. Northern races are more intelligent but civilization began in the south - specifically the Middle East. The Neolithic Revolution advances proceeded across Europe at about a mile a year. It went through Greece. Then Rome and then France, Holland, Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia. When Greece was at its height Rome was a village. When Rome was at it's height France was primitive and Germany more so. But Rome rose higher than Greece just as France rose higher than Rome once they had assimilated the new cultural innovations. Japan before Perry was a backward nation but caught up very quickly. Japan has a very intelligent population and a very advanced industrial infrastructure. They have surpassed Britain but they hadn't in 1840. Once all these technology trends have finished and everyone has absorbed modern technology, we still have differences but now those differences are now mostly racial.

6 people found this helpful

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Warren G

A must-read on the topic of Race.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 15, 2013

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Let me start with a quick word of warning: "Most, but not all, of these chapters first appeared in a special section on race that was added to the revised edition of a much larger and more sweeping study, Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition . Here I have belatedly taken the advice of my research assistant Na Liu, and published these chapters in a separate book for those who wish to focus on racial issues, rather than take on the larger and more time-consuming task of traveling on a more sweeping journey across the landscape of intellectuals' influences on issues ranging from economics to law to war and peace." So, if you have bought, or plan to read, the revised edition of I&S, then you may not feel the need to purchase this book separately, although there are some chapters in this book which are not in I&S.

That said, I have only read one other book by Thomas Sowell - Dismantling America: and other controversial essays . Overall, I was not too terribly impressed or swayed by much of what I read there. I did find myself however in agreement with the things Mr. Sowell had to say here in this book, Intellectuals and Race. I have read quite a bit in regards to race and all that goes with that. Some of the books which go into a great deal more detail, but also coincide with the general gist of this book, are: Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others , Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind , Us and Them: The Science of Identity , Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress , The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It from Itself , and Cultural Differences in a Globalizing World .

In essence, you may agree or disagree with Sowell's premise, but I believe the general sweep of history supports his contentions, which this excerpt from Chapter 4 roughly conveys: "Although economic and social inequalities among racial and ethnic groups have attracted much attention from intellectuals, seldom today has this attention been directed primarily toward how the less economically successful and less socially prestigious groups might improve themselves by availing themselves of the culture of others around them, so as to become more productive and compete more effectively with other groups in the economy. When David Hume urged his fellow eighteenth-century Scots to master the English language, as they did, both he and they were following a pattern very different from the pattern of most minority intellectuals and their respective groups in other countries around the world. The spectacular rise of the Scots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - eventually surpassing the English in engineering and medicine, for example - was also an exception, rather than the rule. A much more common pattern has been one in which the intelligentsia have demanded an equality of economic outcomes and of social recognition, irrespective of the skills, behavior or performance of the group to which they belong or on whose behalf they spoke. In some countries today, any claim that intergroup differences in outcomes are dismissed by the intelligentsia as false "perceptions," "prejudices," or "stereotypes," or else are condemned as "blaming the victim." Seldom are any of these assertions backed up by empirical evidence or logical analysis that would make them anything more than arbitrary assertions that happen to be in vogue among contemporary intellectual elites." In sum, I think that both the historical analysis and global perspective which Sowell uses work together to support the idea that indigenous cultural differences (as opposed to genetic or discriminatory explanations) go further in explicating why certain minority groups excel, or flounder, in the presence of majority cultures. I would certainly recommend this book as worthy for anyone to read.

112 people found this helpful

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James Sell

A brilliant, well argued “mythbusting”

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 8, 2015

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By “intellectuals”, Sowell means people whose work begins and ends by creating or disseminating ideas that are not supported by factual evidence. They judge their ideas by whether they “sound good to other intellectuals or resonate with the public”. Intellectuals therefore differ from scientists, whose work often also begins and ends by creating or disseminating ideas, but these have to be supported by factual evidences on which their peers will base their judgment.

His main thesis is that, although African-Americans have clearly been subject to intense “racial discrimination” in the past and are still now subjected to both positive and, to a far lesser extent, negative discrimination, “racial discrimination” is NOT the main cause of the current differences in performance between blacks and other ethnic groups – contrary to what most intellectuals claim “without a spec of evidence”.

He furthermore shows that these differences are largely due to other causes, the main one being cultural differences, especially the current culture of victimhood, resentment and grievance that intellectual’s ideologies of “racial discrimination” have promoted inside black communities.

Sowell provides many factual evidences supporting his thesis, such as many cases worldwide where subgroups have underperformed in the clear absence of “racial discrimination”, or where subgroups clearly subjected to “racial discrimination” have outperformed the ruling group.

He shows how African-Americans’ performance has overall deteriorated since the advent of the civil right movements and the outlawing of “racial discrimination” against them, and how affirmative action has globally been detrimental to African-Americans achievements.

Throughout his book, his arguments are well supported by numerous references to reputable sources, although many of them are rather old. My only two (minor) criticisms are:
(a) At a few places, some facts are not sufficiently developed to fully support his arguments.
(b) In chapter 5 “Race and Intelligence”, he develops at length some convincing arguments against the heredity hypothesis, but fails to even mention any of the arguments supporting it. However, he courageously takes the defence of the book “The Bell Curve” against “the firestorm among the intelligentsia” that it ignited for suggesting a genetic origin to some of the interracial IQ differences.

27 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

Empirically dispels many of the presuppositions concerning race

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 7, 2019

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Empirically dispels many of the presuppositions concerning race, through providing historical accounts and experiences of race and constructing a powerful argument that will be very insightful for the objective reader, who is willing to lay their emotions aside to focus on the evidence.

As is typical with Thomas Sowell, he provides a thorough, objective and relatively easy to read piece of research which I believe will be interesting for every demographic of readers, given the ethnographic breadth and depth of the book.

I would certainly recommend reading this as well as opposing arguments to come to your own conclusion, that is what true critical thinking is about.

6 people found this helpful

D. A. R. Williams

Co

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 25, 2018

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This is an excellent book that explores issues of race from recent historical times to the present day. The problems that contemporary Western societies have with race can be traced to discredited and devisive political and intellectual arguments put forward by Progressive politics of the late 19th century and to further dogmatic theories of discrimination pursued by so-called Intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century.
Sowell's work is very well researched and eminently readable. All aspiring politicians should read this.

3 people found this helpful

Jeff Tillett

Buy it and never ever lend it.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 11, 2021

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Thomas Sowell the greatest living philosopher. If there are any of his books that you do not own, don't let this be one of them. Get the hardback because it is one that will be handed down to your grand children's grand children.

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