Sowell the Great

“I felt like a thirsty man gulping down a glass of cool water. Here was a black man who was saying what I thought – and not behind closed doors, either but in the pages of a book that had just been reviewed in a national newspaper. Never before had I seen my views stated with such crisp, unapologetic clarity: the problems faced by blacks in America would take quite some time to solve, and the responsibility for solving them would fall largely on black people themselves. It was far more common in the seventies to argue that whites, having caused our problems, should be responsible for solving them instantly, but while that approach was good for building political coalitions and soothing guilty white consciences, it hadn’t done much to improve the daily lives of blacks. Sowell’s perspective, by contrast, seemed old-fashioned, outdated, even mundane – but realistic. It reminded me of the mantra of the Black Muslims I had met in college: Do for self, brother. Now I began to see more clearly why they had impressed me. Though their religion was starkly different from the Catholicism of my youth, their unswerving belief in self-reliance wasn’t so far removed from Daddy’s way of thinking, and you didn’t have to go along with their racial separatism – I didn’t, then or later – to know that blacks could never hope to improve their lives until they took responsibility for them.”

– Clarence Thomas in “My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir” describing his reaction to an excerpt from Thomas Sowell’s “Race and Economics” in Michael Novak’s review of the book in the Wall Street Journal

Until Black people start thinking of themselves as unique “persons” and made so, like all men, with care and love by their Creator, and not reduce their worth by self-identifying merely as just part of a “community” or a group of similarly-pigmented people, and thus gain respect for them selves, which in turn generates responsibility…their broken “inner city” culture will start to mend itself, keeping the good aspects and rejecting what is so self-destructive. Then and only then will they find freedom from the oppressive “victimhood” mentality that is like a cancer, and a barrier to their well being.Then they will realize that the government is not the cure but the roadblock to their freedom and happiness.

Disagree. The problem with the political culture of the black population is that the data from mundane life doesn’t much influence their understanding (such as it is) of civic and historical matters abstract from mundane life. It gives rise to bad conventions (voting Democratic reflexively) and makes them easy meat for race hustlers. Race hustlers are almost entirely drawn from the black bourgeoisie and are very commonly drawn from that portion thereof on the patronage of the white chatterati. We’d have fewer race hustlers if they weren’t subsidized by public agencies and philanthropies abusing their discretion. A great deal of the political / historical kultursmog in and among blacks is promoted by the white chatterati through classroom and media propaganda.

As for the abnormal problems blacks experience in mundane life, a great deal of that can be attributed to an element of black culture that only Edward Banfield alluded to: short time horizons. It leads to ill considered sexual encounters, ill considered domestic disruption, and overspending one’s income. This may gradually improve from one generation to the next (or it may not; it hasn’t in the larger society).