THE CASE OF THE BLACK CONSERVATIVE
Watts, Jerry G.
Though blacks have felt they were under assault since July 4, 1776, they have also felt most of the time that progress, however slow and uneven, was inevitable. Next to Reconstruction, the...
...The recent election of Ronald Reagan and the growing influence of conservatism have reinforced the feeling that black progress is a notion that has come and gone...
...After having attended elite graduate schools, they were forced to teach at academically inferior black colleges while their white graduateschool peers enjoyed the prestige, intellectual status, and research facilities of elite white institutions...
...It is now clear that Reagan was so thoroughly unconcerned about the response of black America to his domestic cutbacks that he didn't even attempt to use a "house nigger...
...He has become the "anti-Affirmative Action" Affirmative Action black...
...Yet those who called for the "Death of White Sociology" never supplied an intellectual defense for their demand...
...Here Sowell had found allies...
...Except for rare occasions, blacks have been forced to view education as a means to economic mobility...
...My hunch is that they will fall decidedly closer to the latter...
...Horace Mann Bond (Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel...
...To be a scholar was "bourgeois...
...Regardless of how I got in, I had to pass the same courses as everyone else in order to get out...
...Intraethnic color hatred is not one of black America's main problems today, for reasons that have much to do with the black nationalist movements of the '60s...
...The competition, according to Sowell, would raise the quality of education...
...But then came the '60s and the era of black militancy...
...Edwards claimed that "the conforming Negro" was the only student concerned with academic achievement...
...As Noam Chomsky pointed out in his critique of intellectuals who served in the Kennedy administration, once affiliated with power an intellectual inevitably abdicates his responsibility to "tell the truth...
...Ira Reid at Haverford...
...This journey is all too common among intellectual members of "oppressed" ethnic groups...
...Unlike some of my leftist peers, I can't yield to an apocalyptic belief that a socialist revolution, whatever that is, would solve all, or even most, problems...
...However, the fact that he grew up poor in Harlem and never finished high school only serves to confuse us, for we can't get rid of him by labeling him an "oreo" or "bourgeois...
...I would later discover a few who were conscientious students of jazz but wouldn't listen to Getz or Bill Evans for they had "taken our blues and gone...
...Sowell is the consummate free-market economist...
...Ironically, if American society had evolved according to Sowell's free-market vision, we might have heard Marx's footsteps...
...Unlike Sowell, I won't allow my ethnicity to compartmentalize my mind ethically...
...There have always been numerous critics of Sowell within the black intellectual community, but they have neither the intellectual status nor the necessary access to the media to effectively confront him...
...Thomas Sowell is being patronized by the same double standards that he so categorically rejects...
...Sowell has a tendency to flaunt his ego...
...Recently he has written an ambitious attempt at conservative social theorizing, Knowledge and Decision...
...His books about ethnicity are essentially compilations of raw economic data, one-dimensionally posed in behalf of an economic theory that works only on the printed page...
...Celebrity status and massmedia popularity are usually not enjoyed by these rare individuals...
...Housing shortages for Sowell are, therefore, not shortages per se but shortages caused by an overload of demand at a certain price level...
...Without a doubt, there are numerous white academic charlatans...
...One may argue, justifiably, that in criticizing academically inferior black studies departments and their instructors, Sowell and Kilson presented an overly idealized conception of academic competence within white academia...
...Sowell must have thought that he would receive support from the white intellectual establishment in defending academic standards, but none was forthcoming...
...Though he had been an apostle of Milton Friedman since his days in graduate school, the issue of black students at elite white institutions would ultimately cause him to be politicized and place him in the camp of conservative politics...
...Blacks become the angelic oppressed, and in the process are removed from any responsibility for their failures...
...At best, the Sowells in the Reagan camp could be innovative policy-makers around issues concerning black America...
...In addition, Sowell attacks the black middle classes, which are, ironically, the only strata among blacks who could remotely believe they would benefit from the policies Sowell advocates...
...Association with power is a heady tonic that can conceal intellectual ambivalence...
...But Sowell is unwilling even to admit the existence of the problems...
...Charles Drew, the discoverer of blood plasma...
...When the Reagan transition team leaked news that it was considering Sowell for a cabinet post, Thomas I. Atkins, general counsel of the NAACP, stated, We would view with considerable concern the appointment of Tom Sowell to HUD or, for that matter, to any other cabinet position . . . . He would play the same kind of role that historically the house niggers played for the plantation owners...
...Sowell believes that the path to a long-run solution to black America's ills depends on the ability of blacks to obtain private-sector jobs in a stable economy...
...In April 1969 protesting black students occupied a university building and subsequently armed themselves...
...Sowell, on the other hand, was less concerned about the militancy of black Cornell students than with the response of the Cornell administration...
...Whites feared being called racist and black faculty stood to benefit...
...What must have impressed him was their individual initiative and ultimate success in the face of far greater obstacles than confront blacks now...
...Sowell, an economist by training, does not grasp the social-psychological aspects of culture, particularly American culture...
...He certainly spends enough time writing about free-market solutions to problems confronting the poor blacks...
...Yet the "instant" quantitative inclusion of blacks in white academia may well have undermined long-run qualitative performance...
...In assessing the response of liberal white academics to second-class black studies departments, it has often been suggested that they were expressing either guilt or racism...
...Yet some of these black scholars produced first-rate scholarship...
...Do WASPS in firms that don't hire Jews, and Jews in firms that don't hire Italian-Americans, and all of these in firms that don't hire blacks feel less secure about their achievements...
...The notion that intuition derived from oppression gave blacks a sufficient understand304 ing of the nature of authority in the most advanced capitalist country was unforgivably ignorant...
...Since he is conservative, we want to question his "blackness...
...Blacks have not been allowed to complete T6nnies's journey from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft...
...But Thomas Sowell is no "house nigger...
...As time has shown, they have kept their allegiance to elitism but narrowed their definition of whom they are responsible to...
...Can it be that Sowell does not realize that had the Supreme Court not intervened in 1954, he too might still be riding in the back of the bus...
...This was demonstrated in the establishment of special programs for black students— programs less rigorous than the regular curriculum...
...Any economist who operates under the vision that Sowell entertains cannot honestly claim that the system, once implemented, will benefit the poor...
...One must critically confront Western culture, and white America in particular, without falling into a romantic celebration of "blackness...
...As for Edwards's revolutionary black students, one can only guess what has become of these degreeless revolutionaries in the aftermath of a revolution that never left the printed page...
...As far as I know, blacks who have been aided by Affirmative Action don't feel any less proud of their achievements than anyone else...
...The priorities of the Reagan's administration are such that concern for society's least well-off, white and black, is somewhere near the bottom of his list...
...It is the only variant of Affirmative Action free of negative stigma: Sowell has played this hand magnificently...
...One can only wonder why Sowell would write such things...
...and (5) the conforming Negro...
...As with the Panthers, such ignorance would cost many their lives...
...Edwards, who later rose to prominence as an interpreter of black militancy, saw these events as a generally positive assertion of black consciousness...
...The highlight of this period was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, for it was Johnson who decided that the federal government should play an active role in behalf of black interests...
...The unemployed black...
...Harry Edwards, who was at Cornell at the time, later explained that the students armed themselves in fear of attack by armed white students...
...Witness the vacillations displayed in his inability to emotionally confront the fact that the two "free" black nations of his time, Liberia and Haiti, were among the most repressive in the world...
...313...
...Insofar as blacks overwhelmingly supported Carter, Sowell must attempt to maneuver within an Administration that doesn't see itself as politically beholden to the black community...
...The same book would have been rejected out of hand if a white author had presented it...
...Allison Davis (co-author of Deep South and Children of Bondage...
...4) the anomic activist...
...Thus in his review of Sowell's book Greeley, of all people, finds it necessary to inform Sowell that the Irish immigrants had some problems and failures in coping with their new existence in America...
...There was a great deal of talk about challenging white America's interpretation of black life and history, but when it came to actually enduring the grind of scholarly research, it was Herbert Gutman who "refuted" Moynihan (and thus Frazier...
...Their support comes from the white liberals . . . and they are constantly taking positions the very opposite of the black community on crime, on quotas, on busing . . . Yet the reaction to Sowell was not surprising, for nowhere does our premodern attitude linger more than in our inability to grasp the complex interrelationship between a black intellectual and the broader ethnic group...
...Consequently there is not enough housing for the poor...
...Without such a voucher program, we are doomed to the continual decline of public education for the poor and the increased privatization of education for the middle classes...
...U.S...
...Sowell and Kilson were subsequently attacked for their defense of traditional (read, white) academic standards...
...As a result, he has created a right-wing "populist" political style...
...Sowell's need for group support as opposed to Kilson's individualism doesn't, however, adequately explain their divergence...
...Second, Sowell's Ethnic America is no more intellectually vacant than much of the nonsense Greeley has had published (for instance, Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...My problem now is that with increased learning my vision has become much more radical while those old college radicals, who should today be my allies, now ask me to meet them for dinner in restaurants I cannot afford...
...What Edwards perceived as a growing commitment on the part of black students to the black community was interpreted by Sowell and his friend Martin Kilson of Harvard University as a cathartic cop-out from the anxieties of having to compete academically...
...However, a secondary impact of racism— but one of primary concern here—is the way in which it affects psychologically and culturally the black individual...
...is recognized for its extraordinary role in developing many luminaries of the black intelligentsia...
...And I would rather see Sowell advising Reagan than a member of the Moral Majority...
...Sowell was willing to ignore the white ethnic parochialism of a Michael Novak or Norman Podhoretz, provided they were willing to support his assaults on ethnic parochialism among blacks...
...Again, as irony would have it, the black studies departments, which were seen by black students as a radical change, merely played into the hands of white academia's refusal to perceive the study of black life and art as legitimate...
...Consequently blacks are in many ways a less modern people than whites...
...The scenario appears attractive until one perceives the hidden ramifications...
...for unlike Edwards I write with a ten-year hindsight...
...Besides the fact that the posture is premodern in its defense of ascriptive insights, and thoroughly anti-intellectual, a simliar stance taken by black nationalists in the '60s was vehemently attacked by the same conservatives who now endorse it in Sowell...
...Given his own anti-Affirmative Action stance, Sowell could only endorse this change in policy, and so brought about a split within the black Reaganite camp that has yet to be mended...
...This was, as Sowell argued in Race and Economics, the only way white immigrant ethnic groups ultimately succeeded...
...Certain things, however, could not be tolerated, such as a head without an Afro or a non-Platonic relationship with "the oppressor or his woman...
...Consequently, when blacks claimed that traditional standards of academic rigor did not apply to them, numerous white liberals acquiesced...
...Sowell increases the attractiveness of conservatism to moderate whites who heretofore may have deemed it too insensitive to black concerns...
...Growing up poor in the South and later in Harlem, Sowell confronted this fundamental meaning of American racism...
...The "revolutionary" black student, we were told, didn't care about established educational criteria...
...Yet as anyone who has been associated with power realizes, only those who don't enter the fray can stand back, criticize, and appear pure...
...If they couldn't shape policies benefiting blacks within what they packaged as a sympathetic Administration, how can they attack those blacks who are linked to an Administration that owes its election to every American voting group except blacks...
...Still others are wondering how they too might corner a piece of the market Sowell has so deftly tapped...
...Greeley's attack on Sowell is instructive on several counts...
...So what...
...Herein lies a problem that ultimately makes much of what Sowell says about ethnicity overly simple-minded...
...Like previous political movements that attempted to politicize an intellectual and aesthetic realm, the black power movement spawned polemics in the name of social science, and propaganda in the name of the arts...
...I don't have the access to the depths of Sowell's mind to tell me exactly what he thinks about the Reagan presidency...
...Even the term intellectual is misunderstood in black America...
...Innovative teachers with their own educational ideas would sprout everywhere...
...Clearly they need a black to broaden their appeal...
...There is no intrinsic reason why black schools in black neighborhoods cannot be firstrate...
...Perhaps the most fascinating of all of Sowell's arguments is the one claiming that he is, in fact, the true black because he grew up in Harlem amid rats and with unsoled shoes, while those blacks who grew up in middle-class Washington, D.C...
...In the case of Sowell, his conservatism predates his association with Reagan and is, in fact, more sophisticated than Reagan's...
...In offering a counterpoint to black failure, Sowell constructs white ethnic success stories that sometimes evade fact...
...The list of controversial positions enunciated by Sowell is seemingly endless...
...Consequently one was apt to feel more guilt over being uninvolved in a big-brother program than over not receiving an A in macroeconomics...
...Nor was this the only tragedy...
...In a review of Sowell's book Ethnic America in Psychology Today (9/81), sociologist Andrew Greeley, a supporter of many of Sowell's controversial policy positions, concluded: I doubt that Basic Books would have published such a sloppy work if Sowell were not a prominent black conservative...
...They called it "our lack of exposure...
...Within the conservative intellectual community, he has been offered and willingly accepted the monopoly on discourse pertaining to blacks...
...This does not, however, prevent us from discussing the benefits that have accrued to Sowell as a result of his ties to the conservative community...
...The impact of racism on the lives of black Americans is far too complex to be addressed properly in this essay...
...Kilson, on the other hand, had always been at least a liberal, and something more...
...Busing, we are told, is another liberal policy that works to the detriment of poor blacks...
...I would suggest, moreover, that Sowell's rhetoric not be taken at face value...
...More crucial to Sowell's argument than the psychological impact of Affirmative Action are its negative economic consequences...
...The notion that the judge merely intervened to seat sandy-haired Sue next to big Bo Willie in order to insure the melting pot is beyond credence...
...It was, he argued, only reasonable to assume that racism had had some impact upon the precollege preparation of black students...
...In effect, the populace was responding to structural constrictions of the prewelfare-state, free-market economy...
...If it is true that there is an inverse correlation between the pop-market political appeal of one's work and its profundity, Sowell might as well write fairy tales...
...At lower prices, there is likely to be more demand for housing than can be supplied...
...He is the author of two studies on the history of economic thought and of numerous studies on American ethnicity...
...This isn't surprising, for though Sowell appears to possess a complex identity by virtue of his deviant stance, he is in fact the quintessential parochial American intellectual...
...Alain Locke, Arthur P. Davis, and Sterling Brown...
...The prevailing argument was that we were on white campuses only because of those black people who died in the streets...
...305 It is easy to sound self-righteous writing from Yale graduate school ten years later...
...At worst, they could do nothing...
...The task of educating the poor, inner-city black child will still remain with the public school system, only now he will "contaminate" fewer others, and there will be even less money for the job...
...The path is a lonely one, for it demands that one live on the boundary between one's particularistic self and one's universal self...
...My hunch, however, is that their response can be read as a manifestation of a wider problem...
...Nevertheless, the criticism showered upon Sowell by certain black leaders because of his affiliation with Reagan is somewhat specious...
...And existing private schools would have an incentive to raise their tuitions by the exact amount of the government-distributed voucher...
...Why does Sowell allow himself to be "used" in this manner...
...As Edwards indicated, the movement elevated the activist over the scholar...
...It wouldn't be until late in their lives that some of these black intellectuals began to receive appointments at white universities: St...
...Sowell's concern with economic efficiency allows him to justify his lack of empathy for those black children who, for whatever reason, would remain in the public schools once the educational voucher system was instituted...
...In only one instance have I seen a conservative white intellectual scornfully raise the issue of Sowell's preferential treatment...
...With the rise of the neoconservatives, Jews finally obtained prominence within the ranks of the politicized conservative intellectual community...
...Several, like historian Benjamin Quarles of Morgan State College and the classicist Frank Snowden, were undoubtedly offered jobs at white institutions but chose to remain at black colleges...
...Of the blacks around Reagan, Sowell is the most interesting...
...Sowell's arguments about lowering the minimum wage and ending rent control show the lack of a humane vision in regard to the least advantaged...
...I was admitted into Harvard College under what was certainly an Affirmative Action program...
...Shortly after Reagan's inauguration, Sowell instigated the most politically mindless attack on black middle-class leaders since the tirades of the late George Schuyler...
...However, because of his ambitions, Sowell is willing to be associated with the intellectually disreputable conservatism of the Reagan presidency...
...Though W. E. B. DuBois eloquently wrote about the duality of consciousness within ethnic pariahs in his Souls of Black Folk, he was unable to live it...
...Neither is conducive to the life of the mind...
...There have been historical moments when clusters of blacks ventured into the intellectual realm...
...Why then concern ourselves with their education...
...Sowell has ventured along a less traveled path...
...Sowell seems to forget that much of the reason behind the flight of middle-class kids from the public schools was to get away from the poor, undereducated black child...
...Furthermore, it lowers the capitalists' profit margin, causing them to expand less and that, of course, results in fewer jobs...
...Sowell writes as if this were 1944...
...In the last two decades the perceived need to be immediately relevant politically has devastated the black intellectual class...
...Rent control forces owners to rent at lower prices than they could demand if rents were left to "supply vs...
...He wants to 308 be accepted into their ranks and celebrated, but feels angry because he has not yet been...
...One obvious benefit can be seen in the increased presence of black students and faculty on white campuses...
...E. Franklin Frazier (Negro Youth at the Crossroads and The Negro Family in the United States and The Black Bourgeoisie...
...There is no American conservative today who claims to speak in behalf of the black lower classes as energetically as Sowell...
...There is a shortage of good housing for people with modest incomes...
...Not only have former white radicals like Rennie Davis and Jerry Rubin discovered that the way to change America is through security stocks, but former black militants like Thomas Jones, who once headed the Black Liberation Front at Cornell, have found "a third way," venture capital...
...Sowell argued that if black students couldn't be expected to perform on the same level as their white peers, they shouldn't be admitted...
...This argument is a carbon copy of a '60s argument and reflects now what it did then, an inability of blacks to cope with inner diversity...
...He responded, I think the NAACP are the classic house niggers...
...He could mete out the straight discipline...
...A hierarchy of private schools would come into existence based on the financial status of the parents...
...Consequently, when debating white liberals on Milton Friedman's television show, Sowell often assumes a "what can you, a white person, tell me, a black, about blacks" posture...
...Most blacks have, however, been forced to think of ideas in a utilitarian manner, for education had to be seen as a means to an end: survival...
...Second, Sowell argued that because he and his friend Walter Williams (another black free-market conservative economist in Reagan's camp) had grown up in the ghettos, they were more authentic spokesmen for blacks than such people as Pat Harris, who had grown up middle-class...
...Edwards was but one of many who tinkered with this view, elevating the thoughtless act over the thoughtful pause...
...The shrewdness of the voucher system is that it would partially subsidize the private-school education of the middle classes, for which now they receive nothing...
...Seale's Seize The Time, H. Rap Brown's Die Nigger Die, Cleaver's Soul On Ice, and the cultural nationalist writings of Ron Karenga and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) were supposed to be to us what Lenin's What Is To Be Done...
...Yet as I approach the academic job market, I must confess that my 310 less-than-stellar graduate-school transcript has me worried that I might get a job that I would not have gotten had I been white...
...Frazier, I've been told, had the unique ability to use humor as a buffer...
...Thus when all things are considered, I would rather have had an Arthur Schlesinger advising President Kennedy than some bureaucratic insider who felt no inner tension...
...Yet one of the most insistent demands echoed nationally by black students was for black studies departments, which were to be staffed by blacks who had been sufficiently bourgeois to have acquired the necessary academic credentials...
...If Reagan had wanted to legitimate himself in the black community, indeed, the last person he would have called on is Thomas Sowell...
...In attacking light-skinned blacks for what he claims is their superiority complex, Sowell has shown that he is in many ways out of touch with black people...
...3) the revolutionary...
...Yet Sowell's main function does not lie in the conversion of blacks...
...Furthermore, the federal government, the most regulated entity in America, has been the best hirer of blacks...
...The hilarious aspect of this is that Sowell has done so by writing books that celebrate the achievements of white ethnics to an extent unrivaled by anyone, including Greeley and Novak...
...Sophisticated free-market economists are at least willing to admit that rent control and the minimum wage address real problems caused by the workings of the freemarket economy...
...Sowell is an opponent of school busing, Affirmative Action, the minimum wage, rent control, and numerous other social-welfare programs that, he argues, create barriers to black social mobility and induce blacks to think they cannot succeed on their own merits...
...The most prominent is Thomas Sowell, a disciple of his former teacher, Milton Friedman, formerly of UCLA but now housed at the conservative think tank the Hoover Institute...
...The solution: the free market...
...Such works may not succeed in making Sowell respected within the scholarly community, but they have succeeded admirably outside it...
...Because blacks have historically been able to monopolize the status of victim within liberal circles...
...If blacks were willing to work for lower wages than whites, the true capitalist would have a factory full of black employees...
...When he is attacked by blacks, he lashes back in the most emotive way...
...nuances of thought become constrained by realizable policy alternatives...
...W E. B. DuBois (The Philadelphia Negro...
...Shrewd blacks have always know that the way to diffuse white skepticism about their qualifications in this era of Affirmative Action is to assume a posture of righteous indignation to what they claim is Affirmative Action's insult to their character and intelligence...
...We cannot make that assumption...
...In this system, the government would place a predetermined amount of money in the hands of any American parent who chose to send a child to a private school, and would thereby save an equal amount by not having to educate these children in the public school system...
...If it were true that Reagan's policies would help the black poor, I would still be opposed to Ronnie, for my universal self would shudder at his visions for Latin America, Africa, and Europe...
...Sowell himself was never predisposed to supporting black student militancy...
...On front pages all around the nation we saw the photographs of stern-faced young blacks leaving the occupied buildings with rifles held high and ammunition belts draped across their chests in the style of Pancho Villa...
...No matter how inhumanely administered, it would be presumed more acceptable because the hands of the disciplinarian are black...
...The notion that he is being used or even its reverse notion, that he is using conservatives, both derive from an assumption that Sowell's belief in conservative ideals is less than authentic...
...Sowell's arguments concerning the reaction of blacks to Affirmative Action are also misinformed, though not dishonest...
...Sowell certainly wouldn't turn to the polls to determine whether EXXON should be nationalized...
...Many black intellec311 tuals, stunned by this Reagan-in-blackface, are able only to muster intellectualized primal screams...
...Rayford Logan and Charles Wesley (historians...
...Why not improve the schools in black communities...
...Ironically, our inability to diversify has produced a cultural lag that views diversity as less than virtuous...
...Like most black intellectuals, he has been unable to creatively cope with the historic context in which he finds himself, that of being both black and American...
...Nevertheless, Sowell did not back off from Atkins's attack...
...Curiously, jazz, though popular, was rarely understood as the serious music it is...
...The minimum wage gives some measure of security, however small, to the most exploitable and exploited sectors of society...
...Next to Reconstruction, the period of greatest black optimism began with FDR's inauguration and ended with Nixon's...
...Charles Johnson (Shadow of the Plantation and Growing Up in the Black Belt...
...Witness those blacks we might call the "turn of the century" generation...
...As for rent control, Sowell's concern about the flooding of the housing market because of the "artificially induced" prices sidesteps the more crucial discussion of the quality of the housing offered...
...This generation produced such figures as Carter G. Woodson, the father of black history...
...Furthermore, one doesn't play one-upmanship on issues "settled" through lives lost, jail sentences, and personal disorders...
...Rites of initiation usually included nothing more than having read a little of Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and all of Malcolm's autobiography...
...This antibusing argument is so contrived that even Sowell's most sympathetic readers must question his integrity...
...As a self-professed Christian socialist, I disagree with most of the policies that Sowell advocates...
...Yet we can probably agree that its primary impact on black Americans has been to deny them access to crucial, material necessities...
...Yet there is something peculiar about this black economist who, though less than original in thought, is willing, boldly and publicly, to violate ethnic positions...
...One had taped to one's dorm walls posters of Malcolm's pointed finger, Angela D's thin face and big Afro, Huey Newton sitting in a bamboo chair with a spear in his hand...
...In 1948, E. Franklin Frazier was elected president of the American Sociological Association, the profession's highest honor awarded for contributions to the discipline, by white sociologists who could not find room for him at their institutions...
...In many cases these Jewish converts, like Irving Kristol, relinquished their scholarly ambitions in order to pursue the writing of popmarket polemics...
...graduation from college for him means little...
...It requires critical distance from black ethnicity without succumbing to assimilation...
...Perhaps he thought he would be part of a new generation that would continue this legacy...
...Sowell shows in Race and Economics that industries whose profit margins have been government-regulated, such as the telephone company, have a far worse record of hiring blacks even in unskilled areas (for instance, operators) than unregulated companies...
...Leave home, Tom...
...Why then do we have it...
...But, I ask rhetorically, is there any rational ground for arguing that a person can't be both black and conservative...
...Many blacks who are themselves intellectuals hesitate to use the term, for it carries connotations of elitism...
...Since activism brought us here, we certainly couldn't be nonactivists while we were here...
...Thus Sowell is all too baffled in attempting to explain the racism of capitalists, given the fact that racism often hurts their profit margins...
...They were, he argued, part of a long tradition that held that lightskinned blacks had more in common with whites than with darker members of their ethnic group...
...demonstrating was much more cathartic...
...But the minimum wage, Sowell argues, eliminates the bargaining power of unemployed black workers by denying them the chance to work at lower wages than whites...
...He argued that Cornell valued campus tranquillity over everything else, and in yielding to the demands of black students essentially reneged on its responsibility to educate them...
...Consequently, he must legitimate himself to conservatives while working in behalf of black interests and must legitimate himself among blacks while working in behalf of conservative interests...
...One had to be on an Ivy League campus in the late '60s and early '70s to really be aware of how many black students thought of themselves as radical...
...I neither lose sleep over it nor gaze upon my diploma with any embarrassment...
...Yet mistakes that aren't confronted are bound to be repeated...
...307 We may disagree with his prescriptions, but that he is concerned we cannot doubt...
...Ralph Ellison and J. Saunders Redding, among others, played the same role in artistic circles...
...Sowell has taken over the fiefdom previously ruled by Greeley and Michael Novak (The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics...
...Further, Sowell argues, polls show that neither blacks nor whites want busing...
...The liberal intellectual establishment decided that they would rather be popular than educate black students...
...In addition, whenever Sowell attacks light-skinned DuBois et al., he conveniently forgets that these are the same people he previously celebrated as scholarly achievers...
...The task is certainly difficult and probably impossible...
...Sowell, I choose to believe, should do likewise...
...Busing, Sowell tells us, should be abolished since polls show that neither blacks nor whites want it...
...Clair Drake at Roosevelt University and later Stanford...
...There were exceptions, such as Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Martin Duberman, Eugene Genovese, and Philip Rieff...
...Furthermore, quota programs make it increasingly difficult for those blacks who are capable of succeeding on their own to take wholehearted credit for their achievements...
...That many of this generation died in bitterness or spent their waning years as alco303 holies is hardly surprising...
...An unarmed group of white jocks had attacked the black students earlier and threatened to return armed...
...Ironically, black leaders had assumed the permanence of the welfare state and as such were perhaps the truest adherents to the "End of Ideology" thesis...
...He should certainly have realized that the task of implementing his policies could only be enhanced by the support of the traditional black political leadership, even though it is heavily Democratic...
...It is crucial to remember just how thoroughly anti-intellectual the black power movement and its spinoffs really were...
...Sowell came to intellectual maturity under the influence of this generation of black scholars...
...and Ralph Bunche (The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR...
...What these black students really wanted was the legitimacy that an Ivy League degree offered in the outside (read, white) world...
...Most would listen to pop black music but rarely to the blues...
...What Sowell refuses to tell us is that, in the absence of an economically interventionist state, we will have an interventionist state politically...
...He dissects black issues without ever casting a critical eye upon the limitations of white society...
...Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C...
...These white intellectuals were able to be politically chic while continuing their own scholarly pursuits...
...In the absence of an economically satisfied working class living under some measure of governmentinsured social security (such as unemployment compensation, welfare), how will national stability be maintained in periods of economic troubles...
...If one cannot subsist on wages earned at the workplace, why continue to work...
...Sowell's advocacy of an educational voucher system as a possible cure to the problems of inner-city black education is somewhat pathetic...
...Neither the Enlightenment nor Matthew Arnold's notion of realizing our higher humanity have found much acceptance in educated black circles...
...The typical black reaction to Thomas Sowell is a reflection of our premodern selves...
...To many of the problems confronting black America I have no answers...
...Had landlords been able to charge the market value for their housing, there would be no shortage...
...Insofar as racism inhibits the fulfillment of talent and desire, it prevents blacks from fully participating in the modern world...
...Furthermore, in a roundabout way, it is racist, for it assumes that blacks who think "differently" are not asserting their autonomy but merely acting as an intermediary for some white interest...
...The tragedy of Thomas Sowell is, in many respects, the tragedy of Afro-American intellectuals...
...This capricious attitude of the white leftist intelligentsia toward the black intelligentsia generated a disdain for the white left that remains to this day...
...had been to earlier generations of American leftists...
...Michel Fabre, a white French academic, and Irene Gendzier, a white American social scientist, wrote definitive biographies of Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon...
...Numerous private schools, established to lure away students, would compete with the public schools...
...My guess is that Sowell suffers from a love-hate relationship with the black middle class...
...In fact, one wonders if they understood the magnitude of the task...
...However, the brunt of defending academic rigor for blacks fell on the shoulders of those blacks, like Kilson and Sowell, who were bold and responsible enough to accept this burden...
...Well, at the lower rents imposed by law, many people who normally would have lived with others rented their own apartments, many got apartments larger than they could have afforded otherwise, and many who no longer needed their large apartments had little economic incentive to give them up in order to save rent...
...A few blacks, however, have surfaced as defenders of Reagan's free-market capitalism...
...The attempt by black academicians to create black sociology, black psychology, black theology, etc., can be seen as a rather shrewd way of cornering an academic market for themselves by eliminating whites from job competition...
...It seems rather clear that Greeley is upset not by Sowell's kind of scholarship but by the fact that Sowell has moved him out of the popwhite ethnic-studies market...
...It's alright for Sowell to be a conservative economist but, please, no more of this nonsense about helping the black poor...
...Thus Dunbar has little value in attempting to pose alternatives to ghetto education today...
...He tells us that there is no housing shortage...
...If so, it was a cheap ticket to sanity...
...The cause of Sowell's rise to prominence is not, however, to be found in his books...
...The chaotic response of the traditional black political leadership is largely a result of never before having had to confront an Administration so "impartially" disinterested in the plight of blacks...
...I say this not to disparage him...
...The ensuing competition between schools will increase the quality of all...
...As an undergraduate at Harvard I had been one of Edwards's "conforming Negro" students, insofar as I valued academic learning...
...demand...
...Anything that does not allow the marketplace to function as it would "naturally," he views as detrimental to black people...
...It was far easier for universities to establish Afro-American studies departments than to place blacks in traditional academic disciplines...
...Regardless of how it works in practice, which will be less ideal than the theory asserts, the poor are not the beneficiaries in the theory itself...
...q I am very grateful to Randall Kennedy, Adolf Reed, Traci West, and Robert Watts for their assistance...
...Years later these same white intellectuals would participate in the denial of tenure to black academic activists who had practiced, in the name of "the revolution," what the white left had preached—"the committed black intellectual was not to be found in the library, but in the streets...
...Nor is the thirst for power...
...Because of antidemocratic liberal courts, well-intentioned but racist white liberals who don't believe in black excellence, and black interest groups, particularly the NAACP The solution...
...That he and any other blacks who attempt critically to analyze intraethnic issues are subject to this charge reflects our inability to tolerate diversity...
...J. Saunders Redding at George Washington and Cornell...
...And the pre-1954 (Brown decision) Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., the prime example of Sowell's "Black Excellence" thesis, was overwhelmingly composed of students from stable middle- and working-class families...
...Yet, I took the militancy of my black peers quite seriously, for though I did not participate in most of the black student militancy at Harvard, I too was subject to the feeling that something, somewhere, was about to occur...
...Like any intellectual grasping for power, Sowell is not unwilling to shape his arguments to fit the moment's political needs...
...In a two-part piece in the Washington Post entitled "Blacker Than Thou" (2/13/ 81 and 2/14), Sowell, for reasons that have baffled even his black GOP peers, attacked Andy Young and other prominent blacks for being light-skinned haters of their dark-skinned brothers and sisters...
...As far as I can tell, he is strongly concerned with the problems of those black Americans who are not, by any definition, "making it...
...The black upper middle class and business sector had previously thought that they would prosper under Reagan as they had under Nixon and Ford but to their horror, Reagan, unlike his Republican predecessors, eliminated their disproportionate (read, Affirmative Action) access to small government contracts...
...There were tolerated variations on these standards...
...It's a neo-Social Darwinist vision...
...Most black intellectuals are able critically to analyze white America and the West but are unable to confront black pathologies...
...are mere pretenders...
...We are not a meritocratic people and don't pretend to be, that is, until we want to block someone else's access to our status...
...John Hope Franldin at Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago...
...A self-interested capitalist, all things considered, will be indifferent to the race and sex of his employees...
...Since when does a conservative like Sowell, with his commitment to a political and economic elite, want to imply that polls should control or seriously influence the formulation of policy...
...Few current black writers celebrate their achievements or refer to their works more often than he...
...In so doing they helped to make conservative inroads into a segment of society that had historically viewed conservatism as less than sensitive to their concerns, if not outright anti-Semitic...
...It was Sowell's inability to accept the political limitations of the intellectual life that led him into active politics...
...Instead of going to Cornell, these students should be educated in state universities where they could compete more comfortably...
...Though many racist laws have been eradicated, the lack of money and jobs in a capitalist marketplace has prevented us from moderniz302 ing further...
...In two articles in the Public Interest, entitled, "Black Excellence: The Case of Dunbar High School" and "Patterns of Black Excellence," Sowell offered examples of predominantly black high schools, private and public, that nurtured academic achievement...
...The only intellectual community that stood by Kilson and Sowell was that of the conservative intellectuals...
...White America for Sowell becomes a given, a goal to be emulated...
...We are told, in effect, that those who were unable to compete with whites undermined black interests by establishing racial quotas that "guaranteed" equal rewards for lesser achievements— and in doing so were encouraged by wellintentioned white liberals who at heart didn't believe that blacks could compete with whites...
...Who loses...
...Blacks, therefore, became the last beachhead in the new pluralism...
...Their children are headed for jail anyway...
...Except for Sowell and Kilson, few people were willing to discuss this aspect of the black studies phenomenon...
...His interest and theirs coincide more often than they conflict...
...News and World Report, 1/19/81...
...Sowell was teaching at Cornell when the event occurred...
...Need we ask the congressional Black Caucus, Andy Young, Pat Harris, and the NAACP why needy blacks indeed received so little from the Carter administration, when black people were so largely responsible for electing Carter...
...But why, Sowell has asked, should we justify our norm on the basis of the lowest common denominator in white academia...
...If we truthfully analyze what it was that drew black students to elite white institutions, we would have to confess that they were attracted by rather orthodox perceptions of the utility of a Harvard or Yale degree...
...He realizes that American conservatism has often been awash in outright racism...
...Rent control, according to Sowell, also works to the detriment of poor blacks...
...But many black intellectuals who were sympathetic to the cause were unable to close ranks with a movement that denigrated intellectual values, even though numerous white leftist intellectuals rushed to endorse the cause...
...Black studies departments in numerous instances facilitated the hiring of black faculty who would not have qualified for the job had their scholarly work been the primary criteria...
...Any proposed solution to the problem of educationally deprived children that pretends to bypass the need to spend disproportionately in their behalf is a sham...
...Yet when Kilson and Sowell began to attack anti-intellectualism among blacks on white campuses, the liberal-left intellectual establishment did not come to their defense...
...So why this foolishness...
...Most deplorable is Sowell's unwillingness to mention cases, as in Boston, where the court 309 ordered busing only because the Irish-American judge found discriminatory practices in the operation of the Irish-American controlled Boston School Committee...
...That is, they will, at best and only occasionally, minimize regression on policies benefiting the black lower class...
...The interaction between white liberal-leftists and black intellectuals has been such that the terms of acceptable discourse were dictated by blacks...
...Kenneth B. Clark and John A. Davis at CCNY...
...The impact of this militancy must now be considered by even the most sympathetic observer as ambiguous...
...He worked himself into a professorship at Berkeley...
...The person who entertains ideas only for their practical utility is not an intellectual, for somewhere in intellectual minds there is a belief in the virtue of knowledge for knowledge's sake...
...The black middle class depends a great deal on public-sector jobs often located in civil-rightsenforcement bureaucracies vulnerable to "efficiency" cutbacks...
...In many instances, however, all that is novel about Sowell is that he has applied free-market analyses to issues that conservative economists have ignored...
...The reasons for this are many, but most lead back to our old nemesis, American racism...
...Sowell certainly realizes that as a black conservative he is somewhat of an anomaly...
...Much of it is hype used to legitimate himself...
...The black middle class will also suffer insofar as Reagan cutbacks in federal outlays will hurt them disproportionately...
...We are to assume that their parents would simply not be concerned about their education...
...Sowell's freemarket dogmas are grounded in a 19th-century economic theory that if actualized would necessitate a 20th-century authoritarianism...
...Sowell has stumbled upon the ultimate black mechanism for personal socioeconomic mobility...
...Their solution is an exercise in triage: let poor people die out...
...L. D. Reddick at Temple...
...Sowell's argument about the free market as a cure to racism hardly merits serious attention...
...My mother's generation intuitively understood this...
...Moreover, he could not fit in with the Commentary crowd for, unlike Sowell, he was a consistent opponent of ethnic parochialism, even when it concerned Jewish or other brands of ethnocentrism...
...Certainly we are not naïve enough to believe that these kids will be allowed into predominantly middle-class private schools simply because they could now afford the tuition...
...2) the militant...
...Furthermore, I have often wondered, unlike Sowell, why it is that we defend mediocre black academicians when there is still discrimination against qualified blacks, as shown by the Berkeley English Department's denial of tenure to the gifted black writer Ishmael Reed...
...In a rather silly polemic, Black Students, he argued that there were basically five types of black students on white campuses: (1) the radical activist...
...Does Sowell think that thousands of Irish-Americans feel less respectful about their social mobility in an urban America where the Irish-dominated political machines have disproportionately placed them on city payrolls...
...Both are equally limited...
...Those that I do have seem unlikely soon to be implemented...
...and Piven and Cloward, white sociologists, substantiated the claim that welfare had been a means of "regulating the poor...
...Consequently the best private schools would continue to remain beyond the financial reach of the urban poor...
...Exept for its creative potential, the inducements to live a "dual-consciousness" life are slim...
...Both of me need you...
...When DuBois did obtain a critical, less emotional perspective on blacks, he did so from the most intellectually uncritical position offered by the white intellectual community, the post-Stalin Communist party...
...Capitalists would be ready to hire anyone who is both productive and willing to work for the 301 lowest possible wage...
...The truly innovative thinkers are usually found among the "homeless...
...Sounds familiar...
...The explanation seems plausible...
...That he was unable ever to acquire a stable intellectual outlook that would have allowed him to critically venture into both worlds is perhaps the one failure of his intellectual life...
...Sowell is as guilty of this effort to reinstitute tribalism as any black writing today...
...Phony "radicalism" wasn't the only problematic aspect of black militancy on white campuses...
...Sowell's free-market ideas don't allow him to advocate a price ceiling on the tuition that these new private schools could charge black parents with vouchers...
...This sort of romantic anti-intellectualism must be taken into account in considering Sowell's refusal to align himself with the black student movement...
...Give parents educational vouchers that can be used to pay for private schools and "public" ones...
...Sowell argues that the court's intervention in this issue is evidence of how liberals have distorted the role of the courts in a democratic society...
...By definition they displace a comfortable relation with any intellectual or political group except perhaps with those that are also trying to live an ethnically marginal existence...
...Having done so, whites will offer prominence to these anti-Affirmative Action blacks in the hope that they will function as antidotes for the pro-Affirmative Action black crowd...
...One should, however, recognize that Social Darwinists do offer a solution to the problem of poverty...
...However, to consciously accept this duality is an immense burden...
...The market, for Sowell, assumes implicit moral authority over the distribution of goods in the society: the people who don't make it become those who shouldn't...
...Unfortunately Sowell is too blinded by economic dogma to realize that social-welfare measures were not altruistic liberal inventions but responses pressed on the government by the populace...
...Sowell, unlike Kilson, sought power...
...Sowell's arguments would seem more valid if people ceased to be human...
...They become, in effect, Affirmative Action cases within the anti-Affirmative Action lobby...
...First, it is not true that Ethnic America would not have been published had it been written by a white author, provided, that is, the white author commanded the attention of the book-buying market to the degree Sowell does...
...The two camps attack each other viciously...
...This community grants Sowell the right to claim a peculiar access (denied to whites by birthright) to hidden ethnic truths...
...The creation of a black psychology, theology, or sociology necessitated more than merely asserting its existence or renaming established taxonomic classifications...
...Yes, they would be responsible elites but elites nevertheless...
...My hunch is that they felt that, "If you didn't want me then, I don't want you now...
...312 Religions, sacred or secular, elitist or massbased, Marxist or free-market, are more often than not the opiate of the mind...
...Political "relevance" has inspired propaganda...
...The notion that blacks support it has been created by black interest groups like the NAACP...
...Those who do are in most cases parochial blacks or white liberal intellectuals unwilling to grant autonomy to a black intellectual...
...Affirmative Action has undermined the moral autonomy of black America...
...Few are able to do so successfully...
...Except for a few like Allison Davis who taught at the University of Chicago, these black scholars spent virtually their entire academic lives relegated to black institutions...
...Sowell assumes, much like Marx, that capitalists are governed by a single motive, the maximization of profit...
...If pressure had not been placed on elite colleges, we cannot be sure that the exclusion of blacks from the academy would ever have ended...
...Finally, when Afro-American studies departments are taken seriously by universities, the students, and the black faculty 306 themselves, there is no reason why these departments cannot be competent—as in the case of Afro-American studies at Yale University...
...Coming on the heels of that generation of authentic social activists who had formed SNCC, etc., we had, true to our American selves, merely purchased, rather than earned, our revolutionary status...
...If Sowell were right, how could we explain the existence of racism in private industry...
...Blacks cannot cope with him because his ideas lie outside our normal ethnic parameters...
...They were called elitists and branded in many black circles as reactionary, though one doesn't quite know what a left/right dichotomy had to do with academic achievement...
...In the meantime, and it may be forever, I must endure the anxieties, false hopes, and real despairs of our problematic existence as blacks in America and as humans in the world...
Vol. 29 • July 1982 • No. 3
