Muggers, Ethnics and Stereotypes

...Their children could not have overcome their educational deficiencies in the schools, if their only problems were racist teachers and biased tests...

...The person you see causes your anxiety level to rise and your pace to quicken...

...We hardly need George Gallup to tell us how a majority of white Americans would answer...

...Misread, Sowell's study reinforces the stereotypes of bigots-for yes, relatively speaking, the Irish do have an alcoholism problem, Jews do have disproportionate influence in the media, Italians are violent, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans do make a thing of being macho, and blacks do have a history of wastefulness and irresponsibility...

...Surprisingly, though, where one would have expected him to shine, Sowell is rather pedestrian and superficial...

...Financial institutions that redline low-income neighborhoods or refuse loans to individuals because they belong to groups that are bad credit risks act entirely rationally, not prejudicially, yet the social impact is the same either way...

...It is easy, of course, to label such a reaction "fascist"-easy, and inaccurate...

...Contemporary fashion demands that we attribute these complaints to prejudice, though to do so means dismissing first-hand accounts and medical history...

...Sowell's arguments for rethinking our ideas about the impact of intolerance are powerful...

...In the cause of tolerance, liberals have traditionally said much the same thing...

...Properly understood, Ethnic America can have the healthy effect of opening previously taboo areas to discussion...

...indeed, the only prejudice operating may be the legitimate prejudging rational human beings must engage in every day merely to pursue the business of living...

...Sowell urges us not to close our eyes to the statistics behind these stereotypes, but to understand their sources in history and culture...

...And he is repetitious to boot: a reader of Ethnic America will not soon forget that the hot dog, that all-American dish, is a German creation...

...It is the greatest virtue of Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America: A History (Basic Books, 353 pp., $16.95) that he is willing to look unblinkingly at many of the most uncomfortable truths about social relations between different groups in the United States without recourse to the customary sloganeering...

...Separate chapters treat the varied fortunes of the Irish, the Germans, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, and the Mexicans...

...Still, any nonspecialist will find something to value in these pages-whether an unexpected fact, a striking statistic or a twist on a received truth...

...This and similar matters concern us all, Sowell insists, for by choosing to see prejudice whenever group differences are mentioned, we miss the crucial lessons history can teach us...

...In the 19th century Americans grumbled that the Irish immigrants smelled bad...

...It is a thin line he asks us all to walk, and many do not have that kind of intellectual balance...

...Controversies are not probed...

...You turn to look...

...Jews scored so poorly on IQ tests around World War I that the results were taken as exploding the myth of Jewish intelligence...

...The Harlem of today got its start from middle-class blacks fleeing Irish ruffians...

...Why not most blacks and Puerto Ricans...

...Jews are not Italians are not Irish are not blacks are not Puerto Ricans, and the attempt to ascribe differences simply to the effects of discrimination is not persuasive...

...The question is legitimate (and Sowell gives answers based on the particular disadvantages American blacks and Puerto Ricans are striving to overcome...

...Surely there is much testimony that a substantial minority would...

...Italians were so divided among themselves that those whose forebears came from northern Italy persuaded American authorities to register southern Italians as a separate race...

...it is rather much to expect them to have acquired bourgeois bathing habits merely by crossing the Atlantic...

...He will regret only that Sowell's book is not better than it is...

...The preponderant part of Ethnic America is given over to ascribing these distinctive patterns...

...Chinatowns because recent Chinese arrivals are more Westernized (and therefore less fearful) than the older immigrants...

...We reject the most important sources of social progress, and encourage currently disadvantaged people always to look outside of themselves for solutions to their difficulties...

...The Japanese, one of the most prosperous of America's ethnic groups, owe much of their early success to their skill at gardening...

...In our public debates, we circle round and round these topics, some partisans piously echoing opinions they scarcely believe, others falling back into outright bigotry, without touching on the sources of the problems themselves or finding a genuine foundation for public policy...

...others who will make use of his work may not be so careful...

...Deprived communities are denied needed sources of capital and talented people are prevented from exercising their abilities because of their race or ethnic origin .(If you are a black from Georgia seeking a loan, you probably stand a better chance of getting it by convincing the bank that your family comes from Jamaica...

...Sowell, perhaps because of the color of his skin, is sensitive to the issues he raises...

...A black economist with the Hoover Institution and a member of Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, Sowell is a tough-minded critic of those liberals who, upon seeing smoke, will posit every kind of theory to explain it except the obvious one...

...On some level, it is even insulting: "Ethnic history is not a mere repetition of patterns, not even with an overlay of general progress...

...Nor is it clear that the Federal government's responsibility for assuring equal rights ends with the prevention of overt discrimination...

...You are, naturally, edgy as you make your way toward your car...

...Moreover, a poll might well find that a majority of black Americans respond exactly as the whites do...

...Suddenly you hear footsteps closing behind...

...I doubt that any Jew, no matter how much money he makes, would ever consider anti-Semitism anything other than a curse to be obliterated...

...A reader of this study will find the level of his own thinking on public issues raised an entire notch...

...Something more positive may be called for...

...The very pathologies we are all so eager to cure are exacerbated through the natural, perfectly legal, operations of the free market, and unless the government somehow compensates for the myriad rational decisions bank managers make that, in their totality, turn out badly for the country, we may have to get used to worrying about that black mugger on the dark street for a long time to come...

...An even greater danger in the present political climate, it seems to me, is the mood of complacency Ethnic America may inspire...

...complexities are ignored, as Sowell pounds home the point that people do not fit a single mold...

...With more than an echo of the teachings of Booker T. Washington, Sowell writes: "A group cannot be getting cleaner over time, if any suggestion that it was ever dirty was only a figment of bigots' imaginations...

...Injustice remains injustice whatever a group's success...

...There are distinctive patterns-groups that behave very differently in similar circumstances, as well as groups that the larger society has treated very differently...

...Probably they (and immigrants who came later) did smell bad...

...These sections are not so much written as compiled from the work of other scholars...

...Yet like other forms of liberation, this one carries with it dangers as well...

...Perhaps racism or discrimination sum up the actions that were taken by small-town Southern sheriffs in the '50s and '60s, but as analyses of what goes on in Northern cities in the '80s, they are at best woefully inadequate and at worst dangerously misleading...

...They feel more threatened seeing a black face on a deserted street than a white face...

...Crime, schooling, employment, housing-in every case, rhetoric seems to have become separated from reality...

...We are not all alike, Sowell reminds us...

...But if the asking of the question leads us to lower our guard against bigotry, that would be a national misfortune...

...As Sowell indicates, the newcomers from Ireland escaped conditions worse than those of American slaves...

...After all, those same millions of people no doubt are more fearful when they see a man on a dark street than a woman, yet only the most lunatic Leftist would call that response "sexist...

...No other internal problems-from alcoholism to violence-could be overcome by any group, if such things were only biased propaganda or the inevitable results of the failures of 'society.' As a corollary, some of the longest and hardest struggles for self-improvement must be denied-which is to say, history itself is denied...

...the Jews, the Japanese and, most significantly, the West Indians have succeeded despite discrimination against them...

...Question: Is that person black or white...

...Crime has gone up in U.S...

...For whatever degree of racism may lurk in all this, it coincides with the weighty reality of statistics...

...If they remain the explanations most readily trotted out whenever black/white differences are aired-when, for instance, hospitals in Harlem or other black areas of New York City are closed-we need no additional evidence to conclude that confusion, guilt and ill will grievously cloud current discussion of race relations in America...

...Blacks from the West Indies do quite well in the United States, earning more by the second generation than the national average, and far more than native-born blacks...