One writer's battles

...Lani Neomi Rao, a former reporter for The Weekly Standard, is a law and graduate student at the University of Chicago...

...History can "get depressing, because it makes you realize how long people have been the way they are...

...Ellis Cose attends to the plight of the black middle class in his Rage of a Privileged Class: Why are Middle-Class Blacks Angry...

...He transferred to Harvard, establishment, "He's not just a from which he was graduated black person who wasn't afraid to magna cum laude...

...I am in this room with all these books and have no idea why I'm here, because I have no money to buy books...

...What pervades all of Sowell's writings is the stubborn doubt that human beings can significantly alter the order of things...

...But at that framework"—a framework that point, Sowell was still a Marxist— asks for empirical evidence instead which a stint with the Department of assumption or emotion...

...He understands the appeal of utopi-anism to the intelligentsia, and it alarms him: "It is not hard to understand why anyone would prefer to live in this kind of world, rather than in a world of inherently constrained options, tragic choices, and variably incremental trade-offs, rather than categorical and emotionally satisfying 'solutions.' The only question is whether it is within our power to choose between these alternative worlds—ultimately, whether reality is optional...

...In a New York Times review of The Vision of the Anointed, Richard Epstein asks critically whether Sowell is "seeking to slay a dragon already dead...

...His prickly, forceful personality is unsuited for the compromises of politics...

...He writes in A Conflict of Visions, "Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conception and misconception that sweep human action along...

...And his own story is not unusual, he contends...

...It doesn't take much to believe in social justice...

...If the anointed dragon of liberal excess is in fact dead, it is in part from the deft thrusts of Thomas Sowell's sharp sword...

...I also discovered that landladies wanted rent every week...

...Cornel West with, "He seems so transparently a hustler...

...Says Glenn Loury, who followed Sowell's lonely path as a black intellectual critical of the black America Care...

...His parents' appreciation of education was critical: "When I entered the seventh grade, it was a big deal...

...It doesn't lead you to hope for any great wonders in the next administration, no matter whose it is...

...His admits to being a conservative in research into the basic mechanisms the accepted sense, but believes of the sugar market made him that political discourse would be skeptical of the ability of Marxism clearer if the label disappeared...

...I have never been in a library...

...They were not interested in what kind of childhood I might or might not have had...

...Sowell says it's easy to understand why socialism appeals to so many: "It has fewer requirements...

...And he dismisses Prof...

...The conception of a conservative is someone who either wants to preserve the status quo or to go back to some status quo ante...

...He joined the Marine Corps, then went to Howard University on the GI Bill...

...Indeed, much of the ideology Sowell has fought against is now being swept back . Affirmative action, for instance, faces many legal and legislative challenges...

...He once heard from a reader—a black lawyer— who reported that out of his tenement came a doctor, another lawyer, a priest, and a college president...

...As a young man, he never had time for "navel-gazing and hand-wringing," because he was too busy trying to earn a living...

...And here I am, nine years old...

...With Sowell—a blunt, exacting trafficker in ideas—what you see is what you get...

...But Sowell can't get too exercised about middle-class rage: "Having grown up in poverty, it's very hard for me to get worked up over the problems of affluent people—no matter what color they may be...

...As a true intellectual, he refuses to play the part of a cultural demagogue or an establishment operative...

...He might easily sell himself as a bootstraps paragon— eventually, he earned a Ph.D...

...It is the first volume of a planned trilogy on the subject of race and the movement of peoples...

...It's not just nostalgia," he insists...

...They always used to be on the same general plane with the schools on the Lower East Side...

...I have the statistics from schools in Harlem...

...Wrote columnist Carl Rowan, "Vidkun Quisling, in his collaboration with the Nazis, surely did not do as much damage to Norwegians as Sowell is doing to the most helpless of black Americans...

...I have not heard of a library...

...In that day, says Sowell, an education was obtainable by those who desired one...

...Sowell himself is no wallflower...

...Guinier, he says, "I don't need some half-white woman from Martha's Vineyard telling me about being black...

...Sowell favors looking at things as they are, while taking into account circumstance and nuance...

...No one else in my family had ever been that far...

...in economics at the University of Chicago—but he declines to use his background to enhance the credibility of his scholarly and political conclusions...

...In his later work, starting with A Conflict of Visions and continuing with The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell has begun to take on the very tenets of liberalism...

...And I don't want to do either...

...Opinion on him is rarely lukewarm...

...I left home when I was 17 and discovered to my surprise that there was no enormous demand for a black high-school dropout with no skills and no experience...

...And that was a turning point in my life...

...Jesse Jackson and Cornel West, for example, vehemently defend affirmative action...

...His friend Eddie was a well-bred boy from the West Indies—"The sort of boy I was always supposed to be like and was always falling short of matching"— and it was he who introduced young Sowell to the public library...

...You didn't have the situation you have now where a dozen black schools are in the bottom 1 percent...

...Under attack from Prof...

...In fact, he says, "There are no solutions to problems...

...Why Should to account for human behavior...

...And Eddie very patiently explains to me—several times—how a library works...

...Sowell has worked on creat-free-market masters Milton Fried- ing a theoretical template for a new man and George Stigler...

...So Sowell, like many others of his generation, seized what opportunities there were...

...The reality for Sowell is that he was born to a poor, lightly educated family and dropped out of high school at 17...

...Said NAACP general counsel Thomas Atkins, when Sowell was rumored for a position in the Reagan cabinet, "He would play the same kind of role which historically the house niggers played for the plantation owners...

...Sowell, now 66, grew into his current intellectual stature slowly...

...Sowell of Labor was soon to cure...

...Then came go where no one else had been able Chicago, where he studied with to go...

...Sowell describes his first visit to a library...

...For at least twenty-five years, Sow-ell has been one of the foremost controversialists in America, and he shows no signs of slowing down...

...Sowell rejects the substitution of personal reflection for intellectual substance: "When I hear these young people talk about how they're trying to find themselves, I say, 'You know, when I was your age, I was trying to find the rent.' I've never had a period of my life when I had the luxury of sitting around and nursing my neuroses...

...But today, when the situation for black young people is more dire, as Sowell notes, black leaders persist in calling for more of the same policies...