21 ms·

Encountering Thomas Sowell

222 points by RickJWagner 6y ago

f154hfds 6y ago
> Many people wondered last summer why, for example, on the Black Lives Matter website the organization declared (and has since deleted) a “disruptive” stance on the nuclear family. What did that have to do with mobilizing against police violence? For a long time I was very sympathetic to BLM, I would even have considered protesting with them. It was the above that caused me to rethink my position and eventually decide that BLM was actually antagonistic to their very goal.
- nullifidian 6y ago
  "Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. In a revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”"
  - chumich1 6y ago
    The idea of somebody being a "trained Marxist" is very funny. Personally, I'm a 4th degree Historical Materialist and I'm training for the 2nd level Communist obstacle course
    - yostrovs 6y ago
      It's not as funny when you get to live under the rule of well trained Marxists. Hundreds of millions of them have been produced over the last century. Look into a history book or just ask around.
      - devtul 6y ago
        It turns out that some genocidal ideologies are too hard to let go, we managed with Nazism pretty well but Marxism is taking some time. Cambodia under Pol Pot should have been enough.
        yostrovs 6y ago
        Indeed it is surprising, but I think it's because communism wasn't put on trial when the Soviet Union collapsed. There weren't courts punishing gulag wardens and KGB officers for torture, murder, and everything else under the sun. Everything was forgiven for the sake of peace, but everyone learned the wrong lesson. Which is why when "nationalism" is mentioned, people think of Nazi germany, but when "socialism" is mentioned, today's youth especially wants to think of Sweden. The crimes of Nazi Germany are regularly mentioned in popular culture, but those of Communists not so much, though they're more contemporary, lasted much longer, and arguably affected a lot more people.
        bopbeepboop 6y ago
        China is currently butchering Uyghurs. That people in the US espouse Marxist beliefs while a Marxist state commits genocide is “the same” as when parts of American society supported Nazis. Disney thanking China for their help filming Mulan next to a camp is the same simpering we saw from corporations supporting the Nazi regime.
    - tryonenow 6y ago
      I can see how it's "funny" if one is trying to minimize and deflect, but if they're hanging around characters like maduro then they're probably referring to more than just economic or government theory - these people see themselves as full blown subversive revolutionaries. And then if you consider the spread of critical theory and postmodernism and the general influence of the Frankfurt school through our institutions, then the overtly "anti-establishment" protesting and rioting spearheaded by BLM and Antifa (which "doesn't exist", "isn't an organization", sure, how typically "revolutionary") starts to look very much like the start of a subversive, insurrectionist ploy, much like that of the bolsheviks that lead to the disaster of a government that my family fled. And then it really isn't funny to me at all. And it also isn't funny to me when one considers that part of the rise of the Nazi party pre WWII can be attributed the behavior of very similar "revolutionary" communists who also were running destroying businesses and beating up citizens on the street for disagreement. No, I'd say such an overtly insurrectionist movement evolving openly in the US is not funny at all.
      - chumich1 6y ago
        I don't think you have much to worry about in the US. From my experience, those who call themselves "Marxist" have a hard time organizing a barbecue, let alone a revolution. They are mostly revolutionary LARPers. I think the internet and media sometimes magnify the size and power of these groups and it warps with our perception of reality. The largest Leninist group in the US is the PSL and they're a joke. A bunch of weirdos with no friends but the ones they found online
    - justaman 6y ago
      "Trained Marxist" might as well mean college graduate these days.
    - neartheplain 6y ago
      I’ve had colleagues in Silicon Valley who were members of their home countries’ Communist Party student organizations.
      - collyw 6y ago
        Commies killed a lot more than Nazis, yet I would be extremely surprised if Nazi party student organization would be allowed.
    - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
      Why is this funny to you? There are many Marxist organizations in the world, surely some of them focus on organizing considering that one of the core ideas of many Marxist and “post”-Marxist intellectual currents (like critical theory) is proletarian or some other sort of revolution.
    - ctrlp 6y ago
      This suggests you didn't get a degree in the humanities in the past 20 years and don't understand the Leninist part of Marxist-Leninist.
      - claudiawerner 6y ago
        I'm yet to see anyone describe themselves as simply a 'trained Marxist' without any indication as to what that might mean specifically, other than these BLM leaders. A 'trained Marxist guerilla'? Sure. A 'trained Marxist economist'? Sure. 'Educatied in Marxism'? Sure. Even just a 'Marxist', sure. But even with the Leninist part (which the quote doesn't specify - there are plenty of non-Leninist Marxists about) it's unclear what it means to be a 'trained' one. It's not as though there's a 'Marxism coach' somewhere who trains you on understanding the significance of the ratio between constant and variable capital or the labour theory of value. It's hilarious because it's so vague, not because there are guerillas or revolutionaries who have been trained by Marxists in agitprop/organizing/guerilla tactics. In short, what's the difference between being a 'trained Marxist' and 'educated in the works of Marx and Engels'? If I heard someone describe themselves as a 'trained literary critic', I'd think exactly what GP pointed out too. My comment is just as much a criticism of the vagueness of the BLM leaders as it is the people who accept them at their word without even inquiring into what it means. For all we know, they could literally just be holding a philosophy degree completed with a Master's project in an aspect of Marxist philosophy.
        tryonenow 6y ago
        >It's hilarious because it's so vague It's not hilarious, it's the modus operandi to keep things vague so that they can hide behind apologists when called out. Like hiding behind decentralization to minimize the implicitly organized behavior of antifa. It's disingenuous and subversive. Then again I suppose subversion is the point...
        ctrlp 6y ago
        Right, if you haven't seen it it must not exist. Are you from Missouri? If that level of radical skepticism works for you, good on ya. Personally, I don't conflate things that I don't know with things that can't be known. A trained Marxist is an activist, it's really that simple. The point is not to interpret the world but to change it yada yada yada. A Leninist is a Marxist who believes the proletariat is too economically comfortable to bring about the revolution and therefore an intellectual vanguard of "trained" revolutionaries (marxist activists) are required to lead the way. Time to hit the books!
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    From Time's interview (https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors/ https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors...) of Cullors, the "main" founder and the only one still maintaining a leadership position at BLM: > Cullors weaves her intellectual influences into this narrative, from black feminist writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, to Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. Reading those social philosophers “provided a new understanding around what our economies could look like,” she says. Reading Lorde and hooks “helped me understand my identity.” All the people happily repeating "Black Lives Matter", putting up lawn signs, and donating to them have no idea that it is led by someone who admires and is inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Zedong. They think the accusations of Marxism are a right-wing conspiracy theory, when the reality is that this is the ideological rot at the core of the Black Lives Matter organization, that its philosophies and goals are based around the same principles espoused by some of the most dangerous ideologues of all time. From https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810 https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-m...: > the deaths caused by communist regimes [...] is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history
- glasss 6y ago
  I do hope everyone would be at least sympathetic towards other human beings wanting justice and equal treatment. I would be wary about that website and I would take whatever you see about a central organization relating to BLM with a grain of salt. I've been involved in local protests and other events in Chicago and I've never once been directed to or heard of a centralized website. I hope you reconsider your stance with the knowledge that BLM is a very decentralized movement, and (while anecdotal) no one I've known who's been involved has been "disruptive" towards the idea of nuclear families. If I can make any other supporting statements or answer questions that might sway you please let me know.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    I get that BLM is decentralized and I agree that most people are just protesting injustices, but then my question is: to whom did all that money go? Clearly it went to someone. Isn't it fair to consider this organization representative of BLM? > Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-lives-matter-raised-more-than-90-million-in-2020-01614135178 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-lives-matter-raised-...
    - runako 6y ago
      > my question is: to whom did all that money go? (The link you provide outlines where the money went.)
      - zo1 6y ago
        The point is that this "decentralized" movement has a central organization that has a lot of money donated to it, and that the central/important tenets of that central organization probably has some measurable influence in deciding which "decentralized" parts of the organization get funding/donations/focus/marketing. So if the "BLM" organization views the nuclear family as something that has to be abolished, then one can assume that they wouldn't donate to local BLM chapters that don't subscribe to that idea. Maybe not always, but a greater than 0% chance for sure. With this whole "decentralized" argument, we might as well say the Republican/Democratic parties are decentralized and that what the RNC and DNC do/say hasn't a huge bearing on the way that the individual local leaders/sub-organizations of the parties do or how their rallies behave. It's more "centralized" than BLM, sure, but like with a lot of things, it's not a black/white description. It's rather a range, and we can't just say "no it's not" when we can clearly see that the "central" portion has some bearing on the smaller parts. So, my thinking on this also aligns with the Sorites Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
- rayiner 6y ago
  The alliance of necessity between social liberals and racial justice advocates creates this problem. There is not anything inherent about “people of color should be treated equally” that also requires buying into “we should disrupt the nuclear family.” That’s just how the political alliances have worked out. The latter ideology in practice works to undercut the former ideology. The contribution to racial inequality is stark: the poverty rate for Black, Latino, and Asian children in two parent households is 1/4 to 1/2 the poverty rate for white children in single mother households. As a south Asian person, I find the aggressive push to move Asian Americans to the left quite troubling. The intense social norms in south and East Asian culture in favor of two parent households is an incredible advantage we should not give up lightly. But it’s almost taboo in socially progressive circles to say that family structure matters (even though this is obvious to Asians).
  - throwaway6734 6y ago
    >But it’s almost taboo in socially progressive circles to say that family structure matters (even though this is obvious to Asians). You must hang in some especially woke circles
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      Doesn't seem that extreme to me. Even saying that divorce should be avoided at all costs and a two parent household is vastly superior to a single parent one is enough to get labeled as a conservative by many.
      - throwaway6734 6y ago
        Definitely not by the average American. Twitter and San Fran/Portland are a small minority of the US.
        ceilingcorner 6y ago
        College students too, unfortunately.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  There's the notion of BLM, of which only sociopaths would disagree, then there's BLM the organization which is exactly how you described it. The naming of this organization was actually a stroke of genius. Only the crazy edge cases would refute it's name but served as a Trojan horse for an ideology that is inherently un-American. If you disagree with them the immediate reaction has been "you don't think black lives matter?" This is a brilliant move.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    Just an inheritance from the term progressive. "I disagree with you." "What, you're against progress?"
    - monoideism 6y ago
      Also "anti-fascist" and "anti-racist". The left has gotten clever with their naming, similar to the conservative movement in the 90s under the advisement of George Lakoff ("death tax", etc).
  - seneca 6y ago
    It's a Motte and Bailey, by design (which I seem to end up pointing out a lot on HN, apology for the repetition but it's a common and important pattern). The core BLM organization are subversive Marxists. Their tenants are extremely un-American and probably not shared by most of the people marching under their banner. When you point this out, they can retreat from the Marxist Bailey to the racial equality Motte and attempt to shut down criticism. This pattern of equivocating between subversive ideas and basic liberal tenants is extremely damaging for the liberals accidentally aligning themselves with extremists, but this smokescreen tactic has existed longer than most any HN posters have been alive. This is the proverbial "Useful Innocents" (and its more pejorative alternative).
- genghisjahn 6y ago
  This is the language from the BLM site regarding disrupting the nuclear family. I'm very pro nuclear family. This didn't seem bad to me. -------------------------- We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work. We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. -----------------
  - zpeti 6y ago
    A dig at fathers in the first paragraph, and a diplomatically stated rejection of the nuclear family in the second. You need to be very generous to interpret this as anything other than an attack on the traditional family.
    - calvinmorrison 6y ago
      And across all the KPI's we know of - kids in a two parent household are more successful by every measure.
      - jjeaff 6y ago
        Which is why it says they reject the "requirement". No one is denying that a 2 parent home is better. But if you are a kid that grew up with one parent, we need to have alternatives to help those kids thrive. Harping on the fact that 2 parents are better than 1 does nothing for kids with only one parent (except maybe make them feel defective and disadvantaged).
        monstersinF 6y ago
        Who made it a requirement?
- m0llusk 6y ago
  It is amazing that people are always projecting these ideas of organization so aggressively. Here BLM is portrayed an organization with founding documents that are have important guiding philosophy from which the rest emerges. Actually looking at the people and what happened shows that there was very little organization involved and what little there was got conjured up late in the game by the most extreme involved players. In reality what happened is that our media intensive culture broadcast a nearly nine minute video of a black man being strangled by a cop and there was a broad visceral reaction against that. So what is really being said here is that a cop strangling a black man isn't that much of a big deal and what really matters is the philosophical positions expounded by the founding documents of the organization that emerged as protests grew. Want to object to cops strangling black men? You better be really slick with your organizational skills and foundational document writing because that is what really matters.
  - bopbeepboop 6y ago
    Yes, it matters what the group espouses: a group using the death of George Floyd to attack the nuclear family using trickery is a second problem.
    - m0llusk 6y ago
      What group is this? Protesters used the slogan and there is now an organization that uses that slogan. Does that mean that the protestors and their protests can be conflated with the organization that makes use of the name? Sharing a negative reaction to cops murdering citizens is not the same as being an organized group. Slogans have great power, but not that power.
  - collyw 6y ago
    The cop restrained a black man using a standard technique, while the balck man had overdose levels of fentanyl in his system. The cop has not been found guilty of strangling Floyd so far, and I believe the system in the US means innocent until proven guilty.
    - 6y ago
- collyw 6y ago
  Can anyone point me to where the millions raised by BLM after the summer riots has gone? BLM seem to cause a lot of agitation, but I am not aware of them doing anything helpful to the communities that it claims to be fighting for.
  - justaman 6y ago
    ActBlue.
- ctrlp 6y ago
  BLM was founded by Marxist-Leninist activists. The original statements about the nuclear family were consistent with viewing the family as a site of patriachical oppression. None of that antagonism is innovative or surprising if you know a bit if intellectual history. I suspect they changed the language because it was too radical to hold a coalition together. Most people seem to like their families and view the nuclear family as a good thing.
  - ctrlp 6y ago
    I see I'm getting downvoted. Will any downvoters have the balls to say why? Here's the relevant quote: "Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. In a revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”"
- olalonde 6y ago
  I was sympathetic with the anti police (brutality) movement but I was never convinced that racism was disproportionally responsible for it. Gender seems to be an even greater factor, yet you don't see a "Male Lives Matter" movement. I don't have a strong opinion on the subject though and I'd be open to see some data.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Black males seem to disproportionately die at the hands of police. But BLM is about much more than just death. Death is just a catalyst that makes people notice. Lots of Black people deal with disrespect and abuse from police on a regular basis. A lot of the seemingly flippant behavior from Black people towards police that we sometimes see during recorded interactions is well earned by years of subtle, and not so subtle harassment by some police officers. Look up some of Amber Ruffin's videos on her interactions with police growing up in NYC. It's pretty eye opening and all of my Black friends have echoed similar stories. Another example that comes to mind is the story of the Black women and children that were made to get out of their car and lay handcuffed, face down on the asphalt in the arizona sun while the cops slowly discovered that the car they were driving was not actually stolen and that they had read the plate wrong. Supposedly, the cops tried to handcuff the little 7 year old girl but even fully tightened her wrists were too small. I have been unable to find a comparable story of an innocent white family of women and children made to lay handcuffed face down like that. I suspect very strongly those same cops would not have treated a white family like that. Excess deaths at the hands of cops is just a serious symptom of a much larger underlying problem of disrespect and abuse.
    - chmod600 6y ago
      The other comment raised the interesting point that the gender gap is a stronger signal here than the race gap. Do you have a comment on that?
      - jjeaff 6y ago
        Seems irrelevant. Of course police see women as less threatening. Most police are men. Though I'm sure Black women are killed by police at higher rates than white women. Seems like just trying to redirect the narrative. Kind of like when you bring up the studies where identical resumes were sent out half with white sounding names and half with Black sounding names and the white sounding names get way more callbacks. The response is usually something like, that probably has more to do with class/wealth, not race. As if the two are not strongly linked.
- scdp 6y ago
  Yes, much like how MLK's popularity made this country socialist. This whole thread reeks of "unwise and untimely".
- ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Black activists (people presenting themselves as activists on behalf of black folk) seem to never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It's almost as if the people funding these activists don't have black folks interest in mind at all... Long history of this. Many such cases. Follow the money and you'll see.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  What's even more shady is that they did not acknowledge the criticism directed on this point at all. Instead they quiety scrubbed their "What We Believe" page (https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-anti-american-marxist-language-from-its-website https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-ant...), without actually admitting that this screed was based on Marxist philosophy (likely Friedrich Engels). In various works, such as "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", Engels claimed that the modern family unit gave rise to the notion of private property, and therefore capitalism, and that it must be undone for socialism to succeed. The greater ecosystem of fundamental socialist and communist theory includes proposals to ban all home and religion education, banning concepts like property and inheritance, nationalizing various housework, and even separating children from parents at an early age so they could primarily be reared by the state (https://thefederalist.com/2015/06/29/americans-buy-into-marxist-family-planning/ https://thefederalist.com/2015/06/29/americans-buy-into-marx...). It's incredible to me that activists who often complain about vague "dog whistles" cannot connect the dots on an ideological relation that is so basic and clear.
JasonFruit 6y ago
Sowell has the great and challenging characteristic that he never quite gives you the answer that would let you justify your first reactions with, "See? He agrees with me!" His writing is too nuanced to provide an easy escape from thinking, even if people occasionally use cut-up quotes to do so.
- debacle 6y ago
  I believe this is with great intent - ideologues of every flavor will leap at the first opportunity to claim speakers like Sowell for their faction.
  - chmod600 6y ago
    The left will never admit any agreement with Sowell, even about the weather. That's what the article is about -- he's completely ignored in liberal-thinking circles, and he shouldn't be.
    - flyingfences 6y ago
      > in liberal-thinking circles In leftist-thinking circles. Let's not forget what "liberal" is supposed to mean.
- tim333 6y ago
  I like Sowell and agree with him but many of his positions would get you rapidly cancelled by the woke if spoken while white. He got away with saying sometimes negative things about black Americans by being one himself.
seneca 6y ago
It's a loss for Americans of all political stripes that Sowell hasn't been the public face of American Conservatism for decades. He's passionate, articulate, and, most of all, deeply nuanced in his thoughts. I don't always agree with him, but I've rarely read or listened to his thoughts and not come away with something to consider. I'm excited to read the linked biography when it's published.
- JasonFruit 6y ago
  I'm on the conservative side, mostly, and I'm deeply disappointed by most prominent conservative voices. There's much more of value in conservative thought than people hear from conservative mouthpieces in the media, but instead we get ugly stupidity.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    If you look at the political incumbents on both sides you’ll be sorely disappointed. Many people who end up in positions of leadership in either parties are basically insiders who did their time and climbed the ladder, and who are deeply unpopular. Candidates who garner a lot of attention are actually viewed as a threat by the incumbents and are usually buried, destroyed, or sidelined. Take Yang, Tulsi and Ron Paul as a few examples.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Social media reward clickbait, ergo clickbait grows.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I agree. Even though I'm a liberal, I'm sad to see the conservative intellectual tradition in such bad shape. I always felt it would be better for your opponents to rally around their best arguments/figures rather than their least savory arguments/figures. I think it has also made us (liberals) lazier--we don't need to bring coherent, reasoned arguments because we can settle for "well, at least we're better than Trump". We're all racing to the bottom.
iagovar 6y ago
I began studying sociology in my mid 20s. That's what threw me off the left most than anything else. I remember I discovered Sowell about that time, and it was challenging and refreshing. I'm still a strange flavor of a utilitarian social democrat, but he's the reason why I picked up this routine of reading libertarians and conservatives. I dismissed some controversial right-wing figures in my country and reading their books (sometimes) challenge my ideas, and often improves my empathy.
- chrispai 6y ago
  Despite considering myself very politically aware, I first learned of him just in the last few years. I'm perpetually amazed that more people are not familiar with Sowell's work over many decades. It makes me wonder whether he was ignored because he was a black man challenging many of the left's dogmas.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    More than being black, which I'm sure it contributes, I think he was a bit of an outsider in academia. Typically you would make friends and connections so your work gets more spread out. It seems that sowell was a bit on his own. There's a lot of nepotism in academia, only the filter of time seems counterbalance it.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> The left takes its vision seriously — more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep. (“Left” in this context is the authoritarian top-left of the political quadrant)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- prionassembly 6y ago
  The political quadrant model is seriously overrated. It may be that libertarian/authoritarian Left is a meaningful distinction in some contexts and not others; or that authoritarian Left/Right is a useful categorization for some purposes, but not for others.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    Why, specifically?
    - prionassembly 6y ago
      Because the pair of distinctions chosen makes sense in some cases and not in others. I provided two examples in my comment above.
      - bhupy 6y ago
        I don't see any examples in your comment.
        prionassembly 6y ago
        I might be engaging a troll, but I'll ctrl-c ctrl-v. "It may be that libertarian/authoritarian Left is a meaningful distinction in some contexts and not others; or that authoritarian Left/Right is a useful categorization for some purposes, but not for others."
languagehacker 6y ago
This post is awful. The author takes a drastic misunderstanding of the operating model of BLM, which is largely decentralized, and uses it to attribute degenerative philosophical characteristics to a group of people all banded together on a loose set of shared goals -- primarily stopping racial violence instigated by police, a problem which cannot be denied in the US. Kendi's work is extremely good, very provocative, and also long enough that I doubt a single person can succinctly summarize it -- let alone refute it through the words of someone else in a mere paragraph. I suppose "consider the source" is at play here. From what I can tell, this site is nothing but the blogosphere version of some garbage neocon beltway think tank.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  > Kendi's work is extremely good Kendi proposes a constitutional amendment that would enshrine the principle that Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy (from certain threshold that he does not specify), and create Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas. [0] Do you find this proposal even good, much less extremely good? I don't. This is an attempt to bend reality by law, which rarely works, but usually has a plethora of unexpected negative consequences. It also goes completely against any individualism that characterizes the Western society and elevates racial groups to basic building blocks of the country. https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/ https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pharmakom 6y ago
    "Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy" if it's not, then would wildly unequal outcomes not imply some races are superior to others? the science indicates that this is not the case so how else can it be explained? --- Hmmm people didn't like this. I will add the statistic I can't get out my head: Incarceration rates in USA (adult male) per 100k White - 450 Hispanic - 831 Black - 2306 Asian - 210 I don't think this can be explained as cultural or genetic.
sradman 6y ago
Written by Thomas Chatterton Williams [1], author of Self-Portrait in Black and White [2]: > “It’s not about color for me,” my aunt said while railing against Obama. “For example, I love Thomas Sowell.” > To that side of my extended family, I became the stereotype of a coastal liberal, writing for the New York Times and wholly out of touch with the real America. In fact, I’ve always prided and defined myself as an anti-tribal thinker, and sometime contrarian, working firmly within a left-of-center black tradition... Why was this published in Law & Liberty, has he burned his left-of-center media bridges? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chatterton_Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chatterton_Williams [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_in_Black_and_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_in_Black_and_Whi...
- JPKab 6y ago
  Yes and no. He doesn't burn bridges, but left of center media elites pull up the drawbridges. On topics like this, they view college activists as authoritative, objective sources of truth on race. Those activists view Sowell, and TCW, as heretics.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Recall also progressive journalist Lee Fang, who endured a cancellation campaign from colleagues at The Intercept because he Tweeted an interview with a black man who expressed concern about black-on-black crime. Many progressive activists and the media also aren't especially keen on Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Razib Khan, or dozens of other outspoken people of color. There seems to be some strong compulsion in the media to suppress any indication that people of color (and blacks in particular) are as complex and intellectually or ideologically diverse as whites. I don't think that's quite the right characterization, but it's not far off.
    - collyw 6y ago
      Progressives already have the solution to the problem, therefore examining the cause can only do harm to their ideas.
apineda 6y ago
One of the great public thinkers today for sure.
lbj 6y ago
Great piece. I have to admit I'm a bit of a fan when it comes to both Friedman and Sowell. They seem to have the rare gift of understanding subjects so well and intuitively that they can explain those subjects more plainly than anyone else. Where most economists have disappointed me greatly in their understanding of math, Sowell has done to opposite.
- MuffinFlavored 6y ago
  I have this feeling Sowell isn’t liked/respected by AOC/Pelosi because of how hard he disagrees with them. Can anybody tell me how he is perceived by liberals? Not trying to get political. Genuinely curious if he is an outcast to the left because a ton of what he says seems to fall into “conservative views”.
  - chmod600 6y ago
    He's mostly dismissed/ignored by the left.
    - MuffinFlavored 6y ago
      That's why I thought. Why would you say that is? He's obviously educated and speaks with "facts" that have "references", but it just feels like the left does not like his facts/does not agree with the same conclusion his references reach. I'm not big into politics but I don't really understand how two different parties can both use "science and data" to reach totally separate conclusions. Which one is lying/wrong? As a programmer, it just doesn't compute. Input and output and all that.
      - chmod600 6y ago
        Politics is informed by data, but it's not a science. There is no "right" answer (though arguably a lot of wrong ones). Think of stuff that programmers do argue about. Type systems, databases, architecture, agile development, etc. Logic is a great tool, but it's also more limited than people realize.
  - 6y ago
newbie578 6y ago
Wow, reading this was really enjoyable and valuable. I intend to read Sowell more.
throwaway183210 6y ago
in before delete
cdavid 6y ago
I don't get what make him popular around certain crowds in HN. He is very polemical (I mean he was arguing that Obama would lead the US to live under Sharia law), is not a particularly good scholar, nor very insightful. Certainly, nothing he wrote as articles gave me a desire to read some of his books. There are tons of smarter, more interesting people in the conservative sphere, especially around libertarian/conservative "brand". I don't get it.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  I wouldn't consider myself a huge Sowell fan, but I do recognize his appeal. He speaks simply, writes prolifically, uses data generously, and has no issues calling out BS. For that reason alone is he better than most political commentators.
  - cdavid 6y ago
    Yeah, I guess if your baseline is political commentator, almost anything would be an improvement. But I fail to understand how supposedly nuanced he is. To me, he looks like a caricature of the American libertarian/conservative flavor.
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      His books are better than his interviews. I'd start there if you want to get a better understanding of him.
- ghostpepper 6y ago
  I think the terms “good scholar” and “insightful” are fairly subjective and open to interpretation so I am curious how you define them. I wonder if you could provide a few example of comparable people you think fit those descriptions better?
  - cdavid 6y ago
    I guess as a disclaimer I should say I am more of a progressive, and not from an American tradition. But in the same generic "conservative / learning libertarian" tradition as Sowell, I vastly prefer people like Tyler Cowen and to a lesser degree Russ Robert to give two very famous examples.
mattanimation 6y ago
Sowell is the man. Read his books.
- sparkling 6y ago
  .. and if you are wondering where to start, i'd suggest either "Basic Economics" or "Intellectuals and Society". The later being more relevant to todays culture.
  - Stronico 6y ago
    Go for the bedrock with "Knowledge and Decisions"
- bruiseralmighty 6y ago
  I feel like everyone should read Back Redneck, White Liberal. Reading this was illuminating. I had never heard this take on the story of America and race before reading Sowell.
  - tim333 6y ago
    Black Rednecks & White Liberals I think. "This explosive new book challenges many of the long-prevailing assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans, about slavery, and about education. " I thought Race And Culture: A World View maybe my favourite - explains a lot about the world.
bjeds 6y ago
Thomas Sowell has a greater reach than many people at Hacker News may think. In Sweden (of all places), he is one of the most quoted conservative intellectuals by some of our most read right-wing writers.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  The problem in the US is that many of the pundits on the right know of Sowell but don't know any of his work. They just recognize him as "one of us." Which has been detrimental to the US right. His books/writings/talks are accessible because he communicates in ways that anyone can understand. There is no word salad, unnecessary jargon, etc.
NDizzle 6y ago
I didn't know he had a book on late speaking children. I ordered that one because of this article. My 3rd child didn't say anything until 4. You couldn't get my first two kids to shut up starting around 2. It was frustrating and challenging. I fear that he's not gifted in any way, as the summary of the book suggests. He has had a load of speech problems that has slowed down his reading abilities dramatically.
- chmod600 6y ago
  I started to talk briefly, then stopped for about a year, which sort of counts as late-speaking. It's good to be concerned and to understand your child, but it doesn't sound like you should panic. People tell me I'm smart. Also, right now I believe we are overly-obsessed with intelligence. Intelligence is a tool; what's important is how you use it. A middling intellect with a good attitude can achieve a lot more than a high intellect and a middling attitude.
slibhb 6y ago
> In his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell argues persuasively that, “The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control of social processes. Therefore the anointed [essentially his proto-term for “woke”] necessarily find themselves repeatedly on a collision course with the family.” This is because, he continues, “the preservation of the family” is fundamentally a source of freedom. “Friedrich Engels’s first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family bonds as part of the Marxian political agenda.” In The Republic, Socrates famously argues that children should be raised in common, ignorant of their parentage. If you're going to take an ultra-rationalistic approach to raising children, "treat every child as if he/she is your own" is the ideal. This debate has been going on forever with victories and losses on both sides. Public school is an example of a triumph on the rationalist side. Of course, just because public schools worked out doesn't mean we should "abolish the nuclear family" but it is a good argument for the utility of this long-running debate.
- ctrlp 6y ago
  It's arguable whether public schools in the US are "working out" right now. As indoctrination day camps, maybe.
  - ctrlp 6y ago
    Elementary schools are shaping up to be little Woke madrassas. We're really failing our kids.
    - wrycoder 6y ago
      An accurate simile. Study woke and only woke.
zucker42 6y ago
Every discussion of Sowell online seems to attract fans of his declaring how brilliant he is. It's a bit strange the sort of hero worship he attracts. Personally, I've never seen it; while he seems like a reasonably smart person, his ideas are simply a mix of standard conservatism and condemnation of the intellectual establishment as he sees it. His views on immigration are uninspiring, the reasons he believes the U.S. is declining are unconvincing to me, and he vocally refuses to believe that climate change in an issue (in my opinion mostly because he is ideologically opposed to proposals to fight climate change). I think part of the reason a lot of conservatives love him is that his haughty and confident attitude, especially when speaking about other intellectuals, is quite seductive. It's convenient and attractive to think that many of the worlds problems are because of people (mostly liberals) who think they are smarter than they are.
- m0llusk 6y ago
  If you focus on his politics especially in a right-left context that makes sense, but his work touches on many social subjects and has considerable depth. I strongly recommend his book Migrations and Cultures where he documents how migrations tend to involve whole social groups and preserve networks. His conservative confidence seems to be his weakest spot. He is fond of claiming that any attempt to help the poor or discriminated against ends up harming them yet universal basic income trials have all had dramatically positive results. Extremists can bring up interesting arguments and information but tend to fail when it comes to realism, balance, and most important of all getting things done in order to make positive change.
  - tengbretson 6y ago
    I don't think I ever received a check from one of those trials, so they might not have been as "universal" as the name implied.
  - hajile 6y ago
    I don’t remember if he’s ever said anything publicly about UBI. Milton Friedman was on the record saying UBI is far superior to current welfare because it forces personal responsibility and choice while completely eliminating the massive welfare bureaucratic overhead.
ralusek 6y ago
Thomas Sowell is a titan. As was his recently deceased best friend and intellectual colleague Walter E. Williams. The leading public intellectual regarding race in America today is undoubtedly Ibram X. Kendi. His central thesis, that any differing outcomes between racial populations is evidence of racism, is the single topic that Thomas Sowell addressed more than any other. The breadth of his research on this particular topic spans hundreds to thousands of years, across the globe. Sowell has come to the near opposite conclusion, that to expect equal outcomes between populations with different histories, cultures, patterns of behavior, etc, is insane. And then to attribute the entire disparity as evidence of racism is doubly so. While Sowell is undoubtedly king, if you're interested in other black intellectuals with alternative takes on philosophy to the racial collectivism of critical race theory, Coleman Hughes is the single clearest thinker I have ever heard. John McWhorter, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, Carol Swaine, Desi-Rae Campbell, Josephine Mathias, Thomas Chatterton Williams (author of the article above), Zuby, among many others. I think every person on this list would tell you that it's irrelevant that they are black, while understanding that it is an important characteristic they possess while bridging the gap between their own liberal ideologies and the prevailing race-conscious critical race theory, for which their racial identities are paramount. https://youtu.be/TEBPCOG5RHs?t=66 https://youtu.be/TEBPCOG5RHs?t=66 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIv4L9M1ECU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIv4L9M1ECU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18tfyp_XgkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18tfyp_XgkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awIcRoDynh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awIcRoDynh0
- m0llusk 6y ago
  That is an interesting reading, but it is worth pointing out that Thomas Sowell consistently differentiates between race and culture. In particular in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals he asserts that many black people living in the American South picked up a redneck culture that does not well serve either them or the white people they picked it up from. Culture trumps race. Anyone could embrace redneck values if they feel they should.
  - ralusek 6y ago
    Yes, I think Thomas Sowell and most people on that list use "race" synonymously with "populations with certain phenotypes or ethnicities who are going to be bucketed together as such." Culture isn't the only thing by which he differentiates people bucketed across "races," but is definitely a primary one. He also very frequently talks about cultures within "races," as you've mentioned here. The drastically different performances between white immigrants to the US, depending on where they came from. Or the stellar performance of black immigrants from Nigeria or Ghana or the West Indies.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

222 points by RickJWagner 6y ago

> Many people wondered last summer why, for example, on the Black Lives Matter website the organization declared (and has since deleted) a “disruptive” stance on the nuclear family. What did that have to do with mobilizing against police violence? For a long time I was very sympathetic to BLM, I would even have considered protesting with them. It was the above that caused me to rethink my position and eventually decide that BLM was actually antagonistic to their very goal.

nullifidian 6y ago
"Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. In a revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”"
- chumich1 6y ago
  The idea of somebody being a "trained Marxist" is very funny. Personally, I'm a 4th degree Historical Materialist and I'm training for the 2nd level Communist obstacle course
  - yostrovs 6y ago
    It's not as funny when you get to live under the rule of well trained Marxists. Hundreds of millions of them have been produced over the last century. Look into a history book or just ask around.
    - devtul 6y ago
      It turns out that some genocidal ideologies are too hard to let go, we managed with Nazism pretty well but Marxism is taking some time. Cambodia under Pol Pot should have been enough.
      - yostrovs 6y ago
        Indeed it is surprising, but I think it's because communism wasn't put on trial when the Soviet Union collapsed. There weren't courts punishing gulag wardens and KGB officers for torture, murder, and everything else under the sun. Everything was forgiven for the sake of peace, but everyone learned the wrong lesson. Which is why when "nationalism" is mentioned, people think of Nazi germany, but when "socialism" is mentioned, today's youth especially wants to think of Sweden. The crimes of Nazi Germany are regularly mentioned in popular culture, but those of Communists not so much, though they're more contemporary, lasted much longer, and arguably affected a lot more people.
      - bopbeepboop 6y ago
        China is currently butchering Uyghurs. That people in the US espouse Marxist beliefs while a Marxist state commits genocide is “the same” as when parts of American society supported Nazis. Disney thanking China for their help filming Mulan next to a camp is the same simpering we saw from corporations supporting the Nazi regime.
  - tryonenow 6y ago
    I can see how it's "funny" if one is trying to minimize and deflect, but if they're hanging around characters like maduro then they're probably referring to more than just economic or government theory - these people see themselves as full blown subversive revolutionaries. And then if you consider the spread of critical theory and postmodernism and the general influence of the Frankfurt school through our institutions, then the overtly "anti-establishment" protesting and rioting spearheaded by BLM and Antifa (which "doesn't exist", "isn't an organization", sure, how typically "revolutionary") starts to look very much like the start of a subversive, insurrectionist ploy, much like that of the bolsheviks that lead to the disaster of a government that my family fled. And then it really isn't funny to me at all. And it also isn't funny to me when one considers that part of the rise of the Nazi party pre WWII can be attributed the behavior of very similar "revolutionary" communists who also were running destroying businesses and beating up citizens on the street for disagreement. No, I'd say such an overtly insurrectionist movement evolving openly in the US is not funny at all.
    - chumich1 6y ago
      I don't think you have much to worry about in the US. From my experience, those who call themselves "Marxist" have a hard time organizing a barbecue, let alone a revolution. They are mostly revolutionary LARPers. I think the internet and media sometimes magnify the size and power of these groups and it warps with our perception of reality. The largest Leninist group in the US is the PSL and they're a joke. A bunch of weirdos with no friends but the ones they found online
  - justaman 6y ago
    "Trained Marxist" might as well mean college graduate these days.
  - neartheplain 6y ago
    I’ve had colleagues in Silicon Valley who were members of their home countries’ Communist Party student organizations.
    - collyw 6y ago
      Commies killed a lot more than Nazis, yet I would be extremely surprised if Nazi party student organization would be allowed.
  - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    Why is this funny to you? There are many Marxist organizations in the world, surely some of them focus on organizing considering that one of the core ideas of many Marxist and “post”-Marxist intellectual currents (like critical theory) is proletarian or some other sort of revolution.
  - ctrlp 6y ago
    This suggests you didn't get a degree in the humanities in the past 20 years and don't understand the Leninist part of Marxist-Leninist.
    - claudiawerner 6y ago
      I'm yet to see anyone describe themselves as simply a 'trained Marxist' without any indication as to what that might mean specifically, other than these BLM leaders. A 'trained Marxist guerilla'? Sure. A 'trained Marxist economist'? Sure. 'Educatied in Marxism'? Sure. Even just a 'Marxist', sure. But even with the Leninist part (which the quote doesn't specify - there are plenty of non-Leninist Marxists about) it's unclear what it means to be a 'trained' one. It's not as though there's a 'Marxism coach' somewhere who trains you on understanding the significance of the ratio between constant and variable capital or the labour theory of value. It's hilarious because it's so vague, not because there are guerillas or revolutionaries who have been trained by Marxists in agitprop/organizing/guerilla tactics. In short, what's the difference between being a 'trained Marxist' and 'educated in the works of Marx and Engels'? If I heard someone describe themselves as a 'trained literary critic', I'd think exactly what GP pointed out too. My comment is just as much a criticism of the vagueness of the BLM leaders as it is the people who accept them at their word without even inquiring into what it means. For all we know, they could literally just be holding a philosophy degree completed with a Master's project in an aspect of Marxist philosophy.
      - tryonenow 6y ago
        >It's hilarious because it's so vague It's not hilarious, it's the modus operandi to keep things vague so that they can hide behind apologists when called out. Like hiding behind decentralization to minimize the implicitly organized behavior of antifa. It's disingenuous and subversive. Then again I suppose subversion is the point...
      - ctrlp 6y ago
        Right, if you haven't seen it it must not exist. Are you from Missouri? If that level of radical skepticism works for you, good on ya. Personally, I don't conflate things that I don't know with things that can't be known. A trained Marxist is an activist, it's really that simple. The point is not to interpret the world but to change it yada yada yada. A Leninist is a Marxist who believes the proletariat is too economically comfortable to bring about the revolution and therefore an intellectual vanguard of "trained" revolutionaries (marxist activists) are required to lead the way. Time to hit the books!
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  From Time's interview (https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors/ https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors...) of Cullors, the "main" founder and the only one still maintaining a leadership position at BLM: > Cullors weaves her intellectual influences into this narrative, from black feminist writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, to Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. Reading those social philosophers “provided a new understanding around what our economies could look like,” she says. Reading Lorde and hooks “helped me understand my identity.” All the people happily repeating "Black Lives Matter", putting up lawn signs, and donating to them have no idea that it is led by someone who admires and is inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Zedong. They think the accusations of Marxism are a right-wing conspiracy theory, when the reality is that this is the ideological rot at the core of the Black Lives Matter organization, that its philosophies and goals are based around the same principles espoused by some of the most dangerous ideologues of all time. From https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810 https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-m...: > the deaths caused by communist regimes [...] is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history
glasss 6y ago
I do hope everyone would be at least sympathetic towards other human beings wanting justice and equal treatment. I would be wary about that website and I would take whatever you see about a central organization relating to BLM with a grain of salt. I've been involved in local protests and other events in Chicago and I've never once been directed to or heard of a centralized website. I hope you reconsider your stance with the knowledge that BLM is a very decentralized movement, and (while anecdotal) no one I've known who's been involved has been "disruptive" towards the idea of nuclear families. If I can make any other supporting statements or answer questions that might sway you please let me know.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  I get that BLM is decentralized and I agree that most people are just protesting injustices, but then my question is: to whom did all that money go? Clearly it went to someone. Isn't it fair to consider this organization representative of BLM? > Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-lives-matter-raised-more-than-90-million-in-2020-01614135178 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-lives-matter-raised-...
  - runako 6y ago
    > my question is: to whom did all that money go? (The link you provide outlines where the money went.)
    - zo1 6y ago
      The point is that this "decentralized" movement has a central organization that has a lot of money donated to it, and that the central/important tenets of that central organization probably has some measurable influence in deciding which "decentralized" parts of the organization get funding/donations/focus/marketing. So if the "BLM" organization views the nuclear family as something that has to be abolished, then one can assume that they wouldn't donate to local BLM chapters that don't subscribe to that idea. Maybe not always, but a greater than 0% chance for sure. With this whole "decentralized" argument, we might as well say the Republican/Democratic parties are decentralized and that what the RNC and DNC do/say hasn't a huge bearing on the way that the individual local leaders/sub-organizations of the parties do or how their rallies behave. It's more "centralized" than BLM, sure, but like with a lot of things, it's not a black/white description. It's rather a range, and we can't just say "no it's not" when we can clearly see that the "central" portion has some bearing on the smaller parts. So, my thinking on this also aligns with the Sorites Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
rayiner 6y ago
The alliance of necessity between social liberals and racial justice advocates creates this problem. There is not anything inherent about “people of color should be treated equally” that also requires buying into “we should disrupt the nuclear family.” That’s just how the political alliances have worked out. The latter ideology in practice works to undercut the former ideology. The contribution to racial inequality is stark: the poverty rate for Black, Latino, and Asian children in two parent households is 1/4 to 1/2 the poverty rate for white children in single mother households. As a south Asian person, I find the aggressive push to move Asian Americans to the left quite troubling. The intense social norms in south and East Asian culture in favor of two parent households is an incredible advantage we should not give up lightly. But it’s almost taboo in socially progressive circles to say that family structure matters (even though this is obvious to Asians).
- throwaway6734 6y ago
  >But it’s almost taboo in socially progressive circles to say that family structure matters (even though this is obvious to Asians). You must hang in some especially woke circles
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    Doesn't seem that extreme to me. Even saying that divorce should be avoided at all costs and a two parent household is vastly superior to a single parent one is enough to get labeled as a conservative by many.
    - throwaway6734 6y ago
      Definitely not by the average American. Twitter and San Fran/Portland are a small minority of the US.
      - ceilingcorner 6y ago
        College students too, unfortunately.
brodouevencode 6y ago
There's the notion of BLM, of which only sociopaths would disagree, then there's BLM the organization which is exactly how you described it. The naming of this organization was actually a stroke of genius. Only the crazy edge cases would refute it's name but served as a Trojan horse for an ideology that is inherently un-American. If you disagree with them the immediate reaction has been "you don't think black lives matter?" This is a brilliant move.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Just an inheritance from the term progressive. "I disagree with you." "What, you're against progress?"
  - monoideism 6y ago
    Also "anti-fascist" and "anti-racist". The left has gotten clever with their naming, similar to the conservative movement in the 90s under the advisement of George Lakoff ("death tax", etc).
- seneca 6y ago
  It's a Motte and Bailey, by design (which I seem to end up pointing out a lot on HN, apology for the repetition but it's a common and important pattern). The core BLM organization are subversive Marxists. Their tenants are extremely un-American and probably not shared by most of the people marching under their banner. When you point this out, they can retreat from the Marxist Bailey to the racial equality Motte and attempt to shut down criticism. This pattern of equivocating between subversive ideas and basic liberal tenants is extremely damaging for the liberals accidentally aligning themselves with extremists, but this smokescreen tactic has existed longer than most any HN posters have been alive. This is the proverbial "Useful Innocents" (and its more pejorative alternative).
genghisjahn 6y ago
This is the language from the BLM site regarding disrupting the nuclear family. I'm very pro nuclear family. This didn't seem bad to me. -------------------------- We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work. We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. -----------------
- zpeti 6y ago
  A dig at fathers in the first paragraph, and a diplomatically stated rejection of the nuclear family in the second. You need to be very generous to interpret this as anything other than an attack on the traditional family.
  - calvinmorrison 6y ago
    And across all the KPI's we know of - kids in a two parent household are more successful by every measure.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Which is why it says they reject the "requirement". No one is denying that a 2 parent home is better. But if you are a kid that grew up with one parent, we need to have alternatives to help those kids thrive. Harping on the fact that 2 parents are better than 1 does nothing for kids with only one parent (except maybe make them feel defective and disadvantaged).
      - monstersinF 6y ago
        Who made it a requirement?
m0llusk 6y ago
It is amazing that people are always projecting these ideas of organization so aggressively. Here BLM is portrayed an organization with founding documents that are have important guiding philosophy from which the rest emerges. Actually looking at the people and what happened shows that there was very little organization involved and what little there was got conjured up late in the game by the most extreme involved players. In reality what happened is that our media intensive culture broadcast a nearly nine minute video of a black man being strangled by a cop and there was a broad visceral reaction against that. So what is really being said here is that a cop strangling a black man isn't that much of a big deal and what really matters is the philosophical positions expounded by the founding documents of the organization that emerged as protests grew. Want to object to cops strangling black men? You better be really slick with your organizational skills and foundational document writing because that is what really matters.
- bopbeepboop 6y ago
  Yes, it matters what the group espouses: a group using the death of George Floyd to attack the nuclear family using trickery is a second problem.
  - m0llusk 6y ago
    What group is this? Protesters used the slogan and there is now an organization that uses that slogan. Does that mean that the protestors and their protests can be conflated with the organization that makes use of the name? Sharing a negative reaction to cops murdering citizens is not the same as being an organized group. Slogans have great power, but not that power.
- collyw 6y ago
  The cop restrained a black man using a standard technique, while the balck man had overdose levels of fentanyl in his system. The cop has not been found guilty of strangling Floyd so far, and I believe the system in the US means innocent until proven guilty.
  - 6y ago
collyw 6y ago
Can anyone point me to where the millions raised by BLM after the summer riots has gone? BLM seem to cause a lot of agitation, but I am not aware of them doing anything helpful to the communities that it claims to be fighting for.
- justaman 6y ago
  ActBlue.
ctrlp 6y ago
BLM was founded by Marxist-Leninist activists. The original statements about the nuclear family were consistent with viewing the family as a site of patriachical oppression. None of that antagonism is innovative or surprising if you know a bit if intellectual history. I suspect they changed the language because it was too radical to hold a coalition together. Most people seem to like their families and view the nuclear family as a good thing.
- ctrlp 6y ago
  I see I'm getting downvoted. Will any downvoters have the balls to say why? Here's the relevant quote: "Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. In a revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”"
olalonde 6y ago
I was sympathetic with the anti police (brutality) movement but I was never convinced that racism was disproportionally responsible for it. Gender seems to be an even greater factor, yet you don't see a "Male Lives Matter" movement. I don't have a strong opinion on the subject though and I'd be open to see some data.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Black males seem to disproportionately die at the hands of police. But BLM is about much more than just death. Death is just a catalyst that makes people notice. Lots of Black people deal with disrespect and abuse from police on a regular basis. A lot of the seemingly flippant behavior from Black people towards police that we sometimes see during recorded interactions is well earned by years of subtle, and not so subtle harassment by some police officers. Look up some of Amber Ruffin's videos on her interactions with police growing up in NYC. It's pretty eye opening and all of my Black friends have echoed similar stories. Another example that comes to mind is the story of the Black women and children that were made to get out of their car and lay handcuffed, face down on the asphalt in the arizona sun while the cops slowly discovered that the car they were driving was not actually stolen and that they had read the plate wrong. Supposedly, the cops tried to handcuff the little 7 year old girl but even fully tightened her wrists were too small. I have been unable to find a comparable story of an innocent white family of women and children made to lay handcuffed face down like that. I suspect very strongly those same cops would not have treated a white family like that. Excess deaths at the hands of cops is just a serious symptom of a much larger underlying problem of disrespect and abuse.
  - chmod600 6y ago
    The other comment raised the interesting point that the gender gap is a stronger signal here than the race gap. Do you have a comment on that?
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Seems irrelevant. Of course police see women as less threatening. Most police are men. Though I'm sure Black women are killed by police at higher rates than white women. Seems like just trying to redirect the narrative. Kind of like when you bring up the studies where identical resumes were sent out half with white sounding names and half with Black sounding names and the white sounding names get way more callbacks. The response is usually something like, that probably has more to do with class/wealth, not race. As if the two are not strongly linked.
scdp 6y ago
Yes, much like how MLK's popularity made this country socialist. This whole thread reeks of "unwise and untimely".
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Black activists (people presenting themselves as activists on behalf of black folk) seem to never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It's almost as if the people funding these activists don't have black folks interest in mind at all... Long history of this. Many such cases. Follow the money and you'll see.
throwawaysea 6y ago
What's even more shady is that they did not acknowledge the criticism directed on this point at all. Instead they quiety scrubbed their "What We Believe" page (https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-anti-american-marxist-language-from-its-website https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-ant...), without actually admitting that this screed was based on Marxist philosophy (likely Friedrich Engels). In various works, such as "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", Engels claimed that the modern family unit gave rise to the notion of private property, and therefore capitalism, and that it must be undone for socialism to succeed. The greater ecosystem of fundamental socialist and communist theory includes proposals to ban all home and religion education, banning concepts like property and inheritance, nationalizing various housework, and even separating children from parents at an early age so they could primarily be reared by the state (https://thefederalist.com/2015/06/29/americans-buy-into-marxist-family-planning/ https://thefederalist.com/2015/06/29/americans-buy-into-marx...). It's incredible to me that activists who often complain about vague "dog whistles" cannot connect the dots on an ideological relation that is so basic and clear.

JasonFruit 6y ago

Sowell has the great and challenging characteristic that he never quite gives you the answer that would let you justify your first reactions with, "See? He agrees with me!" His writing is too nuanced to provide an easy escape from thinking, even if people occasionally use cut-up quotes to do so.

debacle 6y ago
I believe this is with great intent - ideologues of every flavor will leap at the first opportunity to claim speakers like Sowell for their faction.
- chmod600 6y ago
  The left will never admit any agreement with Sowell, even about the weather. That's what the article is about -- he's completely ignored in liberal-thinking circles, and he shouldn't be.
  - flyingfences 6y ago
    > in liberal-thinking circles In leftist-thinking circles. Let's not forget what "liberal" is supposed to mean.
tim333 6y ago
I like Sowell and agree with him but many of his positions would get you rapidly cancelled by the woke if spoken while white. He got away with saying sometimes negative things about black Americans by being one himself.

seneca 6y ago

It's a loss for Americans of all political stripes that Sowell hasn't been the public face of American Conservatism for decades. He's passionate, articulate, and, most of all, deeply nuanced in his thoughts. I don't always agree with him, but I've rarely read or listened to his thoughts and not come away with something to consider. I'm excited to read the linked biography when it's published.

JasonFruit 6y ago
I'm on the conservative side, mostly, and I'm deeply disappointed by most prominent conservative voices. There's much more of value in conservative thought than people hear from conservative mouthpieces in the media, but instead we get ugly stupidity.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  If you look at the political incumbents on both sides you’ll be sorely disappointed. Many people who end up in positions of leadership in either parties are basically insiders who did their time and climbed the ladder, and who are deeply unpopular. Candidates who garner a lot of attention are actually viewed as a threat by the incumbents and are usually buried, destroyed, or sidelined. Take Yang, Tulsi and Ron Paul as a few examples.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Social media reward clickbait, ergo clickbait grows.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I agree. Even though I'm a liberal, I'm sad to see the conservative intellectual tradition in such bad shape. I always felt it would be better for your opponents to rally around their best arguments/figures rather than their least savory arguments/figures. I think it has also made us (liberals) lazier--we don't need to bring coherent, reasoned arguments because we can settle for "well, at least we're better than Trump". We're all racing to the bottom.

iagovar 6y ago

I began studying sociology in my mid 20s. That's what threw me off the left most than anything else. I remember I discovered Sowell about that time, and it was challenging and refreshing. I'm still a strange flavor of a utilitarian social democrat, but he's the reason why I picked up this routine of reading libertarians and conservatives. I dismissed some controversial right-wing figures in my country and reading their books (sometimes) challenge my ideas, and often improves my empathy.

chrispai 6y ago
Despite considering myself very politically aware, I first learned of him just in the last few years. I'm perpetually amazed that more people are not familiar with Sowell's work over many decades. It makes me wonder whether he was ignored because he was a black man challenging many of the left's dogmas.
- iagovar 6y ago
  More than being black, which I'm sure it contributes, I think he was a bit of an outsider in academia. Typically you would make friends and connections so your work gets more spread out. It seems that sowell was a bit on his own. There's a lot of nepotism in academia, only the filter of time seems counterbalance it.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> The left takes its vision seriously — more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep. (“Left” in this context is the authoritarian top-left of the political quadrant)

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prionassembly 6y ago
The political quadrant model is seriously overrated. It may be that libertarian/authoritarian Left is a meaningful distinction in some contexts and not others; or that authoritarian Left/Right is a useful categorization for some purposes, but not for others.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Why, specifically?
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    Because the pair of distinctions chosen makes sense in some cases and not in others. I provided two examples in my comment above.
    - bhupy 6y ago
      I don't see any examples in your comment.
      - prionassembly 6y ago
        I might be engaging a troll, but I'll ctrl-c ctrl-v. "It may be that libertarian/authoritarian Left is a meaningful distinction in some contexts and not others; or that authoritarian Left/Right is a useful categorization for some purposes, but not for others."

languagehacker 6y ago

This post is awful. The author takes a drastic misunderstanding of the operating model of BLM, which is largely decentralized, and uses it to attribute degenerative philosophical characteristics to a group of people all banded together on a loose set of shared goals -- primarily stopping racial violence instigated by police, a problem which cannot be denied in the US. Kendi's work is extremely good, very provocative, and also long enough that I doubt a single person can succinctly summarize it -- let alone refute it through the words of someone else in a mere paragraph. I suppose "consider the source" is at play here. From what I can tell, this site is nothing but the blogosphere version of some garbage neocon beltway think tank.

inglor_cz 6y ago
> Kendi's work is extremely good Kendi proposes a constitutional amendment that would enshrine the principle that Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy (from certain threshold that he does not specify), and create Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas. [0] Do you find this proposal even good, much less extremely good? I don't. This is an attempt to bend reality by law, which rarely works, but usually has a plethora of unexpected negative consequences. It also goes completely against any individualism that characterizes the Western society and elevates racial groups to basic building blocks of the country. https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/ https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...
- deleted 6y ago
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- pharmakom 6y ago
  "Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy" if it's not, then would wildly unequal outcomes not imply some races are superior to others? the science indicates that this is not the case so how else can it be explained? --- Hmmm people didn't like this. I will add the statistic I can't get out my head: Incarceration rates in USA (adult male) per 100k White - 450 Hispanic - 831 Black - 2306 Asian - 210 I don't think this can be explained as cultural or genetic.

sradman 6y ago

Written by Thomas Chatterton Williams [1], author of Self-Portrait in Black and White [2]: > “It’s not about color for me,” my aunt said while railing against Obama. “For example, I love Thomas Sowell.” > To that side of my extended family, I became the stereotype of a coastal liberal, writing for the New York Times and wholly out of touch with the real America. In fact, I’ve always prided and defined myself as an anti-tribal thinker, and sometime contrarian, working firmly within a left-of-center black tradition... Why was this published in Law & Liberty, has he burned his left-of-center media bridges? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chatterton_Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chatterton_Williams [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_in_Black_and_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_in_Black_and_Whi...

JPKab 6y ago
Yes and no. He doesn't burn bridges, but left of center media elites pull up the drawbridges. On topics like this, they view college activists as authoritative, objective sources of truth on race. Those activists view Sowell, and TCW, as heretics.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Recall also progressive journalist Lee Fang, who endured a cancellation campaign from colleagues at The Intercept because he Tweeted an interview with a black man who expressed concern about black-on-black crime. Many progressive activists and the media also aren't especially keen on Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Razib Khan, or dozens of other outspoken people of color. There seems to be some strong compulsion in the media to suppress any indication that people of color (and blacks in particular) are as complex and intellectually or ideologically diverse as whites. I don't think that's quite the right characterization, but it's not far off.
  - collyw 6y ago
    Progressives already have the solution to the problem, therefore examining the cause can only do harm to their ideas.

apineda 6y ago

One of the great public thinkers today for sure.

lbj 6y ago

Great piece. I have to admit I'm a bit of a fan when it comes to both Friedman and Sowell. They seem to have the rare gift of understanding subjects so well and intuitively that they can explain those subjects more plainly than anyone else. Where most economists have disappointed me greatly in their understanding of math, Sowell has done to opposite.

MuffinFlavored 6y ago
I have this feeling Sowell isn’t liked/respected by AOC/Pelosi because of how hard he disagrees with them. Can anybody tell me how he is perceived by liberals? Not trying to get political. Genuinely curious if he is an outcast to the left because a ton of what he says seems to fall into “conservative views”.
- chmod600 6y ago
  He's mostly dismissed/ignored by the left.
  - MuffinFlavored 6y ago
    That's why I thought. Why would you say that is? He's obviously educated and speaks with "facts" that have "references", but it just feels like the left does not like his facts/does not agree with the same conclusion his references reach. I'm not big into politics but I don't really understand how two different parties can both use "science and data" to reach totally separate conclusions. Which one is lying/wrong? As a programmer, it just doesn't compute. Input and output and all that.
    - chmod600 6y ago
      Politics is informed by data, but it's not a science. There is no "right" answer (though arguably a lot of wrong ones). Think of stuff that programmers do argue about. Type systems, databases, architecture, agile development, etc. Logic is a great tool, but it's also more limited than people realize.
- 6y ago

newbie578 6y ago

Wow, reading this was really enjoyable and valuable. I intend to read Sowell more.

throwaway183210 6y ago

in before delete

cdavid 6y ago

I don't get what make him popular around certain crowds in HN. He is very polemical (I mean he was arguing that Obama would lead the US to live under Sharia law), is not a particularly good scholar, nor very insightful. Certainly, nothing he wrote as articles gave me a desire to read some of his books. There are tons of smarter, more interesting people in the conservative sphere, especially around libertarian/conservative "brand". I don't get it.

ceilingcorner 6y ago
I wouldn't consider myself a huge Sowell fan, but I do recognize his appeal. He speaks simply, writes prolifically, uses data generously, and has no issues calling out BS. For that reason alone is he better than most political commentators.
- cdavid 6y ago
  Yeah, I guess if your baseline is political commentator, almost anything would be an improvement. But I fail to understand how supposedly nuanced he is. To me, he looks like a caricature of the American libertarian/conservative flavor.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    His books are better than his interviews. I'd start there if you want to get a better understanding of him.
ghostpepper 6y ago
I think the terms “good scholar” and “insightful” are fairly subjective and open to interpretation so I am curious how you define them. I wonder if you could provide a few example of comparable people you think fit those descriptions better?
- cdavid 6y ago
  I guess as a disclaimer I should say I am more of a progressive, and not from an American tradition. But in the same generic "conservative / learning libertarian" tradition as Sowell, I vastly prefer people like Tyler Cowen and to a lesser degree Russ Robert to give two very famous examples.

mattanimation 6y ago

Sowell is the man. Read his books.

sparkling 6y ago
.. and if you are wondering where to start, i'd suggest either "Basic Economics" or "Intellectuals and Society". The later being more relevant to todays culture.
- Stronico 6y ago
  Go for the bedrock with "Knowledge and Decisions"
bruiseralmighty 6y ago
I feel like everyone should read Back Redneck, White Liberal. Reading this was illuminating. I had never heard this take on the story of America and race before reading Sowell.
- tim333 6y ago
  Black Rednecks & White Liberals I think. "This explosive new book challenges many of the long-prevailing assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans, about slavery, and about education. " I thought Race And Culture: A World View maybe my favourite - explains a lot about the world.

bjeds 6y ago

Thomas Sowell has a greater reach than many people at Hacker News may think. In Sweden (of all places), he is one of the most quoted conservative intellectuals by some of our most read right-wing writers.

brodouevencode 6y ago
The problem in the US is that many of the pundits on the right know of Sowell but don't know any of his work. They just recognize him as "one of us." Which has been detrimental to the US right. His books/writings/talks are accessible because he communicates in ways that anyone can understand. There is no word salad, unnecessary jargon, etc.

NDizzle 6y ago

I didn't know he had a book on late speaking children. I ordered that one because of this article. My 3rd child didn't say anything until 4. You couldn't get my first two kids to shut up starting around 2. It was frustrating and challenging. I fear that he's not gifted in any way, as the summary of the book suggests. He has had a load of speech problems that has slowed down his reading abilities dramatically.

chmod600 6y ago
I started to talk briefly, then stopped for about a year, which sort of counts as late-speaking. It's good to be concerned and to understand your child, but it doesn't sound like you should panic. People tell me I'm smart. Also, right now I believe we are overly-obsessed with intelligence. Intelligence is a tool; what's important is how you use it. A middling intellect with a good attitude can achieve a lot more than a high intellect and a middling attitude.

slibhb 6y ago

> In his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell argues persuasively that, “The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control of social processes. Therefore the anointed [essentially his proto-term for “woke”] necessarily find themselves repeatedly on a collision course with the family.” This is because, he continues, “the preservation of the family” is fundamentally a source of freedom. “Friedrich Engels’s first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family bonds as part of the Marxian political agenda.” In The Republic, Socrates famously argues that children should be raised in common, ignorant of their parentage. If you're going to take an ultra-rationalistic approach to raising children, "treat every child as if he/she is your own" is the ideal. This debate has been going on forever with victories and losses on both sides. Public school is an example of a triumph on the rationalist side. Of course, just because public schools worked out doesn't mean we should "abolish the nuclear family" but it is a good argument for the utility of this long-running debate.

ctrlp 6y ago
It's arguable whether public schools in the US are "working out" right now. As indoctrination day camps, maybe.
- ctrlp 6y ago
  Elementary schools are shaping up to be little Woke madrassas. We're really failing our kids.
  - wrycoder 6y ago
    An accurate simile. Study woke and only woke.

zucker42 6y ago

Every discussion of Sowell online seems to attract fans of his declaring how brilliant he is. It's a bit strange the sort of hero worship he attracts. Personally, I've never seen it; while he seems like a reasonably smart person, his ideas are simply a mix of standard conservatism and condemnation of the intellectual establishment as he sees it. His views on immigration are uninspiring, the reasons he believes the U.S. is declining are unconvincing to me, and he vocally refuses to believe that climate change in an issue (in my opinion mostly because he is ideologically opposed to proposals to fight climate change). I think part of the reason a lot of conservatives love him is that his haughty and confident attitude, especially when speaking about other intellectuals, is quite seductive. It's convenient and attractive to think that many of the worlds problems are because of people (mostly liberals) who think they are smarter than they are.

m0llusk 6y ago
If you focus on his politics especially in a right-left context that makes sense, but his work touches on many social subjects and has considerable depth. I strongly recommend his book Migrations and Cultures where he documents how migrations tend to involve whole social groups and preserve networks. His conservative confidence seems to be his weakest spot. He is fond of claiming that any attempt to help the poor or discriminated against ends up harming them yet universal basic income trials have all had dramatically positive results. Extremists can bring up interesting arguments and information but tend to fail when it comes to realism, balance, and most important of all getting things done in order to make positive change.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  I don't think I ever received a check from one of those trials, so they might not have been as "universal" as the name implied.
- hajile 6y ago
  I don’t remember if he’s ever said anything publicly about UBI. Milton Friedman was on the record saying UBI is far superior to current welfare because it forces personal responsibility and choice while completely eliminating the massive welfare bureaucratic overhead.

ralusek 6y ago

Thomas Sowell is a titan. As was his recently deceased best friend and intellectual colleague Walter E. Williams. The leading public intellectual regarding race in America today is undoubtedly Ibram X. Kendi. His central thesis, that any differing outcomes between racial populations is evidence of racism, is the single topic that Thomas Sowell addressed more than any other. The breadth of his research on this particular topic spans hundreds to thousands of years, across the globe. Sowell has come to the near opposite conclusion, that to expect equal outcomes between populations with different histories, cultures, patterns of behavior, etc, is insane. And then to attribute the entire disparity as evidence of racism is doubly so. While Sowell is undoubtedly king, if you're interested in other black intellectuals with alternative takes on philosophy to the racial collectivism of critical race theory, Coleman Hughes is the single clearest thinker I have ever heard. John McWhorter, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, Carol Swaine, Desi-Rae Campbell, Josephine Mathias, Thomas Chatterton Williams (author of the article above), Zuby, among many others. I think every person on this list would tell you that it's irrelevant that they are black, while understanding that it is an important characteristic they possess while bridging the gap between their own liberal ideologies and the prevailing race-conscious critical race theory, for which their racial identities are paramount. https://youtu.be/TEBPCOG5RHs?t=66 https://youtu.be/TEBPCOG5RHs?t=66 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIv4L9M1ECU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIv4L9M1ECU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18tfyp_XgkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18tfyp_XgkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awIcRoDynh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awIcRoDynh0

m0llusk 6y ago
That is an interesting reading, but it is worth pointing out that Thomas Sowell consistently differentiates between race and culture. In particular in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals he asserts that many black people living in the American South picked up a redneck culture that does not well serve either them or the white people they picked it up from. Culture trumps race. Anyone could embrace redneck values if they feel they should.
- ralusek 6y ago
  Yes, I think Thomas Sowell and most people on that list use "race" synonymously with "populations with certain phenotypes or ethnicities who are going to be bucketed together as such." Culture isn't the only thing by which he differentiates people bucketed across "races," but is definitely a primary one. He also very frequently talks about cultures within "races," as you've mentioned here. The drastically different performances between white immigrants to the US, depending on where they came from. Or the stellar performance of black immigrants from Nigeria or Ghana or the West Indies.

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