By Jason Riley | The Wall Street Journal
ILLUSTRATION:
BARBARA KELLEY
Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime challenging the
orthodoxy on race, economics and more—and produced an impressive body of
scholarship along the way.
Economist Thomas Sowell has grown accustomed to a certain
type of media query, usually from white interviewers. They want to know how, as
a black conservative, he has dealt with criticism from fellow blacks. Charlie
Rose once asked: “How was it, though, for you . . . to be an
African-American man respected by a cross-section of your peers and yet be so
against the grain of fellow African-Americans?”
Mr. Sowell, 90, usually responds by challenging the
premise. “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow
African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American
intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more
typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.”
In another interview, Mr. Sowell told C-Span’s Brian Lamb
that black strangers regularly stop him in public and compliment his views:
“When I checked out of my hotel this morning, the black security guard came
over and said, ‘Are you Sowell?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he shook my hand warmly
and we walked—he walked me the length of the corridor and talked about this and
about that. . . . So, it’s not Sowell versus blacks. It’s the black
intellectuals.”
There is a long history of conflating the interests of
black Americans with those of black organizations, black journalists, black
academics and other elites. The media lazily continues to turn to these groups,
from the NAACP to Black Lives Matter, as if they speak for all black people.
In December 1980, Mr. Sowell headlined the “Black
Alternatives” conference in San Francisco. Its goal was to showcase the variety
of perspectives among black politicians, intellectuals and civil-rights
activists. “The people who were invited,” he began his keynote address, “are
people who are seeking alternatives, people who have challenged the
conventional wisdom on one or more issues, people who have thought for
themselves instead of marching in step and chanting familiar refrains. . . . We
have come through a historic phase of struggle for basic civil rights—a very
necessary struggle, but not sufficient. The very success of that struggle has
created new priorities and new urgencies. There are economic realities to
confront and self-development to achieve, in the schools, at work, in our
communities.”
Liberal elites expected whites to solve the problems of
blacks. They still do. Newer movements like Black Lives Matter, and younger
public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, are far more
interested in white behavior than in black behavior. In his speech, Mr. Sowell
took a different approach. “The sins of others are always fascinating to human
beings, but they are not always the best way to self-development or
self-advancement,” he said. “The moral regeneration of white people might be an
interesting project, but I am not sure we have quite that much time to spare.
Those who have fought on this front are very much like the generals who like to
refight the last war instead of preparing for the next struggle.”
The 1980 conference received extensive press coverage,
and there was talk of a sequel and of creating an organization that challenged
the civil-rights old guard. The plans faltered amid internal disagreements, and
Mr. Sowell realized such an entity would take too much time away from his
research and writing. We will never know how such an organization might have
fared, but it’s probably not a coincidence that the conference took place when
it did. Beginning in the late 1970s, a dozen or so serious black thinkers
gained attention for challenging various aspects of the civil-rights orthodoxy
that had solidified in the 1960s. On a few issues at least, Mr. Sowell seemed
at the time to be gaining some black intellectual allies.
They included Randall Kennedy, William Julius Wilson,
Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, Walter Williams, Stephen Carter,
Orlando Patterson, Stanley Crouch, Anne Wortham and Robert Woodson. The media
would refer to them as “black conservatives” or “black neoconservatives,”
although the labels didn’t fit some of them. Mr. Kennedy, a law professor, was
open-minded on some racial issues but firmly entrenched on the political left.
Mr. Wilson, a sociologist, was a European-style social democrat. The writings
of Ms. Wortham and Williams, respectively a sociologist and an economist, had a
strong libertarian bent. The “conservative” labels were a kind of shorthand to
describe any black intellectual who took a position on a racial or cultural
topic contrary to the received wisdom among black elites.
Black elites on the left have only tightened their grip
on the prevailing racial narrative. That had less to do with the efficacy of
their policies than with their ability to convince the media that other black
perspectives were illegitimate, if not harmful. Typical of the dominant view is
legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s assertion that “the Black community
must develop and maintain a distinct political consciousness” because “the most
valuable political asset of the Black community has been its ability to assert
a collective identity and to name its collective political reality.”
Mr. Sowell fleshed out his philosophical conservatism in
books such as “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980) and “A Conflict of Visions”
(1987). His approach is rooted in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s
nuanced: “It is hard to think of anyone who is, or has been, a black
conservative, in the full sense of the word ‘conservative,’ ” he wrote in
a 2001 article. “Most of those who are called black conservatives are certainly
not interested in preserving the status quo. That status quo includes welfare,
failing schools, quotas, and separatism that most black conservatives deplore
and attack. Still less are they seeking to return to a status quo ante, such as
the Jim Crow era.”
Black conservatism is often equated with an emphasis on
self-help in the mold of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Mr.
Sowell has shown in his writings that groups that confront and address internal
problems are best able to rise socially and economically. “If the history of
American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played
by attitudes of self-reliance,” he wrote in “Race and Economics” (1975). “The
success of the antebellum ‘free persons of color’ compared to the later black
immigrants to the North, the advancement of the Italian-Americans beyond the
Irish-Americans who had many other advantages, the resilience of the
Japanese-Americans despite numerous campaigns of persecution, all emphasize the
importance of this factor, however mundane and unfashionable it may be.”
For Mr. Sowell, however, initiative alone is
insufficient. “It would be premature at best and presumptuous at worst to
attempt to draw sweeping or definitive conclusions from my personal
experiences,” he wrote in “Black Education: Myths and Tragedies” (1972). “It
would be especially unwarranted to draw Horatio Alger conclusions, that
perseverance and/or ability ‘win out’ despite obstacles. The fact is, I was
losing in every way until my life was changed by the Korean War, the draft, and
the GI Bill—none of which I can take credit for. I have no false modesty about
having seized the opportunity and world to make it pay off, but there is no way
to avoid the fact that there first had to be an opportunity to seize.”
Government has a role to play in social mobility, albeit a limited one, and
incentives matter. Handouts that ask little or nothing of the recipient, and
thus risk creating dependency, were the kind that worried Mr. Sowell.
Nevertheless, it is a pragmatic individualism, along with
self-help, that defines Sowellian black conservatism. Ms. Crenshaw’s
“collective identity” mindset is anathema to Mr. Sowell, who sees little
evidence that embracing a racial or ethnic identity and flaunting it helps
underperforming groups excel. More fundamentally, Mr. Sowell argued in “Race
and Culture: A World View” (1994) that “the history of ideas—both social and
scientific—shows again and again that even the most brilliant thinkers
typically grasp only part of the truth, and a fuller understanding comes only
after a clash of ideas with others, even when those others are fundamentally
mistaken on the whole. Those who insist on a monolithic group ideology are
gambling the group’s future on being able to achieve such an understanding
without this process.”
One of the first places Anne Wortham published her work
was the Freeman, a now-defunct libertarian magazine. After reading one of her
submissions in the mid-1960s, an editor told her that it reminded him of the
writings of black journalist George Schuyler (1895-1977). Schuyler was a
political conservative and fierce anticommunist who also wrote satirical novels
and cultural criticism and published regularly in H.L. Mencken’s American
Mercury magazine.
In his history of black conservatism, Christopher Alan
Bracey wrote that Schuyler’s “lifework proves useful in understanding the
trajectory of black conservatism in the modern era.” Schuyler “lived and died
believing that blackness and conservatism were not antithetical, yet he
ultimately failed to persuade the masses of black people as to the
‘correctness’ of his position.” Nevertheless, his work “ensured that the legacy
of black conservative thought would remain available for resuscitation within
black political discourse.”
In my discussions about Mr. Sowell’s legacy with Ms.
Wortham, Walter Williams, Gerald Early and others, Schuyler’s name arose more
often than either Frederick Douglass’s or Booker T. Washington’s. Schuyler also
came up in my conversations with Mr. Sowell. This was not necessarily because
he agreed with the positions Schuyler took on this or that issue. Rather, it
reflected an appreciation of the example the journalist set in fearlessly
challenging, on principle, orthodox thinking on racial matters.
In a review of a collection of Schuyler’s writings, Mr.
Sowell called him perhaps “the first black conservative” and “one of the best”
besides. “Booker T. Washington may come to mind as a predecessor, but
. . . [Washington] was primarily an educator, rather than someone who
made his living from his writings, as Schuyler did. Moreover, the
circumspection that marked Booker T. Washington’s words, during a particularly
bitter and dangerous time for black Americans, was nowhere to be seen in
Schuyler’s later witty, cutting and brutally honest writings that took no
prisoners,” Mr. Sowell wrote. “His insights were always enlightening, even if
his conclusions were not always easy to agree with.”
Mr. Sowell could be describing himself, but even Schuyler
was no Thomas Sowell. Schuyler was one of the most prominent black journalists
of his day, but by the time he died his star had faded, and today his work is
largely forgotten. Even in his prime, which lasted from the 1920s through the
1960s, Schuyler was known almost exclusively for his writings on racial issues.
Mr. Sowell, by contrast, has a distinguished body of work in social theory and
economic history that is separate from his scholarship on race, culture and
inequality. The sheer volume of Mr. Sowell’s writings is surpassed by few
contemporaries, black or nonblack. The breadth and depth of his erudition makes
the label “black conservative,” however the term is defined, too limiting. His
scholarship will be studied and grappled with long after he’s gone.
When I asked Mr. Early, a professor of African American
studies at Washington University in St. Louis, why Mr. Sowell hadn’t received
the same recognition as less-accomplished scholars, he said it was “because the
liberal left dominate intellectual circles. They dominate intellectual circles
at universities. They dominate intellectual circles at foundations. They
dominate intellectual circles insofar as intellectual prizes and awards are
given.” Mr. Sowell hasn’t sought the approval of these circles, and he has paid
the price. Still, Mr. Early believes that Mr. Sowell will get his due sooner or
later.
For his part, Mr. Sowell doesn’t seem worried about his
intellectual legacy. When I asked him where he’d made his mark, he said he’ll
leave it to others to determine. “One of the things I admire about John Stuart
Mill—despite some things I don’t admire—is that he never tried to toot his horn
about contributions that he’d made to economics,” he said. “And he made some.
There were things that hadn’t been said by his predecessors. But when he wrote
his ‘Principles of Political Economy,’ he just blends it all together. His
point is to get across a certain unified body of knowledge and analysis to the
reader without bothering to say how much of it came from him, how much from
[David] Ricardo, how much from [Adam] Smith and so forth.”
Mr. Sowell sees his own work as part of a continuum. In a
2006 letter to Walter Williams, who died in December at 84, he wrote: “Back in
earlier years, you and I were both pretty pessimistic as to whether what we
were writing would make any impact—especially since the two of us seemed to be
the only ones saying what we were saying. Today at least we know that there are
lots of other blacks writing and saying similar things—more than I can keep
track of, in fact—and many of them are sufficiently younger that we know there
will be good people carrying on the fight after we are gone.”
Mr. Riley is a Journal columnist, a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of “Maverick: A Biography of
Thomas Sowell,” from which this article is adapted.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-soul-of-black-conservatism-11622226565?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
