Sowell Food

Thomas Sowell—an African-American economist who serves as Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute—is a national treasure. He is a prolific intellectual with extraordinary research skills, and yet he is also known for his clarity, his concision, and his common sense. I wish everyone who cares about race in America would consider reading his writing.

In an editorial for this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Sowell writes:

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population—whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever—have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race—that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts.

What, then, is the explanation? Read the article to find out.

Sowell’s new book—Black Rednecks and White Liberals: And Other Cultural and Ethnic Issues—is being released this week. According to the book description, this is “the capstone of decades of outstanding research and writing on racial and cultural issues by Thomas Sowell.”