Williams: What the Left Gets Wrong About Racial Disparities

My longtime friend and colleague Thomas Sowell has just published a revised and enlarged edition of “Discrimination and Disparities.” It lays waste to myth after myth about the causes of human differences not only in the United States but around the globe.

Throughout the book, Sowell shows that socio-economic outcomes differ vastly among individuals, groups, and nations in ways that cannot be easily explained by any one factor, whether it’s genetics, sex, or race discrimination or a history of gross mistreatment that includes expulsion and genocide.

In his book “The Philadelphia Negro” (1899), W.E.B. Du Bois posed the question as to what would happen if white people lost their prejudices overnight. He said that it would make little difference to most blacks. He said: “Some few would be promoted, some few would get new places—the mass would remain as they are” until the younger generation began to “try harder” and the race “lost the omnipresent excuse for failure: prejudice.”

Sowell points out that if historical injustices and persecution were useful explanations of group disadvantage, Jews would be some of the poorest and least-educated people in the world today. Few groups have been victimized down through history as have the Jews.

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