By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
There are so many fallacies about race that it would be
hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many of
the other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about
different races being unequally represented in various institutions or careers,
or at different income or achievement levels.
A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different
racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the
economy, and in other endeavors was taken as proof that some races were
genetically superior to others.
Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior
that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton
urged “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”
It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like
this. Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the leading
universities, and were internationally renowned.
Presidents of Stanford University and of MIT were among
the many academic advocates of theories of racial inferiority — applied mostly
to people from Eastern and Southern Europe, since it was just blithely assumed
in passing that blacks were inferior.
This was not a Left—Right issue. The leading crusaders
for theories of genetic superiority and inferiority were iconic figures on the
left on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Maynard Keynes helped create the Cambridge Eugenics
Society. Fabian socialist intellectuals H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw
were among many other leftist supporters of eugenics.
It was much the same story on this side of the Atlantic.
President Woodrow Wilson, like many other Progressives, was solidly behind
notions of racial superiority and inferiority. He showed the movie Birth of a
Nation, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House, and invited various
dignitaries to view it with him.
Such views dominated the first two decades of the 20th
century. Now fast forward to the last few decades of the 20th century. The
political Left of this era was now on the opposite end of the spectrum on
racial issues. Yet they too regarded differences in outcomes among racial and
ethnic groups as something unusual, calling for some single, sweeping
explanation.
Now, instead of genes being the overriding reason for
differences in outcomes, racism became the one-size-fits-all explanation. But
the dogmatism was the same. Those who dared to disagree, or even to question
the prevailing dogma in either era were dismissed — as “sentimentalists” in the
Progressive era and as “racists” in the multicultural era.
Both the Progressives at the beginning of the 20th
century and the liberals at the end started from the same false premise —
namely, that there is something unusual about different racial and ethnic
groups having different achievements.
Yet some racial or ethnic minorities have owned or
directed more than half of whole industries in many nations. These have
included the Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese in West Africa, Greeks in the
Ottoman Empire, Britons in Argentina, Indians in Fiji, Jews in Poland, and
Spaniards in Chile — among many others.
Not only different racial and ethnic groups, but whole
nations and civilizations, have had very different achievements for centuries.
China in the 15th century was more advanced than any country in Europe.
Eventually Europeans overtook the Chinese — and there is no evidence of changes
in the genes of either of them.
Among the many reasons for different levels of
achievement is something as simple as age. The median age in Germany and Japan
is over 40, while the median age in Afghanistan and Yemen is under 20. Even if
the people in all four of these countries had the same mental potential, the
same history, the same culture — and the countries themselves had the same
geographic features — the fact that people in some countries have 20 years more
experience than people in other countries would still be enough to make equal
economic and other outcomes virtually impossible.
Add the fact that different races evolved in different
geographic settings, presenting very different opportunities and constraints on
their development, and the same conclusion follows.
Yet the idea that differences in outcomes are odd, if not
sinister, has been repeated mindlessly from street-corner demagogues to the
august chambers of the Supreme Court.
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