Harnessing the Spirit of Thomas Sowell

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 15, 2022

 

‘Racism is a joke —” says Shelby Steele. “Racism is a joke compared to freedom.”

 

An uncomfortable silence falls on the room. Shelby Steele has a way of doing that.

 

We are at the Old Parkland Conference, a gathering of intellectuals, writers, and activists in Dallas, and, while the words appear nowhere in the conference name, the subject is the social and economic situation of African Americans. The conference is a sequel of sorts to the 1980 Fairmont Conference organized by Thomas Sowell. Sowell, who is not famous for being gregarious, is not here in person, but he is here in spirit: The event begins with a video of one of his 1980s speeches, and most of the panel discussions are named after the titles of his books or the chapters within them. More important, Sowell’s temperament pervades the discussions: suspicion of rhetoric and grandiose social engineering, an insistent focus on policy outcomes rather than policy intentions.

 

It is almost unbelievable to have all of these people in the same room: Steele, Clarence Thomas, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Loury, Janice Rogers Brown, John Yoo, Roland Fryer, Reihan Salam, Robert Woodson, Ian Rowe, Jason Riley, Ramesh Ponnuru, Robert Doar. They are considering big questions and issues: “Why Does Racial Inequality Persist?” “Why Achievement Gaps Persist” “Is Policing a Bigger Problem Than Crime?” “Affirmative Action Reconsidered: Do Blacks Need Special Treatment to Succeed?”

 

Steele’s theme is “The Shock of Freedom.” The 76-year-old writer is prolific and cutting. He attended segregated schools as a child and made it to the sixth grade without being able to read. He was born in the basement of a hospital after his mother was expelled from the maternity ward when the medical staff discovered that his father was black. He has a great deal on his mind, and he ranges over a great deal of territory in his brief remarks: the Congress on Racial Equality, Elon Musk, the Bible, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Camus. He argues that African Americans, having been liberated from the oppression of slavery and Jim Crow, reinvented their oppression in new forms. It is a story with some historical precedent.

 

“As in Exodus,” a woman listening to his argument says quietly to herself. She is referring to the story of the Israelites who suffered hardship after their liberation from Egypt and turned against Moses:

 

And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron: and the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would God we had died in this wilderness!

 

And wherefore hath the Lord brought us unto this land, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey? were it not better for us to return into Egypt?

 

And they said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt.

 

Shelby Steele is in his writing very much of that mind. His most famous book, The Content of Our Character, concludes: “The Promised Land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.”

 

I retch a little bit when political figures situate themselves in capital-H History, as in the title of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History. But one gets a sense of history from Steele, not because of his years — 76 is not that old anymore — but because of what those years have been full of. He represents a continuity between those brave days of old and our current social scene, which must necessarily seem tawdry by comparison — better in most ways, but stale.

 

Another man at the conference is a figure of genuine world-historical importance — I mean, of course, Justice Clarence Thomas. The venue at which the event is being held contains many portraits of historical figures: Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. (The Reverend King is depicted leading a march, and one of the figures in the crowd is Robert Doar’s father, John Doar, an important figure in the Civil Rights Movement.) There is a very prominent (and, I think, very good) portrait of Justice Thomas among these. It belongs there, of course, but the justice himself is a modest, funny, approachable man who gives the impression of taking his work a great deal more seriously than he takes himself. He does not seem like a man who imagines himself carved in marble. If you have ever heard Clarence Thomas laugh, you will not forget what it sounds like.

 

(Would you like to know what Justice Thomas is reading these days? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Why? “Live Not by Lies.”)

 

Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University is an economist, but he doesn’t talk like one — at least, not in this context. He is a more emotional man than I had expected. When he speaks about racial preferences, his voice shakes a little, with a combination of anger, indignation, and sadness. “You took away the standard,” he says, “but I was going to exceed the standard. How do we prove ourselves when we are held to a lower standard?” He refers to “my people” and then acknowledges that these words are “not unambiguous.” How so? “I am a man of the West, and a descendant of slaves.”

 

(He says this standing in front of a neoclassical depiction of Prosperity and Liberty personified as goddesses, together holding aloft a laurel. Since its earliest days, the United States has included the liberty goddess in its national iconography, and she invariably is depicted wearing a pileus, or “liberty cap.” The hat was given to freed slaves as a mark of their manumission in ancient Rome. That a slaveholding nation revered a symbol of slave emancipation may be taken as irony or prescience or both.)

 

Steele is even more unsparing on the subject of affirmative action and similar programs. These do not help African Americans, he says, because they were not designed to — they are in his judgment only psychic analgesics for white people, another way of exploiting black Americans.

 

I am glad this conversation is happening among these people. I myself do not have any big original ideas on how to address the situation of black Americans, who lag behind their white neighbors by many important metrics — but I am increasingly persuaded that that is not even the right way to look at the question: As it was pointed out more than once during the conference’s discussions of education, for as long as we’ve been compiling performance data, there hasn’t been any school year when the majority of white students in our public schools were able to read at an age-appropriate level — if black students caught up to white students, it would mean only perfect equality in mediocrity. We should ask for more than that.

 

But, mostly, I am encouraged that the mark of Thomas Sowell has been so strongly impressed on these thinkers. Good intentions and tender feelings may do credit to those who possess them, but they often lead to ineffective — or positively destructive — policies, imposing a heavy burden that this republic has borne for too long already.