Conservative, Gifted and Black - Thomas Sowell

Black people aren’t supposed to be conservative.

Written by Rev John Root, and republished from his blog 'Out of Many, One People'

Not everyone will remember the Bob Andy and Marcia Griffiths reggae-lite minor hit of 1970, ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, but the three adjectives have been redeployed numerous times in book titles, conferences and adverts; or even slightly altered with the swapping of adjectives, but this may well be the first time ever that the word ‘conservative’ has been incorporated into the slogan. Black people aren’t supposed to be conservative. White people like them to be exciting, transgressive, dynamic, sexy, threatening; exuding a frisson of danger with the implicitly racist notion that we are near ‘the heart of darkness’. How disappointing when black people turn out to be ordinary, pedestrian, conservative!

Thomas Sowell is primarily an economist but also a sociologist, now in his 90s but still extraordinarily prolific, who is based at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Sewell grew up in Harlem, left school at 17, was a Marxist, eventually went to Harvard (where he learned ‘not to be impressed by people who have been to Harvard’), and has had a successful, highly productive academic career. Sewell will not make your scalp tingle with either rage or guilt, though he may well give you the buzz of receiving a heavy input of new information.

What is it in Sowell’s vast output that make his views significant for understanding ‘race’ in Britain today?

1. An Enlarged Canvas.

One immediate characteristic of Sowell’s writings is the very extensive range of his references. Whilst debate on ‘race’ has focussed substantially on the results of the Atlantic slave trade in the Caribbean, the USA and Britain – even more so after the death of George Floyd – Sowell puts these in a longer historical frame and wider geographical canvas. In ‘Conquests and Cultures’ (1998) he has long sections on the British, the Africans, the Slavs and Western Hemisphere Indians. The Angles were of course enslaved by the Romans, thus the classic story of St Augustine’s mission to England originating with his seeing ‘English’ slaves in a Roman slave market. Further, our word ‘slave’ derives from ‘Slav’ as Slavic peoples were an important source of slaves in north Africa, and in western Europe until developments in seafaring enabled merchants to search for wider sources of supply, so that western Europeans were able to tap into the well-established slave trading networks of western and central Africa.

Early on Sowell wrote in the preface to ‘The Economics and Politics of Race’ (1983) that international study ‘means an opportunity to test competing beliefs and theories in a way that can not be done in any given country. For example: How much of any minority group’s economic status depends on their own culture and how much upon the way they are treated by the larger society around them?’ (p 7). Examples abound of countries where people able to wield considerable political, social and even religious power are nonetheless still economically and socially far weaker than other ethnic groups in a society. Thus in Malaysia whilst there has been sixty years of ‘affirmative action’ to entrench the power of the Malay majority and yet Malays are still significantly poorer than the ethnic minorities in their midst, notably the Chinese. Similarly whilst there is less racism in Brazil than the United States, nonetheless the wealth gap between black and white there is significantly greater.

Sowell’s enlarging of the canvas invites comparison with a similarly conservative and controversial initiative in Britain – Professor Nigel Biggar’s ‘Ethics of Empire’ project; which, as I understand it, seeks to turn us from simply attending to the specificity of the British Empire and rather see it in the context of ‘empire’ as an historical and global (and normative?) phenomenon, which deserves more than the too-easy, perjorative dismissal of ‘imperialism’ as intrinsically  harmful.

2. The significance of culture.

The above quotation from ‘The Economics and Politics of Race’ points to a central feature of Sowell’s outlook, namely that the economic and social status of ethnic groups is influenced by two factors: ‘their own culture’ and ‘the way they are treated’. He uses the terms ‘Internal’ and ‘External’ to identify these factors. We are dealing both with the reality of racism, which Sowell is well aware of, but also the ways that cultures can enable or hinder the progress of ethnic groups.

Two themes about culture feature in Sowell’s writings. On the one hand there is the long term rise and fall of identifiable cultural groups, as their development veers in differing directions. In a recent book ‘Discrimination and Disparities’ (2019) he points up the contrasting historical developments of the Chinese and the Lowland Scots. In what the West refers to as the Middle Ages China was considerably more advanced in technology and the development of society. In Malacca I visited an exhibition which celebrated the exploits of the Chinese admiral Zheng He, whose expeditions in the early 15th century were earlier, considerably larger and more complex, and which travelled much further that European explorations of the time. But subsequently China increasingly closed its doors to contact with the outside world and entered a period of stagnation which meant that by the nineteenth century it was vulnerable to European military, mercantile and even religious incursion.

By contrast the Scots were until the sixteenth century a backward and remote society on the periphery of Europe. However the development of literacy, spurred by the desire to create a nation of bible readers, and increased use of the English language meant that by the eighteenth century the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ made a major contribution to European culture in science, economics and philosophy. In these two stories a major theme of Sowell emerges: cultures develop through interaction. Thus he predates Tim Marshall by giving geography a major role in the development of society. Navigable rivers, long coastlines and good natural harbours enable travel and interaction; impenetrable mountains or forest hinder it. Fertile soil makes it possible to feed urban societies, and culture flourishes. No peoples have genetic inferiority, Sowell often stresses, but they do have geographical inferiority. Simply comparing the contrasting coastlines of western Europe and Africa helps illuminate the point.

The second theme in Sowell’s understanding of culture is that whilst over centuries particular cultures rise and fall, more immediate cultural patterns are surprisingly durable, such that when ethnic groups migrate they carry with them behavioural patterns – often quite specific – which are retained in a wide variety of contexts. A favourite example of his is that whether Germans migrate to the USA, Argentina or Australia they seem to become very successful piano tuners! Both Irish and Indian migrants have a propensity to become involved in politics, wielding power well above their proportion of the population. The arrogant, metropolitan assumptions that in-migrating groups are a sort of tabula rasa, awaiting the imprint of the host society is disproved time and again in Sowell’s surveys.

The consequence is that for Sowell disparities between ethnic groups are not an aberrant feature that puts the onus on the majority society to rectify, but is rather an unavoidable world-wide phenomena. The recent American Supreme Court upholding discrimination by Harvard in admitting African-American and Hispanic students on easier criteria than white and especially East Asian students, without such favouring these minorities’ presence would decline by nearly half (from 16% and 13% respectively) and the university would lose ‘the freedom and flexibility to create diverse campus communities’. It is likely that Sowell would argue here that the white establishment goal of creating diversity actually has the knock-on effect of creating problems for some minority students who have to study alongside more able peers.

In ‘Discrimination and Disparities’ he writes: ‘Patterns of skewed success have long been common in the real world – and such skewed outcomes contradict some fundamental assumptions of both the political left and right’ (p 5). In his sights here are the ‘right wing’ early twentieth century assumptions of genetic superiority/ inferiority and the ‘left wing’ late twentieth century assumption that different outcomes can only be the result of external discrimination. (‘Intellectuals and Society’ (2016) treats the issue in detail). For Sowell the two errors are epitomised by the two horrendous evils of the twentieth century, Naziism and Stalinism; the former seeking to eradicate the racially degenerate, the later seeking to eradicate the ‘exploiters’. Today attention focusses on the left’s claim that racial disparities are the consequence of white exploitation (as by Ibram X Kendi in the USA, the Runnymede Trust in Britain), but Sowell reminds us also of the surprising strength of the early twentieth century appeal of racist eugenics – espoused by major figures such as J M Keynes, H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sydney and Barbara Webb, as well as both Churchill and Chamberlain. (Settling scores with racists of the recent past is going to leave us with many more dismantled and traduced reputations).

3. Social Capital.

For Sowell therefore it is vital to focus on what it is that causes ethnic groups to produce substantially different outcomes; in other words, regardless of the strength or otherwise of the discrimination they suffer, what enables some to strive whilst others suffer? ‘Social capital’ refers to a range of behaviours which mark the most successful groups, such as attitudes to work and schooling, deferred gratification, the role of parenting and early years’ experience. Some benefits are unavoidable: first-born (or only children) succeed more than subsequent siblings since they alone have received undivided parental attention in their very earliest months or years of life. But clearly the emphasis given to family stability and fathering plays a major role. Interestingly, and sadly, Sowell does not regard religious faith as a positive factor. (One wonders whether he sees churches as either tied to a liberal consensus which has downgraded family, or so taken up with ecstatic religious experience that the hard work of developing and handing on social capital is neglected).

It is from this perspective that Sowell notes the slow overall progress of black people in the United States, for whom there was substantial progress between the end of Worls War 2 and the Civil Rights Act, despite the existence of politically and socially entrenched white racism, and yet since when progress has been slower and patchier. On the one hand Sowell sees the mind-set of libertarianism that developed from the 1960s as seriously eroding the social capital of poorer people; on the other hand he also blames the corrosive effects of greater government intrusion in the organisation of society and the economy.

4. Evaluation.

Sowell is a conservative, that is in the traditional sense of scepticism about the value of government activity. He at least hints of opposition to attempts to control gun possession or climate change. He says little about the greater success of welfare policies in Europe in reducing poverty and the wealth gap. One of his intriguing distinctions is between different ‘visions’, which - as opposed to policies - are not amenable to compromise. Rather it is a stark choice between the ‘constrained’ and ‘unconstrained’ vision. The latter is well exemplified by Obama’s slogan ‘Yes, we can!’ All things are achievable if we put our hearts and our wills into it. Not so, says the ‘constrained’ vision. There are no such things as solutions, only attempts to address problems, which in turn beget further problems, requiring further solutions which beget yet more problems, generating further solutions – and so the cycle continues with ever increasing (and expensive) state activity. Should Christians favour the ‘hope’ of the unconstrained vision, or the ‘fallen’ realism of the constrained vision?

Very few attempts have come from progressive blacks to critique Sowell. Cornel West in  ‘Race Matters’ (1993) has a chapter on ‘Demystifying the new black conservatism’ which takes issue with the consequences of Sowell’s laissez-faire approach: ‘Black conservatives thus overlook the degree to which market forces of advanced capitalist processes thrive on sexual and military images . . [and] has contributed greatly to the confusion and disorientation of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos’ (p 56), though West avoids the simplification of seeing the problem only as white racism.

Meanwhile, Back in the UK.

Black American conservatives have largely been ignored in the UK. Ken Leech made an occasional reference to Sowell, but seemed unaware of the (to Leech unwelcome) drift of his thought. Steve Bell’s ‘Mountains Move’ footnotes him. I referred to his critical assessment of positive discrimination in my 1996 ‘Building Multi-Racial Churches’ [republished last year by Latimer Trust, contact me if you would like a copy for £4.75]. Like other black conservatives such as Glenn Lowrie or John McWhorter his work has rarely crossed the Atlantic; such that in ‘The Madness of Crowds’ (pp 154-5) Douglas Murray has fun describing how the prestigious LSE’s ‘Review of Books’ had to amend a review of Sowell’s ‘Intellectuals and Society’ by a lecturer in media/cultural studies at Wolverhampton University who had alleged his views were ‘easy for a rich white man to say’! (Certainly one university lecturer’s bibliography needs something other than ‘decolonising’).

The approach of Theresa May’s ‘Racial Disparity Audit’ (2017) was criticised by a number of conservatives, notably the similarly named Tony Sewell, and Katharine Birbalsingh, head of the controversially strict Michaela school in Wembley, and who for a time was head of the government’s Social Mobility Commission; whilst Trevor Phillips might also possibly be included on the list. He has been referred to by the Sunday Times columnist Matthew Said, and was featured in Kemi Badenoch’s pics to be leader of the Conservative Party. Whilst Sewell’s ‘Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities’ did not mention Sowell, there are clear traces of his influence, notably the stress on other factors alongside racial discrimination in affecting outcomes, and advocating the importance of comparative studies in enabling understanding of what it is that enables ethnic minorities to thrive. To this study Sowell brings a vast amount of historical and world-wide data – far more than is found amongst ‘progressives’, along with his heretic’s readiness (indeed, glee) to contest largely unquestioned liberal assumptions. If his views can’t be transferred ready-made into British society they undoubtedly raise questions that invite serious consideration of how the journey to a racially just society may best continue.

The most relevant of Sowell’s books is his recent:

‘Discrimination and Disparities’ (2018)

Also of particular interest are:

‘Race and Culture -a World View’ (1994) &

‘Preferential Policies - An International Perspective’  (1990)

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John Root is a retired Anglican clergyman, living in Tottenham. He has been vice-principal of a Cambridge theological college and was for thirty years vicar of an ethnically ’super-diverse’ church in Wembley. He has also lectured part-time in early colonial history. His wife is Indian, from Malaysia and they have an adult son. You can read more of his work here.