From: intraphase@gmail.com

Thomas Sowell: Tragic Optimist

History is not destiny.
~Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture

Somewhere out of the mysterious interplay between nature and nurture, internal and external factors, cultures and structures, and bottom-up and top-down forces there emerge the individual and group outcomes that we care about and which ultimately make
the difference between human flourishing and its absence. What distinguishes various political ideologies, in effect, is how the line of causation is drawn, or, more specifically, from which direction. What gets left unexamined in the rush for compelling
narratives and ideological certainty, however, is the territory between different causes and how they combine to shape reality. Few have gone further to map that territory than the American economist, political philosopher, and public intellectual Thomas
Sowell.

At 90 years of age, Sowell remains among the most prolific, influential, and penetrating minds of the past century. He understands the world in terms of trade-offs, incentives, constraints, systemic processes, feedback mechanisms, and human capital, an
understanding developed by scrutinizing available data, considering human experience, and applying robust common sense. Sowell has written over 50 books according to his late friend Walter E. Williams, in which he has applied a humanist economic lens to
issues as far-ranging as racial inequality, cultural history, intellectuals, Marxism, charter schools, late-talking children, and affirmative action policies around the world. His nationally syndicated column was published for decades in over 150
different newspapers, including National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. His ability to write with authority on a wide range of issues stems from a genuine curiosity about the world as it is and human beings as they are, not how
things ought to be.

In his 2000 memoir A Personal Odyssey, Sowell recounts a parable that was read to him as a young boy and which he never forgot. “One story I found sad at the time, but remembered the rest of my life, was about a dog with a bone who saw his reflection
in a stream and thought that the dog he saw had a bigger bone than he did. He opened his mouth to try to get the other dog’s bone—and of course lost his own when it dropped in the water. There would be many occasions in life to remember that story.”
1 This set the tone for a life and career committed to closing the gap between image and reality. This is why Sowell’s contributions extend beyond partisan politics. His basic concern is with the dynamism, diversity, and development of living human
beings, not inter-temporal sociological abstractions or racial archetypes that can be leveraged for political or moral power. Likewise, his basic orientation is that of a culturalist, with a belief in the effectiveness of evolved ideas, skills, attitudes,
interests, and norms to change the course of human history, and the autonomy of individuals to adopt better cultural imperatives to improve their prospects and, crucially, those of their children.

“Cultures are not bumper stickers,” he once said during a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. “They are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life… Their legacies belong to all people and all people need
to claim that legacy, not seal themselves off in a dead-end of tribalism or an emotional orgy of cultural vanity.” His work tells a story of human progress and cultural evolution amid the challenges of living in a multi-ethnic democracy and against the
historical determinism and cultural relativism that prevent us from meeting our deepest potential as individuals and societies.

“With all that I went through,” Sowell says of his own rise to prominence, “it now seems in retrospect almost as if someone had decided that there should be a man with all the outward indications of disadvantage, who nevertheless had the key inner
advantages needed to advance.”2

* * *

Sowell’s journey began on June 30th, 1930, in Gastonia, North Carolina, where he was born into poverty and segregation. Both of his biological parents died within the first few years of his life and Sowell was sent to live with his great-aunt and her
adult daughters, not learning the truth of his origins until much later. There was no electricity or running water in the house and light and heat required the use of kerosene. Sowell was baffled to discover two running faucets in the kitchen of a white
family his elder sister worked for, remarking at the time: “They must sure drink a lot of water around here.”3 He had almost no contact with white people and couldn’t understand why some of the characters in the comics he was reading had yellow
hair.4 Of his schooling in the south, he wrote, “My only memories are of fights, being spanked by the teacher, having crushes on a couple of girls and the long walk to and from school.”5 With the attention and care of multiple adult family members,
Sowell had already learned to read by the time he entered grade school and quickly excelled, managing all the course material for the semester in a couple of weeks. He speaks happily of his childhood. They were poor, but they had more.

On Mother’s Day 1939, when Sowell was eight years old, his family moved to Harlem as part of the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities. The experience was a major culture shock. Nobody in his family had made it beyond the seventh grade
and the move was intended to expand his prospects. Sowell was encouraged to acculturate to city life and develop middle class norms, and discouraged from playing with the kids on his block. His family members introduced him to a neighborhood boy of West
Indian heritage named Eddie Mapp, a good student who could play classical music on the piano. It was Mapp who brought the nine-year-old Sowell to his first public library. “Unknown to me at the time, it was a turning point in my life, for then I
developed the habit of reading books.”6 As Sowell recounts in the recent documentary Common Sense in a Senseless World, narrated by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley (author of a forthcoming biography on Sowell), “Really, had I not
encountered [Mapp], the entire rest of the story could not have been the way it was.” Cultural exposure was crucial to his development.

The Harlem schools were more rigorous than those in the south and adjusting to the higher academic standards was a difficult process. He began at the bottom of the class but refused to be held back a grade and even went to the principal to argue his case.
Sowell consistently had trouble dealing with authority—or perhaps authority had trouble dealing with him. He resented the arbitrary rules and regulations of the school system and had physical altercations with his male teachers on more than one
occasion. Nevertheless, he was already beginning to grasp the true diversity and complexity of American life. His junior high school was in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood comprised of over 40 different ethnic groups, “proud of its diversity
and maybe a little too self-congratulatory.”7 It was here that he noticed one of his first racial disparities: “I do not recall ever losing a fight to a white kid my own size.”8

Sowell began to develop a distaste for the paternalism of low expectations and impoverished standards to which minorities tended to be held. In middle school, his class was discouraged from taking the qualifying tests for the better high schools in
Harlem to avoid embarrassing the school if few (or none) of them got in. “Everyone from our class passed every high school exam we took… The teacher’s gross misjudgements of our ability… was a powerful example of what unspoken feelings can do.”
Still, many of his teachers served him well, and, sadly, Sowell believes the Harlem schools of the 1930s and ’40s were much better than they are today.

Sowell entered the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Downtown Manhattan on the advice of Mapp. The workload was much higher and it began to create a rift with his family, who couldn’t wrap their minds around why he was at the library so much. His
aunt, in particular, grew bitter about Sowell’s academic success. “She became, and remained over the years, ambivalent about my progress—proud of my advancement and yet resentful of being left behind, inconsistent in word and deed, tenaciously
determined to assert her authority, however arbitrarily, and yet with a premonition that our relationship—never the strongest—was completely unraveling.”9

With the stress of life at home, Sowell fell behind in school and eventually dropped out at 17 after a bout with illness further disrupted his education. He took up a job as a Western Union messenger, and here first encountered poor and semi-literate
white people, some of whom were of immigrant backgrounds and needed to have their telegrams read to them. “It was my first realization that life is tough all over.”10 Naturally creative, he tried his hand at illustrating and writing short stories for
a time. When he was lent an old camera by a work colleague, he developed a lifelong passion for photography. Meanwhile, his relationship with his aunt finally deteriorated beyond repair—after an extended legal dispute over his living situation, he left
her apartment to stay in a homeless boys’ shelter for a brief time where he kept a knife under his pillow in case he needed to defend himself.

Sowell was scrambling for a path forward, applying for jobs around the city and trying to figure things out. It was a rough patch. After he was laid off by a machine shop in the garment district, he recalls “wondering what the future held, as I looked
out the factory window, down into the canyons of midtown Manhattan, where the Christmas decorations were still out and the snow was softly falling.”11 He would soon visit Washington, DC to apply for a job as a clerk, and became increasingly preoccupied
by the issue of race. Segregation was still in place in the nation’s capital and his first published piece of writing was a letter to the Washington Star urging the desegregation of the city’s public schools. Grabbing a burger in the city meant
standing to eat while whites sat at the counter. He had arguments with his brother about the issue, who kept reminding him of the strides blacks were making. “Great, William,” Sowell would reply. “Why don’t we go drink to that—at a bar downtown?
”12

On one occasion, he bought a secondhand set of encyclopedias for $1.17 and discovered Karl Marx, a thinker whose ideas would enthral him for the next decade. “The ideas seemed to explain so much, and explain it in a way to which my grim experience made
me very receptive.”13 Sowell simply could not understand the yawning chasm between the Harlem tenements and the extravagant wealth of lower Manhattan. “I wondered, ‘Why is this?’ It’s so different.” he recounts in Riley’s documentary. “
And nothing in the schools or the books seemed to deal with that. Marx dealt with that.” His disappointments were channeled into radicalism. “I was appalled at this discrepancy between the ideal and the actual, which is how I judged, as a young
radical—not according to what the limited alternatives might have been.”14

In 1951, Sowell was drafted for the Korean War. He was recruited as a marine and went through bootcamp before working as a photographer at a naval air station in Pensacola, Florida. His description of military life reads like an endless series of
shenanigans to avoid work and stymie authority. “As elsewhere throughout my life, I made enough enemies to get me in trouble and enough friends to get me out of it.”15 Upon returning to New York after his time in the military, Sowell began working in
the stockroom of a camera store while taking classes at night to earn his general equivalency diploma. Leaving work one evening, he mentioned to the elevator man that he was too tired to go to school that night. The man “became distressed, alarmed, and
urged me to go to school anyway. With surprising emotion, he told me how he had thrown away opportunities when he was young and regretted it ever afterwards.”16 The exchange stood out to him, emblematic of a different era of greater social trust in the
country when adults were more willing to steward and forewarn the young.

Soon, Sowell began taking classes at the all-black Howard University in Washington, DC. One night, his sociology professor announced that the Supreme Court had overruled the “separate but equal” doctrine upon which Jim Crow laws were based. The class
was asked to reflect on the decision. “All of us were, of course, in favor of it, but many of my classmates seemed to have the most Utopian expectations that this was going to lead to some magical solution to problems of race and poverty.”17 His
skepticism, unfortunately, was prescient.

At Howard, Sowell met the renowned poet Sterling Brown. It was during professor Brown’s creative writing class that Sowell “acquired an appreciation of the beauty and power of plain writing, which helped me the rest of my life when writing nonfiction.
” But Sowell found other elements of the institution wanting. “Most students—and faculty members—were just not serious about intellectual work. They might sometimes be somber about it, or unctuous about it, or even pompous about it, but they were
not serious about it.” Sowell was eventually able to secure a place at Harvard by virtue of his high standardized test scores and teacher recommendations, including that of Brown. “Although a bitterly eloquent critic of racism in his writings,”
Sowell writes of his former teacher, “he also understood the pitfalls of a victim mentality.” When he left Howard, he recalls Brown telling him, “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ’cause the white folks were mean.”18


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