Visiting Harlem (NYC)

Thomas Wentworth wrote:
Why do you want to visit a slum?

The short answer would be so that my kids don't grow up to be
narrow-minded bigots. But having spent a few painful minutes looking at
other postings by Mr. Wentworth I am releived to say that even the
youngest is already intellectual leagues ahead of someone whose idea of
factual authority is Wikipedia.

Thomas Wentworth wrote:
snip, snip

UNTIL THE BLACKS, AFRICAN WHATEVER,,,, STOP BLAMING WHITE PEOPLE FOR THEIR
STUPID BEHAVIOR, STOP HAVING CHILDREN WITHOUT MARRIAGE, HAVE A CRIME RATE
THAT IS OUT OF SITE, AND EDUCATION LEVEL OF MORONS ..... UNTIL THEN..

THEY CAN GO SCREW.

Ah, but Thomas, your own penetrating analysis into the roots of the
problem suggests that that's exactly what they oughtn't to be doing.

I dont know that I am the one you need to be quoting on this
matter......
its interesting though, depending on where you are getting your news it
will likely shape your view of the "mayhem and violence", I think its
clear it was overwhelmingly covered in the mainstream media, but
various sources have documented several examples of the exact behavior
described and later questioned by most media outlets.....

what I find most interesting in light of the earlier posts, is that
much of the looting has been attributed to the police themselves, and
white officers at that.....

and as I said before, comapred to PA where they were yanking gold
fillings out and cutting off fingers for jewlery I would say the peeps
in new orleans were relatively behaved all things considered...

Chuck

bronx zoo.....skipable for the most part unless Zoo's are realy your
thing.....aside from the gorillas and africa plains, it isnt one of the
nicer zoo's in the country...imho.....central park zoo is a better use
of time, great central park skyline views, easy to get to, and if the
kids have seen madagascar the movie they will love being at the central
park zoo.....

Chuck

wrote in message
oups.com...
compared to what the whites did in the flood in PA, new orleans was
quite civilized.....

people who rely on statistics are the people too stupid to read the
research behind the data and formulate their own opinion.....I work for
one of the major stat companies in the USA and depending on who is
paying us, we can make numbers say anything we want....

the out of wedlock birth rate is probably as high in several all white
counties all along the south....

to me you are just an ignorant fool, but we do have at least one thing
in common, we both slept with your sister......

Chuck

================================================== ====================
At first, I was not going to respond. Then, the more I read of this
absolutely stupid posting .....

The following by Thomas Sowell, a Black

RACE, CULTURE, AND EQUALITY1
by Thomas Sowell




During the 15 years that I spent researching and writing my recently
completed trilogy on racial and cultural issues,2 I was struck again and
again with how common huge disparities in income and wealth have been for
centuries, in countries around the world-- and yet how each country regards
its own particular disparities as unusual, if not unique. Some of these
disparities have been among racial or ethnic groups, some among nations, and
some among regions, continents, or whole civilizations.
In the nineteenth century, real per capita income in the Balkans was
about one-third that in Britain. That dwarfs intergroup disparities that
many in the United States today regard as not merely strange but sinister.
Singapore has a median per capita income that is literally hundreds of times
greater than that in Burma.
During the rioting in Indonesia last year, much of it directed against
the ethnic Chinese in that country, some commentators found it strange that
the Chinese minority, which is just 5 percent of the Indonesian population,
owned an estimated four-fifths of the capital in the country. But it is not
strange. Such disparities have long been common in other countries in
Southeast Asia, where Chinese immigrants typically entered poor and then
prospered, creating whole industries in the process. People from India did
the same in much of East Africa and in Fiji.
Occupations have been similarly unequal.
In the early 1920s, Jews were just 6 percent of the population of
Hungary and 11 percent of the population of Poland, but they were more than
half of all the physicians in both countries, as well as being vastly
over-represented in commerce and other fields.3 In the early twentieth
century, all of the firms in all of the industries producing the following
products in Brazil's state of Rio Grande do Sul were owned by people of
German ancestry: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties, leather, soap,
glass, watches, beer, confections and carriages.4
In the middle of the nineteenth century, just three countries produced
most of the manufactured goods in the world-- Britain, Germany, and the
United States. By the late twentieth century, it was estimated that 17
percent of the people in the world produce four-fifths of the total output
on the planet.
Such examples could be multiplied longer than you would have the
patience to listen.5
Why are there such disparities? In some cases, we can trace the
reasons, but in other cases we cannot. A more fundamental question,
however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first
place?
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that not only every racial or
ethnic group, but even every single individual in the entire world, has
identical genetic potential. If it is possible to be even more extreme, let
us assume that we all behave like saints toward one another. Would that
produce equality of results?
Of course not. Real income consists of output and output depends on
inputs. These inputs are almost never equal-- or even close to being equal.
During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in
Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as the
Malay majority. Halfway around the world at the same time, the majority of
the population of Nigeria, living in its northern provinces, were just 9
percent of the students attending that country's University of Ibadan and
just 2 percent of the much larger number of Nigerian students studying
abroad in foreign institutions of higher learning. In the Austrian Empire
in 1900, the illiteracy rate among Polish adults was 40 percent and among
Serbo-Croatians 75 percent-- but only 6 percent among the Germans.
Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other
countries-- disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as
well as in fields of specialization-- why should anyone expect equal
outcomes in incomes or occupations?
Educational differences are just one source of economic disparities.
Even at the level of craft skills, groups have differed enormously, as they
have in urbanization. During the Middle Ages, and in some places long
beyond, most of the population of the cities in Slavic Eastern Europe were
not Slavs. Germans, Jews, and other non-Slavic peoples were the majority
populations in these cities for centuries, while the Slavs were
predominantly peasants in the surrounding countrysides. Prior to the year
1312, the official records of the city of Cracow were kept in German-- and
the transition that year was to Latin. Only decades later did Poles become
a majority of the population of Cracow. Only over a period of centuries did
the other cities of Slavic Eastern Europe acquire predominantly Slavic
populations. As late as 1918, 97 percent of the people living in the cities
of Byelorussia were not Byelorussians.
Until this long transition to urban living took place among the Slavs,
how could the wide range of skills typically found in cities be expected to
exist in populations that lived overwhelmingly in the countryside? Not only
did they not have such skills in Eastern Europe, they did not have them when
they immigrated to the United States, to Australia, or to other countries,
where they typically worked in low-level occupations and earned
correspondingly low incomes. In the early years of the twentieth century,
for example, immigrants to the United States from Eastern and Southern
Europe earned just 15 percent of the income of immigrants from Norway,
Holland, Sweden, and Britain.
Groups also differ demographically. It is not uncommon to find some
groups with median ages a decade younger than the median ages of other
groups, and differences of two decades are not unknown. During the era of
the Soviet Union, for example, Central Asians had far more children than
Russians or the peoples of the Baltic republics, and so had much younger
median ages. At one time, the median age of Jews in the United States was
20 years older than the median age of Puerto Ricans. If Jews and Puerto
Ricans had been absolutely identical in every other respect, including their
cultures and histories, they would still not have been equally represented
in jobs requiring long years of experience, or in retirement homes, or in
activities associated with youth, such as sports or crime.
Nothing so intractably conflicts with our desires for equality as
geography. The physical settings in which races, nations, and civilizations
have evolved have had major impacts on the cultures developed within those
settings. Those settings vary enormously-- as do their cultural
consequences. How could Scandinavians or Polynesians know as much about
camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara? And how could the Bedouins know as
much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians? The peoples of the
Himalayas have certainly not had an equal opportunity to acquire seafaring
skills. Nor have Eskimos had an equal opportunity to acquire knowledge and
experience in growing pineapples or other tropical crops. Ability in the
abstract is one thing, but specific capabilities of doing specific things is
what matters economically.
Too often the influence of geography on wealth is thought of narrowly,
in terms of natural resources that directly translate into wealth, such as
oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa. But, important as such
differences in natural wealth are, geography influences even more profound
cultural differences among the people themselves.
Where geography isolates people, whether in mountain valleys or on small
islands scattered across a vast sea, there the cultural exposures of those
people to the outside world are very limited and so, typically, is their
technological advancement. While the rest of the world exchanges goods,
knowledge, and innovations from a vast cultural universe, isolated peoples
have been largely limited to what they alone have been able to develop.
Few, if any, of the great advances in human civilization have come from
isolated peoples. As the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel put it,
the mountains almost always lag behind the plains-- even if the races in the
two places are the same. Potatoes and the English language both reached the
Scottish lowlands before they reached the highlands. Islam reached North
Africa's Rif mountains long after the people in the plains had become
Moslems.
When the Spaniards invaded the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century,
they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone-age level. So were
the Australian aborigines when the British discovered them in the eighteenth
century. Geographically imposed cultural isolation takes many forms and
exists in many degrees. Cities have long been in the vanguard of human
progress, all over the world, but cities do not arise randomly in all
geographic settings. Most of the great cities of the world have developed
on navigable waterways-- rivers or harbors-- but such waterways are by no
means equally or randomly distributed around the world. They are very
common in Western Europe and very rare in sub-Saharan Africa. Urbanization
has long been correspondingly common in Western Europe and correspondingly
rare in sub-Saharan Africa. One-third of the land mass of Europe consists
of islands and peninsulas but only one percent of the land mass of South
America consists of islands and peninsulas.
Navigable waterways have been economically crucial, especially during
thousands of years of human history before the development of railroads,
trucks, and airplanes. Before the transcontinental railroad was built, it
was both faster and cheaper to reach San Francisco from a port in China than
from Saint Louis. People in the city of Tbilisi bought their kerosene from
Texas-- 8,000 miles away across water -- rather than from the Baku oil
fields, less than 400 miles away across land.
Such vast differences in costs between water transport and land
transport affect what can be transported and how far. Gold or diamonds can
repay the costs of transport across thousands of miles of land, but grain or
coal cannot. More important, the size of a people's cultural universe
depends on how far they can reach out to other peoples and other cultures.
No great civilization has developed in isolation. Geography in general and
navigable waterways in particular set the limits of a people's cultural
universe, broadly or narrowly. But these limits are by no means set equally
for all peoples or all civilization.
For example, when the British first crossed the Atlantic and confronted
the Iroquois on the eastern seaboard of what is today the United States,
they were able to steer across the ocean in the first place because they
used rudders invented in China, they could navigate on the open seas with
the help of trigonometry invented in Egypt, their calculations were done
with numbers invented in India, and their general knowledge was preserved in
letters invented by the Romans. But the Iroquois could not draw upon the
knowledge of the Aztecs or the Incas, whose very existence they had no way
of knowing. The clash was not between the culture created by the British
versus the culture created by the Iroquois. It was a clash between cultural
developments drawn from vast regions of the world versus cultural
developments from a much more circumscribed area. The cultural
opportunities were unequal and the outcomes were unequal. Geography has
never been egalitarian.
A network of rivers in Western Europe flow gently through vast plains,
connecting wide areas economically and culturally. The rivers of tropical
Africa plunge a thousand feet or more on their way to the sea, with cascades
and waterfalls making them navigable only for stretches between these
natural barriers-- and the coastal plain in Africa averages just 20 miles.
Regular rainfall and melting snows keep the rivers of Western Europe flowing
throughout the year but African rivers have neither-- and so rise and fall
dramatically with the seasons, further limiting their usefulness. The two
continents are at least as dramatically different when it comes to natural
harbors. Although Africa is more than twice the size of Europe, it has a
shorter coastline. That is because the European coastline continually
twists and turns, creating innumerable harbors, while the African coastline
is smooth, with few harbors. How surprising is it that international
commerce has played a much smaller role in the economic history of Africa
than in that of Europe in general and Western Europe in particular?
These particular geographic disparities are by no means exhaustive. But
they are suggestive of some of the many ways in which physical settings have
expanded or constricted the size of the cultural universe available to
different peoples. One revealing indication of cultural fragmentation is
that African peoples are 10 percent of the world's population but have
one-third of the world's languages.
In controversies over "nature versus nurture" as causes of economic and
other disparities among peoples and civilizations, nature is often narrowly
conceived as genetic differences. Yet geography is also nature-- and its
patterns are far more consistent with history than are genetic theories.
China, for example, was for many centuries the leading nation in the world--
technologically, organizationally, and in many other ways. Yet, in more
recent centuries, China has been overtaken and far surpassed by Europe. Yet
neither region of the world has changed genetically to any extent that would
account for this dramatic change in their relative positions. This historic
turnaround also shows that geographic limitations do not mean geographic
determinism, for the geography of the two regions likewise underwent no such
changes as could account for the reversal of their respective positions in
the world.
Back in the fifteenth century, China sent ships on a voyage of
exploration longer than that of Columbus, more than half a century before
Columbus, and in ships more advanced than those in Europe at the time. Yet
the Chinese rulers made a decision to discontinue such voyages and in fact
to reduce China's contacts with the outside world. European rulers made the
opposite decision and established world-wide empires, ultimately to the
detriment of China. In short, geography sets limits but people determine
what they will do within those limits. In some parts of the world,
geographic limits have been set so narrowly that the peoples of these
regions have never had the options available to either the Europeans or the
Chinese. Isolation has left such regions not only lagging economically but
fragmented culturally and politically, making them prey to larger, more
prosperous, and more powerful nations.
We have seen how cultural handicaps have followed Eastern Europeans as
they immigrated overseas, leading to lower levels of income than among
immigrants from Western Europe who settled in the same places, whether North
America or Australia. If Africans had immigrated voluntarily to the Western
Hemisphere, instead of in bondage, is there any reason to believe that their
earnings would have achieved an equality that the Slavic immigrants failed
to achieve?
There is no question that Africans and their descendants faced the
additional barrier of color prejudice, but can we measure its effects by
assuming that black people would have had the same income and wealth as
white people in the absence of this factor-- especially in view of the large
disparities among different groups of white immigrants, not to mention the
rise of some non-white groups such as Chinese Americans and Japanese
Americans to incomes above the national average?
Put differently, geography has not only cheated many peoples of equal
cultural opportunities, it has also cheated all of us today of a simple
criterion for measuring the economic and social effects of other variables,
such as prejudice and discrimination.
Nothing has been more common in human history than discrimination
against different groups, whether different by race, religion, caste or in
innumerable other ways. Moreover, this discrimination has itself been
unequal-- more fierce against some groups than others and more pervasive at
some periods of history than in others. If there were not so many other
powerful factors creating disparities in income and wealth, it might be
possible to measure the degree of discrimination by the degree of
differences in economic outcomes. Even so, the temptation to do so is
seductive, especially as a means of reducing the complexities of life to the
simplicities of politics. But the facts will not fit that vision.
Anyone familiar with the history of race relations in the Western
Hemisphere would find it virtually impossible to deny that blacks in the
United States have faced more hostility and discrimination than blacks in
Latin America. As just one example, 161 blacks were lynched in one year in
the United States, but racial lynching was unknown south of the Rio Grande.
Perhaps the strongest case against the predominance of discrimination as an
explanation of economic disparities would be a comparison of blacks in Haiti
with blacks in the United States. Since Haiti became independent two
centuries ago, Haitian blacks should be the most prosperous blacks in the
hemisphere and American blacks the poorest, if discrimination is the
overwhelming factor, but in fact the direct opposite is the case. It is
Haitians who are the poorest and American blacks who are the most prosperous
in the hemisphere-- and in the world.
None of this should be surprising. The fact that discrimination
deserves moral condemnation does not automatically make it causally crucial.
Whether it is or is not in a given time and place is an empirical question,
not a foregone conclusion. A confusion of morality with causation may be
politically convenient but that does not make the two things one.
We rightly condemn a history of gross racial discrimination in American
education, for example, but when we make that the causal explanation of
educational differences, we go beyond what the facts will support. Everyone
is aware of times and places when the amount of money spent educating a
black child was a fraction of what was spent educating a white child, when
the two groups were educated in separate systems, hermetically sealed off
from one another, and when worn-out textbooks from the white schools were
then sent over to the black schools to be used, while new and more
up-to-date textbooks were bought for the white children. The number of days
in a school year sometimes differed so much that a black child with 9 years
of schooling would have been in class the same number of days as a white
child with only 6 years of schooling. It seems so obvious that such things
would account for disparities in test scores, for example.
But is it true?
There are other groups to whom none of these factors apply-- and who
still have had test score differences as great as those between black and
white children in the Jim Crow South. Japanese and Mexican immigrants began
arriving in California at about the same time and initially worked in very
similar occupations as agricultural laborers. Yet a study of a school
district in which their children attended the same schools and sat
side-by-side in the same classrooms found IQ differences as great as those
between blacks and whites attending schools on opposite sides of town in the
Jim Crow South. International studies have found different groups of
illiterates-- people with no educational differences because they had no
education-- with mental test differences larger than those between blacks
and whites in the United States.
What is "the" reason? There may not be any such thing as "the" reason.
There are so many cultural, social, economic, and other factors interacting
that there was never any reason to expect equal results in the first place.
That is why plausible simplicities must be subjected to factual scrutiny.
Back in 1899, when the schools of Washington, D.C. were racially
segregated and discrimination was rampant, there were four academic high
schools in the city-- three white and one black. When standardized tests
were given that year, the black academic high school scored higher than two
of the three white academic high schools.6 Today, exactly a century later,
even setting such a goal would be considered hopelessly utopian. Nor was
this a fluke. That same high school was scoring at or above the national
average on IQ tests during the 1930s and 1940s.7 Yet its physical plant was
inadequate and its average class size was higher than that in the city's
white high schools.
Today, that same school has a much better physical plant and per-pupil
expenditures in the District of Columbia are among the highest in the
nation. But the students' test scores are among the lowest. Nor was this
school unique in having had higher academic achievements during a period
when it seemingly lacked the prerequisites of achievement and yet fell far
behind in a later period when these supposed prerequisites were more
plentiful.
This is obviously not an argument for segregation and discrimination,
nor does it deny that counter-examples might be found of schools that
languished in the first period and did better in the second. The point here
is much more specific-- that resources have had little or nothing to do with
educational quality. Numerous studies of schools in general have shown
that, both within the United States and in international comparisons. It
should be no surprise that the same applies to black schools.
Politically, however, the disbursement of resources is by no means
inconsequential. The ability to dispense largess from the public treasury
has for centuries been one of the signs and prerogatives of power in
countries around the world. In electoral politics, it is vital as an
element in re-election. But the ultimate question is: Does it in fact make
people better off? How that question is answered is much less important
than that it be asked-- that we not succumb to social dogmas, even when they
are intellectually fashionable and politically convenient.
It is also important that economic and other disparities be confronted,
not evaded. Best-selling author Shelby Steele says that whites in America
today are fearful of being considered racists, while blacks are fearful of
being considered inferior. Social dogmas may be accepted because they
relieve both groups of their fears, even if these dogmas neither explain the
past nor prepare for the future.
It should be axiomatic that there is not unlimited time, unlimited
resources, or unlimited good will among peoples-- anywhere in the world. If
we are serious about wanting to enlarge opportunities and advance those who
are less fortunate, then we cannot fritter away the limited means at our
disposal in quixotic quests. We must decide whether our top priority is to
smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are looking
for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good for the moment or whether we
are seeking methods with a proven track record of success in advancing whole
peoples from poverty to prosperity.
In an era when esoteric theories can be readily turned into hard cash
from the public treasury, our criteria must be higher than what can get
government grants for middle-class professionals. It must instead be what
will rescue that youngster imprisoned, not only in poverty, but also in a
social and cultural isolation that has doomed whole peoples for centuries in
countries around the world. When we promote cultural provincialism under
glittering labels, we must confront the hard question whether we are
throwing him a lifeline or an anchor.
History, geography, and cultures are influences but they are not
predestination. Not only individuals but whole peoples have moved from the
backwaters of the world to the forefront of civilization. The late Italian
author Luigi Barzini asked of Britain: "How, in the first place, did a
peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?" The
story of Japan's rise from a backward country in the mid-nineteenth century
to one of today's leading economic powers has been at least equally as
dramatic. Scotland was for centuries known for its illiteracy, poverty, and
lack of elementary cleanliness. Yet, from the mid-eighteenth to the
mid-nineteenth century, most of the leading intellectual pioneers of Britain
were Scots, and Scots also become prominent in business, banking, medicine,
and engineering-- not only in Britain but around the world.
These and other dramatic and heartening rises of whole peoples came from
doing things that were often directly the opposite of what is being urged
upon less fortunate groups in the United States today. Far from painting
themselves into their own little cultural corner and celebrating their
"identity," these peoples sought the knowledge and insights of other peoples
more advanced than themselves in particular skills, technologies, or
organizational experience. It took centuries for the English to absorb the
cultural advances brought by such conquerors as the Romans and the Normans
and by such immigrants as the Huguenots, Germans, Jews, and others who
played a major role in developing the British economy. Their early
dependence on outsiders was painfully demonstrated when the Romans pulled
out of Britain in the fifth century, in order to go defend their threatened
empire on the continent, and the British economy and political structure
both collapsed. Yet ultimately-- more than a thousand years later-- the
British rose to lead the world into the industrial revolution and controlled
an empire containing one-fourth of the land area of the earth and one-fourth
of the human race.
Japan's economic rise began from a stage of technological backwardness
that was demonstrated when Commodore Perry presented them with a gift of a
train. Here was their reaction:

At first the Japanese watched the train fearfully from a safe distance,
and when the engine began to move they uttered cries of astonishment and
drew in their breath. Before long they were inspecting it closely, stroking
it, and riding on it, and they kept this up throughout the day.8

A century later, the Japanese "bullet train" would be one of the
technological wonders of the world, surpassing anything available in the
United States. But, before this happened, a major cultural transformation
had to take place among the Japanese people. A painful awareness of their
own backwardness spread through Japan. Western nations in general and the
United States in particular were held up as models to their children.
Japanese textbooks urged imitation of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin,
even more so than Japanese heroes. Many laments about their own
shortcomings by the Japanese of that era would today be called "self-hate."
But there were no cultural relativists then to tell them that what they had
achieved was just as good, in its own way, as what others had. Instead, the
Japanese overcame their backwardness, through generations of dedicated work
and study, rather than redefining it out of existence.
Both the British and the Japanese became renowned for their ability to
absorb the ideas and the technology of others and to carry them forward to
higher levels. So did the Scots. At one time, it was common for Scots to
blindly imitate the English, even using an English plow that proved to be
unsuitable for the soil of Scotland. Yet, once they had absorbed what the
English had to offer, the Scots then surpassed the English in some fields,
notably medicine and engineering.
History does not offer blueprints for the present but it does offer
examples and insights. If nothing else, it can warn us against becoming
mesmerized by the heady visions and soaring rhetoric of the moment.
One of the most seductive visions of our time is the vision of
"fairness" in a sense that the word never had before. At one time we all
understood what was meant by a "fair fight." It meant that both fighters
fought by the same Marquis of Queensbury rules. It did not mean that both
fighters had equal strength, skill, experience or other factors that would
make them equally likely to win.
In today's conception of fairness, only when all have the same prospects
of winning is the fight fair. It was not in The Nation or some other
left-wing magazine, but in the neoconservative quarterly The Public Interest
that we find opportunity equated with "the same chance to succeed" or "an
equal shot at a good outcome"-- regardless of the influence of social,
cultural, or family background.
This confusion between the fairness of rules and the equality of
prospects is spreading across the political spectrum. Regardless of which
of these two things might be considered preferable, we must first be very
clear in our own minds that they are completely different, and often
mutually incompatible, if we are to have any hope of a rational discussion
of policy issues ranging from anti-trust to affirmative action.
To add to the confusion, when prospects are not the same for all, this
is then blamed on "the system" or "the rules of the game," as Brookings
Senior Fellow Isabel V. Sawhill does in the Spring issue of The Public
Interest. Rules and standards are the creation of particular human beings
but circumstances need not be. Ms. Sawhill herself includes "good genes"
among the circumstances which affect economic inequalities, and we might add
all sorts of other geographic, demographic, cultural and historical factors
that were not created by today's "rules of the game" or by "the system" or
by anyone currently on the scene.
It makes sense to blame human beings for biased rules and standards.
But who is to be blamed for circumstances that are the results of a
confluence of all sorts of conditions of the past and present, interacting
in ways that are hard to specify and virtually impossible to disentangle?
Unless we wish to start a class action suit against geography or against the
cosmos or the Almighty, we need to stop the pretense that somebody is guilty
whenever the world does not present a tableau that suits our desires or fits
our theories.
This new kind of "fairness" has never existed anywhere at any time. The
real world has always been astronomically remote from any such condition.
Nor are the costs and risks of trying to achieve this cosmic fairness small.
Crime rates soared when our courts began to concern themselves with such
things as the unhappy childhoods of violent criminals or the "root causes"
of crime in general. Those who paid the highest price for these excursions
into cosmic justice were not the judges or the theorists whose notions the
judges reflected, but the victims of rape, murder and terrorization by
hoodlums.
The same preoccupation with "fairness" in some cosmic sense has often
turned our anti-trust laws into ways of penalizing those whose lower costs
enable them to sell profitably to the public at lower prices than those of
their competitors who are struggling to survive. Here again there is often
a pretense of villainy enshrined in rhetoric about "predatory" pricing or
"domination" or "control" of the market. And here again there are third
parties who lose-- the consumers.
Equating an absence of cosmic justice with villainy has become common in
employment law as well. Companies whose employees do not statistically
mirror the ethnic composition of the local labor force can be found guilty
of "discrimination," even if no one can find a single employee or job
applicant who has been treated unfairly by having different rules or
standards applied to his or her work or qualifications.
Do we as individuals and as a nation wish that others less fortunate had
our blessings? We should and we do. But our blessings as a nation did not
consist of having other nations give us foreign aid. The blessings of
individuals who have achieved in life have seldom taken the form of having
others accept mediocre performances from them or make excuses for their
counterproductive behavior.
Almost as mushy as the quest for cosmic justice is the notion that the
alternative is to "do nothing" about the gross disparities in prospects that
are common around the world. There has never been a moment in the entire
history of the United States when we have done nothing. There are
innumerable things that still need to be done, but spreading confusion is
not one of them.





N O T E S


a.. © Thomas Sowell. back

b.. Race and Culture (1994); Migrations and Culture (1996); Conquests
and Cultures (1998). back

c.. Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures, p. 265. back

d.. Jean Roche, La Colonisation Allemande et le Rio Grande do Sul
(Paris: Institut des Études de L'Amérique Latine, 1959), pp. 388-389. back

e.. Numerous, documented examples can be found in just two recent books
of mine: Conquests and Cultures (Basic Books, 1998), pp. 43, 124, 125, 168,
221-222; Migrations and Cultures (Basic Books, 1996), pp. 4, 17, 30, 31,
567, 118, 121, 122-123, 126, 130, 135, 152, 154, 157, 158, 162, 164, 167,
176, 177, 179, 182, 193, 196, 201, 211, 212, 213, 215, 224, 226, 251, 258,
264, 265, 275, 277, 278, 289, 290, 297, 298, 300, 305, 306, 310, 313, 314,
318, 320, 323-324, 337, 342, 345, 353-354, 354-355, 355, 356, 358, 363, 366,
372-373. Extending the search for intergroup statistical disparities to the
writings of others would of course increase the number of examples
exponentially, even when leaving out those cases where discrimination might
be a plausible cause of the disparities. back

f.. Henry S. Robinson, "The M Street School," Records of the Columbia
Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Vol.LI (1984), p. 122; Constance
Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 137. Constance Green said
that the M Street School had "a higher proportion of highly trained talent
than the white high schools could claim," (Ibid), presumably because of
limited career opportunities for well-educated blacks at that time. The
identity of the respective high schools was established from Report of the
Board of Trustees of Public Schools of the District of Columbia to the
Commissioners of the District of Columbia: 1898-1899 (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1900), pp. 7, 11. back

g.. Thomas Sowell, "Black Excellence: The Case of Dunbar High School,"
The Public Interest, Spring 1974, p. 8. See also Mary Gibson Hundley, The
Dunbar Story: 1870-1955 (New York: Vantage Press, 1965), p. 25. back

h.. Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 7. back

"Skookum" wrote in message
oups.com...

Thomas Wentworth wrote:
snip, snip

UNTIL THE BLACKS, AFRICAN WHATEVER,,,, STOP BLAMING WHITE PEOPLE FOR
THEIR
STUPID BEHAVIOR, STOP HAVING CHILDREN WITHOUT MARRIAGE, HAVE A CRIME RATE
THAT IS OUT OF SITE, AND EDUCATION LEVEL OF MORONS ..... UNTIL THEN..

THEY CAN GO SCREW.

Ah, but Thomas, your own penetrating analysis into the roots of the
problem suggests that that's exactly what they oughtn't to be doing.


You got me .... Good response.

You obviously find something in this to bolster your personal prejudice, so
what is it? One inner-city school isn't exactly a trend, nor is a shorter
history of modernization. Look at the history of DC itself, and you'll see
that the so-called Black high school received a lot of political favor. It
was, after all, right after the Civil War. It did well because it was
expected to do well, as it was a model for the nation, and very well funded
at the time.

More important today is the fact that blacks *can* do well - immensely well.
This thread started with Harlem, and you need look no further for the proof
in the pudding. It is still clearly a black neighborhood, but I sure don't
have the money to live there. I don't think it's germaine to bring 1964
news about anything into discussions about today. How long was your hair
back then? How clean were your clothes?

That year is when the civil rights movement in the US found a grip, the year
when the President came down firmly in favor, the year white society started
to learn, and began to loosen its hold on things.

Yes there was chaos in the land. Both blacks feeling a new energy and
whites resisting that energy came face to face time and again. The news
accounts you cited the other day were absolutely typical of the times;
grossly exaggerated accounts of black aggressions against whites and, oddly,
against themselves. Did it happen? Maybe some, but later accounts sound
far less dire. The turbulence lasted for years, but laws were passed,
economic measures taken, and things began to change.

I think that if anyone looks at the post-trauma news from New Orleans, it's
clear that many early reports of outrages were either exaggerated or totally
false to begin with. There were no murders in the Super Dome or the
Convention Center; indeed, only one victim out of hundreds appears to have
met such a fate. The police have admitted to breaking into stores for
supplies and to, um, appropriating cars not owned by them. The only thing
remotely suspicious about that is that they know how to.

I'm a white guy, and I've visited Harlem (mostly for the Apollo) since I was
a kid. When we took our own kids to NYC we always went to Harlem. It's
gentrified now, but even when it wasn't our visits were always fascinating.

To the OP - go without fear. There are free walking tours, and with little
kids you should look for one that both short and appropriate to their ages.
Do have a look at East Harlem (Spanish Harlem) too.

Keith

"Thomas Wentworth" wrote in message
news:Vub1f.10383$WD5.9558@trndny06...

wrote in message
oups.com...
compared to what the whites did in the flood in PA, new orleans was
quite civilized.....

people who rely on statistics are the people too stupid to read the
research behind the data and formulate their own opinion.....I work for
one of the major stat companies in the USA and depending on who is
paying us, we can make numbers say anything we want....

the out of wedlock birth rate is probably as high in several all white
counties all along the south....

to me you are just an ignorant fool, but we do have at least one thing
in common, we both slept with your sister......

Chuck

================================================== ====================
At first, I was not going to respond. Then, the more I read of this
absolutely stupid posting .....

The following by Thomas Sowell, a Black

RACE, CULTURE, AND EQUALITY1
by Thomas Sowell




During the 15 years that I spent researching and writing my recently
completed trilogy on racial and cultural issues,2 I was struck again and
again with how common huge disparities in income and wealth have been for
centuries, in countries around the world-- and yet how each country
regards its own particular disparities as unusual, if not unique. Some of
these disparities have been among racial or ethnic groups, some among
nations, and some among regions, continents, or whole civilizations.
In the nineteenth century, real per capita income in the Balkans was
about one-third that in Britain. That dwarfs intergroup disparities that
many in the United States today regard as not merely strange but sinister.
Singapore has a median per capita income that is literally hundreds of
times greater than that in Burma.
During the rioting in Indonesia last year, much of it directed against
the ethnic Chinese in that country, some commentators found it strange
that the Chinese minority, which is just 5 percent of the Indonesian
population, owned an estimated four-fifths of the capital in the country.
But it is not strange. Such disparities have long been common in other
countries in Southeast Asia, where Chinese immigrants typically entered
poor and then prospered, creating whole industries in the process. People
from India did the same in much of East Africa and in Fiji.
Occupations have been similarly unequal.
In the early 1920s, Jews were just 6 percent of the population of
Hungary and 11 percent of the population of Poland, but they were more
than half of all the physicians in both countries, as well as being vastly
over-represented in commerce and other fields.3 In the early twentieth
century, all of the firms in all of the industries producing the following
products in Brazil's state of Rio Grande do Sul were owned by people of
German ancestry: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties, leather, soap,
glass, watches, beer, confections and carriages.4
In the middle of the nineteenth century, just three countries produced
most of the manufactured goods in the world-- Britain, Germany, and the
United States. By the late twentieth century, it was estimated that 17
percent of the people in the world produce four-fifths of the total output
on the planet.
Such examples could be multiplied longer than you would have the
patience to listen.5
Why are there such disparities? In some cases, we can trace the
reasons, but in other cases we cannot. A more fundamental question,
however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first
place?
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that not only every racial or
ethnic group, but even every single individual in the entire world, has
identical genetic potential. If it is possible to be even more extreme,
let us assume that we all behave like saints toward one another. Would
that produce equality of results?
Of course not. Real income consists of output and output depends on
inputs. These inputs are almost never equal-- or even close to being
equal.
During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in
Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as
the Malay majority. Halfway around the world at the same time, the
majority of the population of Nigeria, living in its northern provinces,
were just 9 percent of the students attending that country's University of
Ibadan and just 2 percent of the much larger number of Nigerian students
studying abroad in foreign institutions of higher learning. In the
Austrian Empire in 1900, the illiteracy rate among Polish adults was 40
percent and among Serbo-Croatians 75 percent-- but only 6 percent among
the Germans.
Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other
countries-- disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as
well as in fields of specialization-- why should anyone expect equal
outcomes in incomes or occupations?
Educational differences are just one source of economic disparities.
Even at the level of craft skills, groups have differed enormously, as
they have in urbanization. During the Middle Ages, and in some places
long beyond, most of the population of the cities in Slavic Eastern Europe
were not Slavs. Germans, Jews, and other non-Slavic peoples were the
majority populations in these cities for centuries, while the Slavs were
predominantly peasants in the surrounding countrysides. Prior to the year
1312, the official records of the city of Cracow were kept in German-- and
the transition that year was to Latin. Only decades later did Poles
become a majority of the population of Cracow. Only over a period of
centuries did the other cities of Slavic Eastern Europe acquire
predominantly Slavic populations. As late as 1918, 97 percent of the
people living in the cities of Byelorussia were not Byelorussians.
Until this long transition to urban living took place among the Slavs,
how could the wide range of skills typically found in cities be expected
to exist in populations that lived overwhelmingly in the countryside? Not
only did they not have such skills in Eastern Europe, they did not have
them when they immigrated to the United States, to Australia, or to other
countries, where they typically worked in low-level occupations and earned
correspondingly low incomes. In the early years of the twentieth century,
for example, immigrants to the United States from Eastern and Southern
Europe earned just 15 percent of the income of immigrants from Norway,
Holland, Sweden, and Britain.
Groups also differ demographically. It is not uncommon to find some
groups with median ages a decade younger than the median ages of other
groups, and differences of two decades are not unknown. During the era of
the Soviet Union, for example, Central Asians had far more children than
Russians or the peoples of the Baltic republics, and so had much younger
median ages. At one time, the median age of Jews in the United States was
20 years older than the median age of Puerto Ricans. If Jews and Puerto
Ricans had been absolutely identical in every other respect, including
their cultures and histories, they would still not have been equally
represented in jobs requiring long years of experience, or in retirement
homes, or in activities associated with youth, such as sports or crime.
Nothing so intractably conflicts with our desires for equality as
geography. The physical settings in which races, nations, and
civilizations have evolved have had major impacts on the cultures
developed within those settings. Those settings vary enormously-- as do
their cultural consequences. How could Scandinavians or Polynesians know
as much about camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara? And how could the
Bedouins know as much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians?
The peoples of the Himalayas have certainly not had an equal opportunity
to acquire seafaring skills. Nor have Eskimos had an equal opportunity to
acquire knowledge and experience in growing pineapples or other tropical
crops. Ability in the abstract is one thing, but specific capabilities of
doing specific things is what matters economically.
Too often the influence of geography on wealth is thought of narrowly,
in terms of natural resources that directly translate into wealth, such as
oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa. But, important as such
differences in natural wealth are, geography influences even more profound
cultural differences among the people themselves.
Where geography isolates people, whether in mountain valleys or on
small islands scattered across a vast sea, there the cultural exposures of
those people to the outside world are very limited and so, typically, is
their technological advancement. While the rest of the world exchanges
goods, knowledge, and innovations from a vast cultural universe, isolated
peoples have been largely limited to what they alone have been able to
develop.
Few, if any, of the great advances in human civilization have come from
isolated peoples. As the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel put it,
the mountains almost always lag behind the plains-- even if the races in
the two places are the same. Potatoes and the English language both
reached the Scottish lowlands before they reached the highlands. Islam
reached North Africa's Rif mountains long after the people in the plains
had become Moslems.
When the Spaniards invaded the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century,
they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone-age level. So
were the Australian aborigines when the British discovered them in the
eighteenth century. Geographically imposed cultural isolation takes many
forms and exists in many degrees. Cities have long been in the vanguard
of human progress, all over the world, but cities do not arise randomly in
all geographic settings. Most of the great cities of the world have
developed on navigable waterways-- rivers or harbors-- but such waterways
are by no means equally or randomly distributed around the world. They
are very common in Western Europe and very rare in sub-Saharan Africa.
Urbanization has long been correspondingly common in Western Europe and
correspondingly rare in sub-Saharan Africa. One-third of the land mass of
Europe consists of islands and peninsulas but only one percent of the land
mass of South America consists of islands and peninsulas.
Navigable waterways have been economically crucial, especially during
thousands of years of human history before the development of railroads,
trucks, and airplanes. Before the transcontinental railroad was built, it
was both faster and cheaper to reach San Francisco from a port in China
than from Saint Louis. People in the city of Tbilisi bought their
kerosene from Texas-- 8,000 miles away across water -- rather than from
the Baku oil fields, less than 400 miles away across land.
Such vast differences in costs between water transport and land
transport affect what can be transported and how far. Gold or diamonds
can repay the costs of transport across thousands of miles of land, but
grain or coal cannot. More important, the size of a people's cultural
universe depends on how far they can reach out to other peoples and other
cultures. No great civilization has developed in isolation. Geography in
general and navigable waterways in particular set the limits of a people's
cultural universe, broadly or narrowly. But these limits are by no means
set equally for all peoples or all civilization.
For example, when the British first crossed the Atlantic and confronted
the Iroquois on the eastern seaboard of what is today the United States,
they were able to steer across the ocean in the first place because they
used rudders invented in China, they could navigate on the open seas with
the help of trigonometry invented in Egypt, their calculations were done
with numbers invented in India, and their general knowledge was preserved
in letters invented by the Romans. But the Iroquois could not draw upon
the knowledge of the Aztecs or the Incas, whose very existence they had no
way of knowing. The clash was not between the culture created by the
British versus the culture created by the Iroquois. It was a clash
between cultural developments drawn from vast regions of the world versus
cultural developments from a much more circumscribed area. The cultural
opportunities were unequal and the outcomes were unequal. Geography has
never been egalitarian.
A network of rivers in Western Europe flow gently through vast plains,
connecting wide areas economically and culturally. The rivers of tropical
Africa plunge a thousand feet or more on their way to the sea, with
cascades and waterfalls making them navigable only for stretches between
these natural barriers-- and the coastal plain in Africa averages just 20
miles. Regular rainfall and melting snows keep the rivers of Western
Europe flowing throughout the year but African rivers have neither-- and
so rise and fall dramatically with the seasons, further limiting their
usefulness. The two continents are at least as dramatically different
when it comes to natural harbors. Although Africa is more than twice the
size of Europe, it has a shorter coastline. That is because the European
coastline continually twists and turns, creating innumerable harbors,
while the African coastline is smooth, with few harbors. How surprising
is it that international commerce has played a much smaller role in the
economic history of Africa than in that of Europe in general and Western
Europe in particular?
These particular geographic disparities are by no means exhaustive.
But they are suggestive of some of the many ways in which physical
settings have expanded or constricted the size of the cultural universe
available to different peoples. One revealing indication of cultural
fragmentation is that African peoples are 10 percent of the world's
population but have one-third of the world's languages.
In controversies over "nature versus nurture" as causes of economic and
other disparities among peoples and civilizations, nature is often
narrowly conceived as genetic differences. Yet geography is also nature--
and its patterns are far more consistent with history than are genetic
theories. China, for example, was for many centuries the leading nation in
the world-- technologically, organizationally, and in many other ways.
Yet, in more recent centuries, China has been overtaken and far surpassed
by Europe. Yet neither region of the world has changed genetically to any
extent that would account for this dramatic change in their relative
positions. This historic turnaround also shows that geographic
limitations do not mean geographic determinism, for the geography of the
two regions likewise underwent no such changes as could account for the
reversal of their respective positions in the world.
Back in the fifteenth century, China sent ships on a voyage of
exploration longer than that of Columbus, more than half a century before
Columbus, and in ships more advanced than those in Europe at the time.
Yet the Chinese rulers made a decision to discontinue such voyages and in
fact to reduce China's contacts with the outside world. European rulers
made the opposite decision and established world-wide empires, ultimately
to the detriment of China. In short, geography sets limits but people
determine what they will do within those limits. In some parts of the
world, geographic limits have been set so narrowly that the peoples of
these regions have never had the options available to either the Europeans
or the Chinese. Isolation has left such regions not only lagging
economically but fragmented culturally and politically, making them prey
to larger, more prosperous, and more powerful nations.
We have seen how cultural handicaps have followed Eastern Europeans as
they immigrated overseas, leading to lower levels of income than among
immigrants from Western Europe who settled in the same places, whether
North America or Australia. If Africans had immigrated voluntarily to the
Western Hemisphere, instead of in bondage, is there any reason to believe
that their earnings would have achieved an equality that the Slavic
immigrants failed to achieve?
There is no question that Africans and their descendants faced the
additional barrier of color prejudice, but can we measure its effects by
assuming that black people would have had the same income and wealth as
white people in the absence of this factor-- especially in view of the
large disparities among different groups of white immigrants, not to
mention the rise of some non-white groups such as Chinese Americans and
Japanese Americans to incomes above the national average?
Put differently, geography has not only cheated many peoples of equal
cultural opportunities, it has also cheated all of us today of a simple
criterion for measuring the economic and social effects of other
variables, such as prejudice and discrimination.
Nothing has been more common in human history than discrimination
against different groups, whether different by race, religion, caste or in
innumerable other ways. Moreover, this discrimination has itself been
unequal-- more fierce against some groups than others and more pervasive
at some periods of history than in others. If there were not so many
other powerful factors creating disparities in income and wealth, it might
be possible to measure the degree of discrimination by the degree of
differences in economic outcomes. Even so, the temptation to do so is
seductive, especially as a means of reducing the complexities of life to
the simplicities of politics. But the facts will not fit that vision.
Anyone familiar with the history of race relations in the Western
Hemisphere would find it virtually impossible to deny that blacks in the
United States have faced more hostility and discrimination than blacks in
Latin America. As just one example, 161 blacks were lynched in one year
in the United States, but racial lynching was unknown south of the Rio
Grande. Perhaps the strongest case against the predominance of
discrimination as an explanation of economic disparities would be a
comparison of blacks in Haiti with blacks in the United States. Since
Haiti became independent two centuries ago, Haitian blacks should be the
most prosperous blacks in the hemisphere and American blacks the poorest,
if discrimination is the overwhelming factor, but in fact the direct
opposite is the case. It is Haitians who are the poorest and American
blacks who are the most prosperous in the hemisphere-- and in the world.
None of this should be surprising. The fact that discrimination
deserves moral condemnation does not automatically make it causally
crucial. Whether it is or is not in a given time and place is an empirical
question, not a foregone conclusion. A confusion of morality with
causation may be politically convenient but that does not make the two
things one.
We rightly condemn a history of gross racial discrimination in American
education, for example, but when we make that the causal explanation of
educational differences, we go beyond what the facts will support.
Everyone is aware of times and places when the amount of money spent
educating a black child was a fraction of what was spent educating a white
child, when the two groups were educated in separate systems, hermetically
sealed off from one another, and when worn-out textbooks from the white
schools were then sent over to the black schools to be used, while new and
more up-to-date textbooks were bought for the white children. The number
of days in a school year sometimes differed so much that a black child
with 9 years of schooling would have been in class the same number of days
as a white child with only 6 years of schooling. It seems so obvious that
such things would account for disparities in test scores, for example.
But is it true?
There are other groups to whom none of these factors apply-- and who
still have had test score differences as great as those between black and
white children in the Jim Crow South. Japanese and Mexican immigrants
began arriving in California at about the same time and initially worked
in very similar occupations as agricultural laborers. Yet a study of a
school district in which their children attended the same schools and sat
side-by-side in the same classrooms found IQ differences as great as those
between blacks and whites attending schools on opposite sides of town in
the Jim Crow South. International studies have found different groups of
illiterates-- people with no educational differences because they had no
education-- with mental test differences larger than those between blacks
and whites in the United States.
What is "the" reason? There may not be any such thing as "the" reason.
There are so many cultural, social, economic, and other factors
interacting that there was never any reason to expect equal results in the
first place. That is why plausible simplicities must be subjected to
factual scrutiny.
Back in 1899, when the schools of Washington, D.C. were racially
segregated and discrimination was rampant, there were four academic high
schools in the city-- three white and one black. When standardized tests
were given that year, the black academic high school scored higher than
two of the three white academic high schools.6 Today, exactly a century
later, even setting such a goal would be considered hopelessly utopian.
Nor was this a fluke. That same high school was scoring at or above the
national average on IQ tests during the 1930s and 1940s.7 Yet its
physical plant was inadequate and its average class size was higher than
that in the city's white high schools.
Today, that same school has a much better physical plant and per-pupil
expenditures in the District of Columbia are among the highest in the
nation. But the students' test scores are among the lowest. Nor was this
school unique in having had higher academic achievements during a period
when it seemingly lacked the prerequisites of achievement and yet fell far
behind in a later period when these supposed prerequisites were more
plentiful.
This is obviously not an argument for segregation and discrimination,
nor does it deny that counter-examples might be found of schools that
languished in the first period and did better in the second. The point
here is much more specific-- that resources have had little or nothing to
do with educational quality. Numerous studies of schools in general have
shown that, both within the United States and in international
comparisons. It should be no surprise that the same applies to black
schools.
Politically, however, the disbursement of resources is by no means
inconsequential. The ability to dispense largess from the public treasury
has for centuries been one of the signs and prerogatives of power in
countries around the world. In electoral politics, it is vital as an
element in re-election. But the ultimate question is: Does it in fact
make people better off? How that question is answered is much less
important than that it be asked-- that we not succumb to social dogmas,
even when they are intellectually fashionable and politically convenient.
It is also important that economic and other disparities be confronted,
not evaded. Best-selling author Shelby Steele says that whites in America
today are fearful of being considered racists, while blacks are fearful of
being considered inferior. Social dogmas may be accepted because they
relieve both groups of their fears, even if these dogmas neither explain
the past nor prepare for the future.
It should be axiomatic that there is not unlimited time, unlimited
resources, or unlimited good will among peoples-- anywhere in the world.
If we are serious about wanting to enlarge opportunities and advance those
who are less fortunate, then we cannot fritter away the limited means at
our disposal in quixotic quests. We must decide whether our top priority
is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are
looking for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good for the moment or
whether we are seeking methods with a proven track record of success in
advancing whole peoples from poverty to prosperity.
In an era when esoteric theories can be readily turned into hard cash
from the public treasury, our criteria must be higher than what can get
government grants for middle-class professionals. It must instead be what
will rescue that youngster imprisoned, not only in poverty, but also in a
social and cultural isolation that has doomed whole peoples for centuries
in countries around the world. When we promote cultural provincialism
under glittering labels, we must confront the hard question whether we are
throwing him a lifeline or an anchor.
History, geography, and cultures are influences but they are not
predestination. Not only individuals but whole peoples have moved from
the backwaters of the world to the forefront of civilization. The late
Italian author Luigi Barzini asked of Britain: "How, in the first place,
did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?"
The story of Japan's rise from a backward country in the mid-nineteenth
century to one of today's leading economic powers has been at least
equally as dramatic. Scotland was for centuries known for its illiteracy,
poverty, and lack of elementary cleanliness. Yet, from the mid-eighteenth
to the mid-nineteenth century, most of the leading intellectual pioneers
of Britain were Scots, and Scots also become prominent in business,
banking, medicine, and engineering-- not only in Britain but around the
world.
These and other dramatic and heartening rises of whole peoples came
from doing things that were often directly the opposite of what is being
urged upon less fortunate groups in the United States today. Far from
painting themselves into their own little cultural corner and celebrating
their "identity," these peoples sought the knowledge and insights of other
peoples more advanced than themselves in particular skills, technologies,
or organizational experience. It took centuries for the English to absorb
the cultural advances brought by such conquerors as the Romans and the
Normans and by such immigrants as the Huguenots, Germans, Jews, and others
who played a major role in developing the British economy. Their early
dependence on outsiders was painfully demonstrated when the Romans pulled
out of Britain in the fifth century, in order to go defend their
threatened empire on the continent, and the British economy and political
structure both collapsed. Yet ultimately-- more than a thousand years
later-- the British rose to lead the world into the industrial revolution
and controlled an empire containing one-fourth of the land area of the
earth and one-fourth of the human race.
Japan's economic rise began from a stage of technological backwardness
that was demonstrated when Commodore Perry presented them with a gift of a
train. Here was their reaction:

At first the Japanese watched the train fearfully from a safe distance,
and when the engine began to move they uttered cries of astonishment and
drew in their breath. Before long they were inspecting it closely,
stroking it, and riding on it, and they kept this up throughout the day.8

A century later, the Japanese "bullet train" would be one of the
technological wonders of the world, surpassing anything available in the
United States. But, before this happened, a major cultural transformation
had to take place among the Japanese people. A painful awareness of their
own backwardness spread through Japan. Western nations in general and the
United States in particular were held up as models to their children.
Japanese textbooks urged imitation of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin
Franklin, even more so than Japanese heroes. Many laments about their own
shortcomings by the Japanese of that era would today be called
"self-hate." But there were no cultural relativists then to tell them that
what they had achieved was just as good, in its own way, as what others
had. Instead, the Japanese overcame their backwardness, through
generations of dedicated work and study, rather than redefining it out of
existence.
Both the British and the Japanese became renowned for their ability to
absorb the ideas and the technology of others and to carry them forward to
higher levels. So did the Scots. At one time, it was common for Scots to
blindly imitate the English, even using an English plow that proved to be
unsuitable for the soil of Scotland. Yet, once they had absorbed what the
English had to offer, the Scots then surpassed the English in some fields,
notably medicine and engineering.
History does not offer blueprints for the present but it does offer
examples and insights. If nothing else, it can warn us against becoming
mesmerized by the heady visions and soaring rhetoric of the moment.
One of the most seductive visions of our time is the vision of
"fairness" in a sense that the word never had before. At one time we all
understood what was meant by a "fair fight." It meant that both fighters
fought by the same Marquis of Queensbury rules. It did not mean that both
fighters had equal strength, skill, experience or other factors that would
make them equally likely to win.
In today's conception of fairness, only when all have the same
prospects of winning is the fight fair. It was not in The Nation or some
other left-wing magazine, but in the neoconservative quarterly The Public
Interest that we find opportunity equated with "the same chance to
succeed" or "an equal shot at a good outcome"-- regardless of the
influence of social, cultural, or family background.
This confusion between the fairness of rules and the equality of
prospects is spreading across the political spectrum. Regardless of which
of these two things might be considered preferable, we must first be very
clear in our own minds that they are completely different, and often
mutually incompatible, if we are to have any hope of a rational discussion
of policy issues ranging from anti-trust to affirmative action.
To add to the confusion, when prospects are not the same for all, this
is then blamed on "the system" or "the rules of the game," as Brookings
Senior Fellow Isabel V. Sawhill does in the Spring issue of The Public
Interest. Rules and standards are the creation of particular human beings
but circumstances need not be. Ms. Sawhill herself includes "good genes"
among the circumstances which affect economic inequalities, and we might
add all sorts of other geographic, demographic, cultural and historical
factors that were not created by today's "rules of the game" or by "the
system" or by anyone currently on the scene.
It makes sense to blame human beings for biased rules and standards.
But who is to be blamed for circumstances that are the results of a
confluence of all sorts of conditions of the past and present, interacting
in ways that are hard to specify and virtually impossible to disentangle?
Unless we wish to start a class action suit against geography or against
the cosmos or the Almighty, we need to stop the pretense that somebody is
guilty whenever the world does not present a tableau that suits our
desires or fits our theories.
This new kind of "fairness" has never existed anywhere at any time.
The real world has always been astronomically remote from any such
condition. Nor are the costs and risks of trying to achieve this cosmic
fairness small.
Crime rates soared when our courts began to concern themselves with
such things as the unhappy childhoods of violent criminals or the "root
causes" of crime in general. Those who paid the highest price for these
excursions into cosmic justice were not the judges or the theorists whose
notions the judges reflected, but the victims of rape, murder and
terrorization by hoodlums.
The same preoccupation with "fairness" in some cosmic sense has often
turned our anti-trust laws into ways of penalizing those whose lower costs
enable them to sell profitably to the public at lower prices than those of
their competitors who are struggling to survive. Here again there is
often a pretense of villainy enshrined in rhetoric about "predatory"
pricing or "domination" or "control" of the market. And here again there
are third parties who lose-- the consumers.
Equating an absence of cosmic justice with villainy has become common
in employment law as well. Companies whose employees do not statistically
mirror the ethnic composition of the local labor force can be found guilty
of "discrimination," even if no one can find a single employee or job
applicant who has been treated unfairly by having different rules or
standards applied to his or her work or qualifications.
Do we as individuals and as a nation wish that others less fortunate
had our blessings? We should and we do. But our blessings as a nation
did not consist of having other nations give us foreign aid. The
blessings of individuals who have achieved in life have seldom taken the
form of having others accept mediocre performances from them or make
excuses for their counterproductive behavior.
Almost as mushy as the quest for cosmic justice is the notion that the
alternative is to "do nothing" about the gross disparities in prospects
that are common around the world. There has never been a moment in the
entire history of the United States when we have done nothing. There are
innumerable things that still need to be done, but spreading confusion is
not one of them.





N O T E S


a.. © Thomas Sowell. back

b.. Race and Culture (1994); Migrations and Culture (1996); Conquests
and Cultures (1998). back

c.. Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures, p. 265. back

d.. Jean Roche, La Colonisation Allemande et le Rio Grande do Sul
(Paris: Institut des Études de L'Amérique Latine, 1959), pp. 388-389. back

e.. Numerous, documented examples can be found in just two recent books
of mine: Conquests and Cultures (Basic Books, 1998), pp. 43, 124, 125,
168, 221-222; Migrations and Cultures (Basic Books, 1996), pp. 4, 17, 30,
31, 567, 118, 121, 122-123, 126, 130, 135, 152, 154, 157, 158, 162, 164,
167, 176, 177, 179, 182, 193, 196, 201, 211, 212, 213, 215, 224, 226, 251,
258, 264, 265, 275, 277, 278, 289, 290, 297, 298, 300, 305, 306, 310, 313,
314, 318, 320, 323-324, 337, 342, 345, 353-354, 354-355, 355, 356, 358,
363, 366, 372-373. Extending the search for intergroup statistical
disparities to the writings of others would of course increase the number
of examples exponentially, even when leaving out those cases where
discrimination might be a plausible cause of the disparities. back

f.. Henry S. Robinson, "The M Street School," Records of the Columbia
Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Vol.LI (1984), p. 122; Constance
Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's
Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 137. Constance
Green said that the M Street School had "a higher proportion of highly
trained talent than the white high schools could claim," (Ibid),
presumably because of limited career opportunities for well-educated
blacks at that time. The identity of the respective high schools was
established from Report of the Board of Trustees of Public Schools of the
District of Columbia to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia:
1898-1899 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), pp. 7, 11. back

g.. Thomas Sowell, "Black Excellence: The Case of Dunbar High School,"
The Public Interest, Spring 1974, p. 8. See also Mary Gibson Hundley, The
Dunbar Story: 1870-1955 (New York: Vantage Press, 1965), p. 25. back

h.. Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 7. back

Rita wrote:


Of all the possible things to do in NYC, a visit to Grant's Tomb is at the
bottom of the list. It is one of the places the bus tours drive by and the
reaction is always a yawn.

Well, gee, I sort of liked it. We visited it on the way to Columbia
University (also stopped by the Riverside Church), and I thought it was
interesting, especially for Civil War buffs.

On 4 Oct 2005 08:15:42 -0700, "Skookum" wrote:

I have been to New York City many times but no doubt because of supreme
ignorance mixed with usually sublimated fear, and being distinctly not
a person of color, I've never really been to Harlem. Yes,I will admit
it: the thought of going north and east of Central Park intimidates me
a bit.

You have guts, admitting your fear and resolving to confront it
head-on. I salute you!

But next spring I am planning a family visit to NYC. I'd like to
spend a day up in Harlem and am seeking advice on how best to travel
there and around, what the highlights are, any tours made for the
somewhat meek and lily-white etc. Since I'll have my three daughters
(11,9 and 7) along, attractions of special interest to that age set
would be appreciated.

Others have made some useful (and in one case, contemptible and
useless) remarks. If your daughters enjoy walking, I suggest walking
along 125 St. from west to east. That street has a feel all its own.
Some streets that are lined with beautiful architecture include
Convent Av. from around City College (135-140th Sts.) northward, St.
Nicholas Av. in the 140s and 150s, and Eighth Av. (aka Frederick
Douglass Blvd.) at Striver's Row (roughly, the 140s or so again --
walk north from 135 St.). It might be interesting to take a bus or the
7th Av. local (#1) to 137 St. (a Dominican neighborhood) and walk up
the hill, north on Convent Av. and east on 140 St. past St. Nicholas
Park, then up 8th Av. and St. Nick to 168 St. or so.

Quite honestly, I don't remember going up to Harlem as a child and
don't believe I did. Of course, in those days (1970s), it was a very
rough neighborhood. I did know people who were living near 125 St.,
but around Claremont Av., which is a block west of Broadway. We Upper
West Siders always considered the area west of Amsterdam and
Morningside Drive up to 125 St. part of the Upper West Side, with
Harlem starting further east.

Another thought is that La Marqueta on E. 116 St. might be of some
interest, as the business center of East (Spanish) Harlem.

If you do go up to Harlem, make sure to stop by the original Patsy's
at 2287 1st Av. between 117 and 118 Sts. for a pie and if you're still
hungry, you can get some slices to go from their takeout section. They
make terrific pizza in a hot coal oven.

Michael

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