Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

by Thomas Sowell

It is now more than three decades since the historic Supreme Court decision on desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education . Thomas Sowell takes a tough, factual look at what has actually happened over these decades -- as distinguished from the hopes with which they began or the rhetoric with which they continue, Who has gained and who has lost? Which of the assumptions behind the civil rights revolution have stood the test of time and which have proven to be mistaken or even catastrophic to those who were supposed to be helped?

Genres: Politics, History, Economics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Race, Law

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social philosopher, and political commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina and grew up in Harlem, New York City. Due to poverty and difficulties at home, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and worked various odd jobs, eventually serving in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. Afterward, he took night classes at Howard University and then attended Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958. He earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University the next year and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In his academic career, he held professorships at Cornell University, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked at think tanks including the Urban Institute. Since 1977, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy.
Sowell was an important figure to the conservative movement during the Reagan era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was offered a position as Federal Trade Commissioner in the Ford administration, and was considered for posts including U.S. Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, but declined both times.
Sowell is the author of more than 45 books (including revised and new editions) on a variety of subjects including politics, economics, education and race, and he has been a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers. His views are described as conservative, especially on social issues; libertarian, especially on economics; or libertarian-conservative. He has said he may be best labeled as a libertarian, though he disagrees with the "libertarian movement" on some issues, such as national defense.

Reviews

[TJ Shelby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I marvel at the coincidence in my decision to read George Orwell's 1984 as I simultaneously read Sowell's "Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality" which he wrote in 1984. Both deal with the issue of revisionist history and with those of capable thought processes to debate whether certain things did or were happening.

As a self-professed "Stat Geek" this book blew me away. It tore down a few walls that I harbored as fact and/or opinion regarding the role of government in the civil rights movement. One of the most damning revelations was that there was more progress in civil rights BEFORE the Civil Rights Act than after. I can't help but wonder, as many American homosexuals battle for similar government supported rights, if this occurence will unfortunately repeat itself.

One of my favorite quotes from the book, a damning condemnation of our current political state, says: "Demagoguery flourishes where something can be said in a few catchy words that would take volumes to disprove."

I recommend this to all.

[Elizabeth StClair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book shifted the way I look at presented statistics. Having minored in Poverty and Human Capability studies in college, I felt I knew broadly the various interpretations of the Civil Rights movement, as well as the continued struggle for equality today. This book changed that. While reading, at times I struggled to understand how an issue so obvious could get so out of hand, and muddled by pointless arguments and false or misleading numbers, but after watching CNN for a few moments, I quickly remembered why this is a problem. I'm not sure that I fully agree with this book. I think discrimination does still exist, and that there are still civil rights issues to be fought and won (ex: gay marriage, recently legalized, as well as other issues). However, by breaking down statistics into more evenly measurable groups (same age range, same household make up, etc...) it makes it more easy to see that discrimination isn't active in the ways previously thought. I liked the economic argument that if businesses were actively discriminating, this would result in a failure to maximize profits. Eventually some business would figure it out. That is not to say, of course, that there isn't discrimination. There is. But the discrimination of today is much more complex than it is often presented. Women earn less than men, partly because they end up in fields that pay less but allow them to take time off and re-enter without needing much additional training. I remember wondering in elementary school what was the purpose of having my dad pay for college if I was "just going to get married and have kids," thereby removing myself from the labor force. While I now understand the importance of education regardless of future life choices, part of me acknowledges how this thought process must play for employers. Women, more so than men, will take time off after the birth of their child, are more likely to be the stay-at-home parent, and thereby more likely to drop out of the labor force, or hold themselves back from progression in the labor force, than men. Culturally, this is what has happened in the past and, despite advances in female employment, continues to happen today. As Sowell points out, it seems marriage and motherhood detract more so from female job growth than discrimination. There is a lot to be said about this idea as well as this book, and I don't have the time to type out all of my thoughts. Parts of this book made me uncomfortable. Sowell's argument that ethnic cultures influence perceived inequalities in job outcomes (ie: Asians are more strongly represented in maths and sciences while blacks and Hispanics are vastly underrepresented), while interesting and valid, at times toed the line of being perceived as arguing the superiority of some cultures over others (which wasn't the author's purpose). Sowell's main argument against current civil rights leaders can be summarized as equal opportunity does not mean equal results. Overall, this book gave me a vast amount to consider. I plan to read more books on this issue. I do believe there continues to be discrimination and unjust inequality in the US. However, after reading this book, I think we are using misleading measurements and therefore unhelpful approaches to solve this issue.

[Alejandro Heracles al-Mu'minin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If feel that there is no way I could ever do justice trying to explain Thomas Sowell's intellect. On this topic alone I have gone through an exhaustive amount of material of his, yet each time go goes about explaining this it is intriguing and far from redundant.

Sowell admits this is no work of pleasure and hardly voluntary but a project of demand. One that is so crucially needed in dispelling so many of the accepted myths that have substitued a blind justice of equal opportunity, with one based on pre-determined outcomes that demand uniform results.

The result has been counter-intuitive, almost dystopian; where we no longer allow for equal opportunity in the move a movement founded on this very liberty.

The book is very focused on the legislative wrongs and judicial errors which explains what went wrong, whereas most of Sowell's other work till this point has been focused on the trends of people in a macro sense and the effects of culture on those trends as studied in Ethnic America; a great book for new and young Americans studying with their own identity or confused by the origins and greatness of our national makeup.

[Eric C 1965 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Cameron Ostrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sowell 🐐🐐🐐

[The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to believe this was written in the 80s. The issues and arguments remain the same.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly believe everyone should read this book or something else on a similar topic by Sowell. Aside from the specific information and arguments presented, enough in themselves to force any honest reader to think more rigorously about the topic and question many near-universal assumptions, I'll never look at statistics comparing various groups the same way again. I'll always have to ask: What level of aggregation are we looking at? What factors are not being considered? What unspoken assumptions are present?

[Mike Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps it's the salience of our current times or I’ve simply succumb to the Halo Effect, but I find myself always impressed by Thomas Sowell’s work. Unfortunately, hyperpartisan times and hypersensitivity preclude me from saying much without fear of reprisal, but in this book Professor Sowell makes several points that strongly resonate with me (though I recognize that I only speak for my own individual experiences and nobody else's); the strongest takeaway is the importance of recognizing how easy it is to automatically accept the purported (and often amorphous) explanation for a given problem, without considering the possibility that less salacious or more complicated reasons are actually at the root of said problem. The sad outcome is that the problem itself never gets resolved, but instead frustration and divisiveness continue to boil over. “Argument fallacies are assets in rhetoric, but liabilities in logic.” Put truth above popularity.

[Don Lim · Rating 4 out of 5]

It may surprise the reader to know this book was published in 1984, and yet the same misconceptions and fallacies exist in the public. It is also sad that Sowell felt it was his duty to write this book when time could have been spent doing other work. Sowell makes quick work of the two incorrect reasoning when attempting to explain the discrepancies of the black population: statistics and discrimination. Statistics alone does not necessarily mean there is a disparity in equality of opportunity. Discrimination alone does not account for the success of Black West Indians. Furthermore, Sowell examines the transformation of the civil rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education was a monumental stride towards equality for blacks but the development of Green v. School Board of Kent County led to a decision where students were judged on the basis of race, beginning the tide of fighting racism with racism.

The book is perhaps more relevant today after electing the first black president. Race relations has become more sour and to no surprise provided you read the book. The issue has become so highly volatile that as Sowell pointed out, the accumulation of matches only needs a single spark to blow.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sowell examines how the civil rights movement began, and what it morphed into. It started as desiring equal opportunity and developed into demanding equal outcome, a policy that actually discriminates in all sorts of ways and results in counterproductive unintended consequences. He persuasively makes the case that individual rights were abandoned to get group results. All kinds of progress was being made for minorities before the civil rights movement. Sowell is the iconoclast of reigning false dichotomies such as believing the that differences in group results (blacks, whites, Asians, men, women, etc) are explained either by discrimination or by genetics. This is a lesser known book of Sowell's, but highly valuable to recommend to others because it is brief and directly relevant to the many fallacies passionately advocated every day by politicians, left and right.

January '21 A book for now.

2024.6 Listened this time.

[Mangus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking piece of work. I always thought the historical account provided in school was incomplete, but no one had either interest or the courage to discuss it with me. Though Sowell wrote this book 30 years ago, I felt there are several concepts still relevant today.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sowell makes good arguments for civil rights as negative rights vs. "outcomes", and makes a case for different outcomes for individuals or groups without requiring either discrimination or genetic inferiority. He also does a good job of identifying costs to various interventions.

[Calvin Isch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sowell argues that civil rights leaders are more focused on rhetoric than reality, that many of their positions and policies are far from helpful for the people they supposedly support, are not grounded empiricism. He points out several areas where equality of outcome between races has declined since the movement, and also identifies areas where gains realized are captured by the relatively privileged of the marginalized group. For Sowell, cultural values and practices are critical for explaining varied outcomes between groups; leaders focused on improving things should note the positives and the negatives of any culture and target these with their policies. More importantly, individuals should not be grouped together just by their identity marker (e.g., race) because there is greater variance within groups than between them. The market economy is the solution to any overt or systemic racism. If a certain group is unfairly treated, they provide an excellent set of workers/customers for an entrepreneur.

There’s the description. Still chewing on my own position…

[Josiah Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good and full of statistics and studies that are more than convincing. Sowell argues that civil rights, as a whole, is merely rhetoric that avoids the reality of the true issues. Many things that those who argue for civil rights believe and echo, are just repeating commonly held myths. One of the more interesting and important topics in this book was Sowell's take on diversity in the workplace as well as the supposed wage gap, both of which have been manipulated so badly you can hear an audible snap. Worthwhile.

[Garbanzo Beans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot here. His claims about the government criminalizing statistical outliers through affirmative action was amazing! The argument was sound and I agree with it. I also loved him walking through ethnic disparity among other nations when the minority group actually has more access to economic prosperity than the majority group. He is a great thinker and this was the first book I read by Sowell. It won’t be the last!

[Drew Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book with numerous examples leading the argument that differences between groups of people (whites/blacks/asians...men/women) isn’t necessarily discrimination based. He also argues that more advancement in civil rights happened before it became a political movement and some of those advancements were greatly hindered or destroyed (and continue to be so).
Thomas Sowell should be on every American bookshelf.

[Jeremy]

Recommended here.

[George Trudeau · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Chrisanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a man so concerned with numbers, he sure loves words and is as expressive as usual. Possibly more so... have his editors tempered his newer works?

[عدنان العبار · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Thomas Sowell's earlier books, 'Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?' is a book about the Regression Fallacy. Simply put, this fallacy states that it is logically impermissible to claim that a change in the states of affairs X occurred because of a change in policy or behavior, Y. It is a derivative of the famous logical fallacy: Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The book contains many chapters, all questioning the civil rights narrative, of claiming that the progressive policies are the social events that changed the ancien regime into the current 'better' states of affairs. The fallacy is applicable to trends more so than to singular events. For example, when we say that bloodletting diminished because of legislation that bans it, we tend to forget that the practice of bloodletting was already diminishing due to the advent of modern medicine. Causality ought to be carefully attributed to any one thing: Generally, we say that A causes B, when A is a sufficient cause for B, and A happens before B. But that is truly not enough -- consider this scenario. Imagine being stabbed in the liver. That is sufficient to kill you, and it would, of course, has to happen before your death to have caused it. That is not enough to attribute your death to the shiving. Suppose right after you were shived, you suffered a shotgun blast to the head. Now, we have to remedy our theory of causality to include both the deterministic thesis, that every event has a cause, and that causality can only be attributed in the absence of more pressing competing sufficient causes.

The book's first chapter discusses Thomas Sowell's idea of the overarching narrative: He defines 'The Civil Rights Vision' as that vision that seeks to remedy society's perceived ills through policies and legislation. Nowadays, many people think that the only solution to our problems is a legislation, regardless of how much a legislation would drain the resources and create perverse incentive structures and also unintended consequences. 'Well, something has to be done about X,' one would say, not paying careful attention that that something can really be anything and that many things can not only make the situation worse but create more problems that are in greater need of attention.

The middle chapter deals with some of the solutions that turned out to be worse than the problems themselves, like the attempt to create equal opportunities or to enforce an affirmative action scheme. Other solutions concern 'desegregation' and busing. Let us consider these solutions individually, starting with the equality of opportunity. People are born unequal, and naturally, they will have unequal opportunities. For us to equalize opportunities, we can either bring the disadvantaged upwards or push the advantaged downwards. But helping those crippled with physical or mental retardation is limited by many factors, that would be best solved at either the level of the individual or the family, or the community. It is impossible to solve such problems at the federal level without severely limiting the freedoms of almost all individuals. Moreover, even if these schemes do not work, they are extremely costly and would drain the resources from the community in such a way that would make it extremely hard to accommodate any upcoming problems. An immediate problem that comes to mind is the problem of lockdowns in the year 2020. They aimed to solve an urgent and pressing problem, which is the transmissivity of a deadly virus at a time when the vaccines were not available. But such lockdowns imposed much greater costs to citizens, and to small businesses, and finally, retarded production in such a way that food production around the world stagnated, resulting in food shortages in the poorest societies in the world. It just might be the case that more people died from starvation in the years 2020 and 2021, than people would ever die from Coronavirus from its inception until the end of time. "11 people are likely dying every minute from hunger, now outpacing COVID-19 fatalities, warns Oxfam." That is also, without including the cases of deaths from despair, or the allocation of resources into warding off COVID instead of treating cancers in their inception, and so on.

We turn now to the problem of affirmative action: The book harshly criticizes affirmative action on both, ethical, and practical grounds. Affirmative action creates such a burden on employers in areas where it is harder to find local women or blacks, and with the level of expertise needed for the job. Sometimes, all of the applicants might be black or women, and therefore, blacks and women will be overrepresented — basketball players would be one such profession for blacks, and nurses for women. In universities, this means that universities often have to accept students who would not normally qualify just to fill up a quota, leading to the failure of such students and a mismatch of academic choices (these students may be among the top 1% of American students, say, but Harvard's levels need students who are among the 0.1% or better — such students would have excelled if they were accepted into a slightly easier university, and would have had astonishing careers, had they graduated). On ethical grounds, the problem of affirmative action, even though it cannot accomplish its goals of racial and gender assimilation, or improving the social fabric, is that it enforces a will onto private individuals and private firms, and it encroaches on the freedoms of people. It would be outrageous if your neighbor imposed his will onto yours, but for some mystical reason, it is ethically permissible if a bureaucrat does it. It is also unethical in that it forces nondiscriminant people to discriminate between people based on their race or sex, to achieve a faux sense of vaguely defined social justice.

Similar things can be said about school desegregation and busing. When the department of education, say, chooses an optimal amount of persons from category X in any school, the school can no longer shoot for a certain goal. I cannot run a school on integrity and merit if I require that students get an average grade of B+ if I cannot choose my students based on informed expectations and cannot even suspend them if they weren't up to the academic level required. Moreover, many of the studies done on schooling or education are inherently fallacious since either they flimsily employ ideologies to guide their theories — shoehorning the axioms of the ideology into the conclusion section — or their arguments cannot be proven — say, are built to prove counterfactual claims. The case for busing was quite bizarre, and was extremely costly. The idea was to put white and black and Asian children in a bus and go over every house so that the time the kids would be together was maximized. The bus back home would also take hours. So much time, which could have been spent otherwise, was wasted, to force the children of all races to be put together on the bus. As Walter Williams puts it, it was as if there was the notion that the other races would benefit from being exposed to white children. This is, of course, an extremely racist idea by the true sense of the word, and yet it was put as a hypothesis, and has failed after costing millions of taxpayer dollars. It's one of the stranger episodes of the history of the United States.

There were two chapters, by the end of the book, which focused on the special case of blacks and the special case of women, in economics and sociology. Much of the scholarship concerning these two groups was riddled with errors. They are too much to count, so I will select a few at random. Consider the case of the wage-gap that women suffered from. The whole idea was that for the same amount of work, women were paid an X% of what men were paid That would not pass the smell test: If employing women for the same job, and for the same amount of work, and for the same quality of work, costs X% of what hiring similar men, then economic pressure would drive those men out of these jobs and women would be hired in their place. That, of course, did not happen. Therefore, this is easily demonstrated to be false using economic theory. But the issue can be further studied: Women and men who were investigated in that survey reported working for over 35+ hours a week. But 36, as well as 60, both fall into the 35+ category. So, the comparison is flawed from the start. That is not to say that women are not paid more or less, but that I cannot conclude this result from the given propositions. Moreover, the same is said about African-American professors. But upon further analysis, we see that most African-American professors hold a degree in education (perhaps %50+), and Caucasians choose more varied disciplines which pay more. Women hold the majority of seats in psychology and sociology departments, whereas men hold most seats in physics and mathematics departments. Jews and Asians might more readily choose the hard physical sciences, and excel the most among their peers. It was erroneous from the start to assume that people's preferences are not skewed towards their ethnicities, cultures, religious predispositions, and so on. One final example is the case of both Blacks and women, whom the author considers at length in these two chapters: When comparing between averages, medians, and so on, one should understand the limitation of such data. If the limitations were not integrated into one's analysis, one is bound to fall into all types of errors. If men, on average, are paid more than women, then it might be the case that many women who are by themselves not poor, and who have husbands who work overtime, choose low-paying but flexible jobs to accomodate for the family. To include her into the sample, as well as her husband, would by necessity change the average (albeit by a small amount) since we're not dealing with infinite quantities. The humanities and the social sciences are ill equiped to process statistical data, and often the surveys don't accurately represent the data, and in the end, the analysis of the data is not always waterproof which leads to the many errors that plague these disciplines.

I would definitely recommend this book to all those who do not see through the rhetoric of civil rights, and the progressive movement, in hopes that real discussion — unlike the scholars who attack Sowell (even in his prime) — could take place regarding these issues.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, but having read his newer stuff I’ve heard most of the arguments already. Also the information is semi out of date, though still mostly relevant.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A conversation about societal injustice led me to this book. I don’t know everything, I don’t pretend to have it figured out and know I'm only scratching the surface. All I know is that Civil Rights is a subject where emotions run high. It’s intimate, it's raw, and its painful and those emotions are powerful fuel for politics. I turned to Thomas Sowell for his expertise in Economics and his analysis of disparities pre and post-affirmative action. He admits he took no pleasure in writing the book but felt it an obligation due to the growing regression among the truly disadvantaged and increasing polarization of the races. This book was published in 1985 so some of the data is dated, however, his key message is highly relevant today. He analyzes census data from the 16th to 20th century and within that, reviews multiple cultures and population migrations. He then compares the origins of the civil rights movement to the 1980s civil rights vision and examines the change in narrative. Sowell illustrates how easily a narrative can form by simply ignoring or including a few key variables. His conclusion simply states that the “evidence” in political rhetoric can rarely be summed up under one causal accusation and these accusations often obscure the real issues the truly disadvantaged face. While his tone is blunt, the underlying concern is for the disadvantaged and a plea for us to do better. In the final pages, he warns against the very hate groups we see today. It's a prediction he hoped would never come to pass. I look forward to reading critiques to this work as well as his citations and footnotes over the next few weeks.

[Steven H · Rating 3 out of 5]

AN OFTEN PASSIONATE BOOK BY THE FAMED BLACK ECONOMIST

Thomas Sowell (born 1930) is an economist, columnist, and author who has long been associated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1984 book, “It has not been a pleasure to write this book but a necessity… Yet the growing polarization of the races, the stagnation and retrogression of the truly disadvantaged, and the embittered atmosphere surrounding the evolution of ‘civil rights,’ in the courts especially, leave no real alternative to an open and frank reconsideration of what has been done, and is being done, in the name of those two words… Thirty years after the historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education is an appropriate time to reconsider where we have some and where we are going… How much of the promise of these judicial and legislative events has been fulfilled? How much has it been perverted? How well has the social vision behind the civil rights movement been understood---or even questioned? These are the issues addressed in the pages that follow.”

He states that in the Civil Rights Act, “Congress declared itself in favor of equal opportunity as opposed to affirmative action. So has the American public. Opinion polls show a majority of blacks opposed to preferential treatment, as is an even larger majority of women. Federal administrative agencies led the change from the prospective concept of individual equal opportunity to the retrospective concept of group ‘representation’…” (Pg. 40-41)

He suggests, “There is additional evidence that the advantaged have benefited under affirmative action while the disadvantaged have fallen behind… Affirmative action hiring pressures make it costly to have no minority employees, but continuing affirmative action pressures at the promotion and discharge phases also make it costly to have minority employees who do not work out well. The net effect is to increase the demand for highly qualified minority employees while decreasing the demand for less qualified minority employees or for those without a sufficient track record to reassure employers. Those who are most vocal about the need for affirmative action are of course the more articulate minority members---the advantaged who speak in the name of the disadvantaged. Their position on the issue may accord with their own personal experience, as well as their own self-interest. But that cannot dismiss the growing evidence that is it precisely the disadvantaged who suffer from affirmative action.” (Pg. 52-53)

He argues, “Affirmative action deals with averages almost as if there were no variance. If Hispanics are 8 percent of the carpenters in a given town, it does not follow that EVERY employer of carpenters in that town would have [x] percent Hispanics if there were no other discrimination. Even if carpenters were assigned to employers by drawing lots… there would be VARIANCE in the proportion of Hispanic carpenters from one employer to another. To convict those employers with fewer Hispanics of discrimination in hiring would be to make statistical variance a federal offense.” (Pg. 54)

He points out, “The median annual income of women has [been]… just under three-fifths of that of men. From this statistic has derive the non sequitur that a woman id paid just 59 percent of what a man receives for doing THE SAME WORK… In reality, women work substantially fewer hours annually than men, in part because a much higher proportion of women are PART-TIME workers. Women also average fewer continuous years of employment on a given job. Most of these differences relate to marriage and motherhood…. The relevant question… is: What of those women to whom marriage and motherhood do not apply, the women who remain single and work full-time?... Women who remain single earn 91 percent of the income of men who remain single, in the age bracket of 25 to 64 years old. Nor can the other 9 percent automatically be attributed to employer discrimination, since women are typically not educated as often in such highly paid fields as mathematics, science and engineering, nor… well-paid fields such as construction work, lumberjacking, coal mining, and the like.” (Pg. 92)

He objects, “It can no longer be taken for granted that a reviewer or critic will even state the very subject of a book accurately… It has become remarkably commonplace… to attribute positions directly the opposite of those actually taken… Others whose work has raised inconvenient questions about race and ethnicity have encountered similar treatment… The real issue is whether the new McCarthyism creates an atmosphere in which only a handful of people dare to question publicly the prevailing vision. If it succeeds in discrediting ideas and facts it cannot answer, in intimidating others into silence, then the whole attempt to resolve urgent social issues will have to be abandoned to those with fashionable clichés and political cant---what has aptly been called ‘Whitespeak.’” (Pg. 124-127)

He points out, “A common charge against me is that my own career is due to the very affirmative action I criticize… It so happens that I have not achieved anything in my career that was not achieved by other blacks before me---and therefore long before affirmative action… [This] unsupported assertion … is sometimes accompanied by the unsupported assertion that writing about race has made my career. But in reality I had tenure at UCLA … before ever publishing a single book or article on race.” (Pg. 136-137)

He concludes, “People do not change their vision of the world the way they change clothes… But change they must if they mean to survive. No individual (or group) is going to capture all of reality in his vision. If the only reaction to other visions---or uncomfortable evidence---is blind mudslinging, then the limitations that are common to all human beings become, for them, ideological prisons.” (Pg. 140)

This book will be “must reading” for fans of Sowell, and similar conservatives.

[Quintillis K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sowell misses the point totally. This Economist does not accept, or include the sociological aspects that has affected people. As he states, one can take any number of factors and make them fit their conclusion, as I feel it is what he did in this book.

[Ivan Dickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Demagoguery flourishes where something can be said in a few catchy words that would take volumes to disprove."

I feel like this pretty much sums up the state of political affairs in the modern day.

[AttackGirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely Rhetoric!

Oh Thomas, I have tried the exact same facts to no avail, have you wondered why people want to believe inaccuracies and outright lies. Why do people want to continue to brainwashed the low IQ into victimization. Why have they continued to ignore behaviors that come with low IQ, then we have the low IQ females raising the highest population crime rate and wonder why...well I do not.
Then to make further cultural biased when they have removed the law from each town and restricted the job markets and given constaint money when we know throwing money at a problem has never fixed it anything. We fund "Special programs, special areas, given special status which only keep the low IQ unable to participate in ways they could and historically have, a person with an IQ lower than 85 cannot join the military to help defend their land, yet we had a history of separate very successful servicemen that could work together to achieve amazing results.

It doesn't help anyone to not face facts, to not be able to walk peacefully anywhere in their land next to their neighbors, aren't we all in this together. As I have said so many times we have to have non- emotional factual data driven conversations. We need to fix the problems immediately, starting with eliminating the over regulation of the people, posting the laws in every town, allowing choice, stopping quotas, returning to chain gangs and work camps, and stop interfering with citizens.

If I choose to commission myself to you and you can call it slavery, servitude, share cropping who cares as long as I am safe, have food and work within the agreement we together discuss, that is between the people. We could establish overbite to ensure no one is abused or taken advantage of. If I can afford to care for you and your family but require work and time based on history of the planet we need to allow such, even Jefferson did not release untrained non self sufficient peoples to starve under the guise of Freedom, Its just cruel. We do not release animals from captivity and expect them to survive on their own.

As I have asked you please study the history of the planet and produce a book on a return to "slavery" or perhaps come up with a better word as the ancients did. Many people know the story of Moses freeing his people from "bondage" from the Egyptians but they do not know that the people sold themselves so they would not starve to death. That the people did not want to leave because they had homes, food, jobs, their families and a purpose.

Even in the ancient stories we have not told the truth because the truth is they all died starving in the dessert and not one who left Egypt survived to see the "promised land" what the story admits is endless warring, slaughtering of innocent people in attempt to claim someone else lands. Who has focused on the generation of people lost under Moses self indulgent Hero plan and even he was to old to make it to a stable place. Even now until this day they still have no land and wander about, imagine what they could have been if they has stayed in Egypt. I am sure there would not have been a WWII. Try reading the stories from a different view from the view of someone needing food, home, children and living in peace happily together, as a historical document. Didnt they even say they wanted to go back where they had food and homes, so Moses cut them down, talk about oppression. Its time to wake up people.

We may all be created from God but when you say created equally well that is not true either we are all created differently each with strengths and weaknesses and we need each other to grow and be healthy happy successful in the world. The US is "Treated equally under the LAW" but everyone already knows that is not true. The person with the most money gets the best treatment and if you don't trade sex you are going to jail, if the policeman has just come from anther stop you are going to jail, on and on the facts show. We cannot have the only posted law being the speed limit and someone pulling you over, telling you that you violated it and then can shoot you dead on the spot for whatever they make up, who would risk driving.

So lets stop the lies and fighting and work towards truth and common goals. I cannot cook, but I can fix your house, car, paper or pour concrete, read and write understand electrical and doctoral level math and if you like to work and cook and care for children why can we not make a plan together outside of regulated minimum wage where you have to pay I have to pay for housing and you get section 8, I have to pay for kids school lunches and you get it free, I pay high taxes for good school systems and you get bused into an area you don't feel comfortable on and on it goes with others forcing their fantasy ideals, forcing separation and hate with laws and restrictions on us as a people.

Its way past time to address the facts and fix the problems.

Thomas, I cannot imagine your frustration, book after book and things are only getting worse.

[Kyle Carson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sowell did well to criticize areas where correlations are inaccurately treated as causal when referencing the policies and results of Civil Rights. It is true that more randomized trials are necessary to analyze and adjust Civil Rights policies. However, isn't this also true for the "war on terror" (military industrial complex), the war on drugs (criminal justice system), the education system, "trickle down economics" etc?

I also question Sowell's convenient changes in statistical granularity. In one instance he highlights the cultural "truths" evident in German, Chinese, Irish and other peoples in general terms yet insists on going with more granular statistics to counter broad claims of discrimination against Blacks or women. I accept that discrimination describes only part of the plight of the Black experience in the United States but I am not convinced that culture is a stronger influence. Especially since Black American culture is so short in it's history relative to the others highlighted in the book. If anything, Black culture is one of unparalleled strength, resilience, and creativity. This of course was out of necessity in order to survive 250 years of brutal economic exploitation, cultural genocide, educational suppression, and psychological and emotional trauma plus another 100 years of legal segregation and discrimination.

Finally, I fully endorse a keen eye towards results for Civil Rights. What would capitalism be without results at the end of the day? The absence of meaningful, quality statistics to effectively gauge the efficacy of Civil Rights legislation doesn't warrant throwing the entire accomplishment away or casting it as a failure after only 20 years compared to 350 years of state condoned exploitation and discrimination.

[Ean Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality is a classic by Thomas Sowell. The writing of Sowell in 1984 is much different and harder to read than it is now in 2021. Luckily, he was just as compelling then as he is now. This books starts off with the fact that it was written 30 years after the historic US Supreme Court case Brown vs Board of Education. With that came the notorious Civil Rights Movement, which Sowell implies was rightly established. Though the premise Sowell posits in this book is how the ideas of that movement have been promulgated in the federal government. Has laws such as affirmative action actually improved the plight of minorities? Sowell doesn’t see any evidence to suggest so then, and I don’t think his mind has changed in 37 years. It’s astounding the the problems that existed that long ago still exist now. The rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement is still here, thought the reality of the movement with what it was trying to accomplished is long done. The demagoguery of politicians will give you a short memory of reality, making you think the federal government’s laws have actually done what they were intended to do.

If you are a Sowell follower, this is definitely worth the read. You see not much has changed, in my opinion. If you aren’t a Sowell reader, read this. It is not easy, but maybe you’ll be able to become a fan after reading this! Sowell gets 5 stars in my book. He offers a thorough analysis of Civil Right and provides ample statistics to support his claims.

[Marc A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? is a classic by Thomas Sowell that was published in 1984. He seeks to answer one question: is discrimination the cause of group disparities? Dr. Sowell thinks not, and endeavors to demonstrate why in the book's 164 pages.

By "group disparities," Dr. Sowell means the differences in economic status between ethnic groups, or between men and women. He begins his examination by briefly reviewing the history of civil rights legislation and court rulings. Very early on, politicians shifted the goal from trying to provide equal opportunity to all groups to favoring certain groups to ensure equal outcomes. "Affirmative action," as it came to be known, became the means used by government and civil rights activists to achieve that goal. In succeeding chapters, Dr. Sowell demonstrates that cultural differences are more likely the cause group disparities, and affirmative action initiatives have done little to change the status quo. If anything, disadvantaged groups are worse off than ever, while demagogic politicians profit by sowing division among the races or groups.

Little has changed in the 40-plus years since the book was published. Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? is still relevant. Dr. Sowell does an admirable job explaining a complex topic. He makes his case in a clear and concise manner. Despite his scholarly approach, interested readers should have no difficulty following his presentation.

[Tanner Hawk · Rating 3 out of 5]

"What is at issue is whether statistical differences mean discrimination, or whether there are innumerable demographic, cultural, and geographic differences that make this crucial automatic inference highly questionable" (48).

"Affirmative action hiring pressures make it costly to have no minority employees, but continuing affirmative action pressures at the promotion and discharge phases also make it costly to have minority employees who do not work out well. The net effect is to increase the demand for highly qualified minority employees while decreasing the demand for less qualified minority employees or for those without a significant track record to reassure employers...it is precisely the disadvantage who suffer from affirmative action" (53).

"There are virtually endless examples of concealed losses to blacks that evoke no political response from black leaders [e.g. subsidies to farmers that raise food prices, taxi licensing laws that make it nearly impossible for most blacks to obtain a taxi license]. Earmarked benefits are what pay off for these leaders politically, however small or even counterproductive these earmarked programs may be for blacks [e.g. food stamps, affirmative action]" (90).

"Sincerity of purpose is not the same as honesty of procedure. Too often they are opposites" (120).