Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Interesting piece in today's Opinion Journal by Thomas Sowell on culture as a bigger roadblock to success than race. It's less often the color of one's skin, and more often the character of one's culture that serves as an indicator of future success:
Crippled by Their Culture - Race doesn't hold back America's "black rednecks." Nor does racism.
Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.
If this disparity is not due to race, it is equally hard to explain by racism. To a racist, one black is pretty much the same as another. But, even if a racist somehow let his racism stop at the water's edge, how could he tell which student was the son or daughter of someone born in the West Indies or in Africa, especially since their American-born offspring probably do not even have a foreign accent?
What then could explain such large disparities in demographic "representation" among these three groups of blacks? Perhaps they have different patterns of behavior and different cultures and values behind their behavior...