May 6^th

Thomas Sowell is writng today. As an economist he isn’t much of a sociologist but he tries.

 Sowell, like many right wing types, manages to shade the truth in his favor; witness his statement, “…the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman.” For Sowell any mistake which is not flattering to his point of view is a lie. In the heat of the moment, in a community long abused by police, anything derogatory about the police is credible so people believed erroneously that Brown was shot in the back. Mistaken beliefs are not lies. Sowell claims that there are those who believe the problems of poverty in the ghetto communities are caused by the “sins of whites” and are the “legacies of slavery.” Who are those people Sowell? He provides no names; pick any liberal.

All these evils “went up after the much celebrated sixties.” Oh come now Dr. Sowell, did they teach you nothing about logical fallacies in your economics graduate program at Chicago? Have you never heard of post hoc reasoning? Just because events occur as a sequence in time does not mean the previous event caused the subsequent event. It is certainly true that many new welfare programs began then but so did the voting rights act, school desegregation, the anti-miscegenation SCOTUS decision, the murder of Martin Luther King and the murder of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. I would bet that much of the 60s civil unrest was caused by the murder of Martin Luther King…but you didn’t even mention that. I guess you just forgot it in your zeal to blame liberal support programs.

Dr. Sowell makes another interesting point: The ghettoes and black communities were not nearly as restive in the 1920s as they became in the late 1960s and today.  Sowell likes to blame this, again, on social welfare programs, programs that didn’t exist in the 20s and began to flourish in the 60s. But there are other massive social differences between these two periods; Blacks in their ghettoes in the 20s had little hope that things might change for them or that they could do anything about their condition themselves. Although there were riots as early as 1919 in Chicago when 38 were killed and 500 injured. Some WW 1 veterans then were unwilling to take anymore segregationist abuse. Along with the 60s social programs, there was also cheaper television and with it the images of how other people lived. Now some ghetto people began to appreciate what might be possible eventually and to be in a rush for eventually to happen immediately; when it didn’t frustration finally produced the aggression seen in the ghettoes over the last twenty years or so. This was helped massively by just a few racist police.  Jelani Cobb has found that,  “With the exception of the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., every major riot by the black community of an American city since the Second World War has been ignited by a single issue: police tactics.”

Hungry people rarely attack unless you show them food and then deny them access to it; then watch out!

Is this analysis too subtle for Thomas Sowell? Probably not unless he has his political blinders on; unfortunately he is rarely without them.