Posted on 10/17/2001 9:20:40 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
TownHall.com: Conservative Columnists: Thomas Sowell
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Thomas Sowell (back to story)
October 18, 2001
Do facts matter?
Recently a young black man sent a thoughtful e-mail to me. Among his kind comments was an expression of sympathy for the racism that he thought blacks of my generation must have experienced in going through college. In reality, it is his generation of blacks who have encountered more racial hostility on campus than mine. But his was an understandable mistake, given how little attention is paid to accuracy in history and how often history is used as just a propaganda tool in current controversies.
My college and early postgraduate education took place during the 1950s -- that decade before the political left brought its light into the supposed darkness of the world. During the decade of the 1950s I attended four academic institutions -- a year and a half at a black institution, Howard University, three years at Harvard, where I graduated, nine months at Columbia, where I received a master's degree, and a summer at New York University.
I cannot recall a single racist word or deed at any of these institutions. The closest thing to a racist remark was made about a student from England who was referred to as "nasty, British and short." It was I who made that remark.
My first encounter with racism on campus came toward the end of my four years of teaching at Cornell in the 1960s -- and it erupted after black students were admitted under lower standards than white students and were permitted to engage in disruptions that would have gotten anyone else suspended or expelled. I was not the target of any of these racist incidents, which were directed against black students. I received a standing ovation in the last class I taught at Cornell.
One of the black students at Cornell moved in with my wife and me for a while, because she was afraid of both the black militants and those whites who were increasingly bitter about both the trouble that the militants were causing and the way the administration was catering to them. This backlash was not peculiar to Cornell, but developed on many campuses and became so widely known over the years that it acquired a name -- "the new racism."
In the late 1980s, for example, a dean at Middlebury College reported that -- for the first time in her 19 years at that institution -- she was getting requests from white students not to be housed with black roommates. People who had taught at Berkeley for similar periods of time likewise reported that they were seeing racist graffiti and hate mail for the first time. More than two-thirds of graduating seniors at Stanford said that racial tensions had increased during their years on campus.
All this is the direct opposite of what you might be led to believe by the politically correct history or theory of race in America. The endlessly repeated mantra of "diversity" implies that such things as group quotas and group identity programs improve race relations. Quotas are often thought to be necessary, in order to create a "critical mass" of black students on campus, so that they can feel sufficiently comfortable socially to do their best academic work.
That there are various opinions on such things is not surprising. What ought to be surprising -- indeed, shocking -- is that these social dogmas have been repeated for decades, with no serious effort to test whether or not they are true.
When elite liberal institutions like Stanford, Berkeley and the Ivy League colleges have been scenes of racial apartheid and racial tensions on campus, have more conservative institutions that have resisted quotas and preferences been better or worse in these respects? My impression has been that they have been better. But the real problem is that we must rely on impressions because all the vast research money and time that have gone into racial issues have still not even addressed this key question that goes to the heart of the dogmas pervading academia today.
Over a period of more than three decades, during the first half of the 20th century, 34 black students from Dunbar High School in Washington were admitted to Amherst College. Of these, about three-fourths graduated and more than one-fourth of these graduates were Phi Beta Kappa. But there were never more than a handful of black students at Amherst during that era -- nothing like a "critical mass."
Is this evidence conclusive? No. But it is evidence -- and the political left avoids evidence like the plague.
©2001 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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Lack of leadership and courage usually leads to bad results. It certainly did here. The most effective leaders in the fight against racism are blacks like Drs. Sowell and Williams.
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