Intellectuals and Race
Lamenting the tendency toward one-dimensional analysis of race status in the U.S., Sowell explores the various perspectives that intellectuals have brought to race on how racial groups have affected and been effected by the sociopolitics of their era. He analyzes the early twentieth-century notions of genetic determination, or biology as destiny, which evolved into the eugenics movement and the foundation of Nazism, and he juxtaposes this with the late twentieth-century intellectual assessment of discrimination as the dominant cause of race status. Sowell digs beneath the intellectual arguments to offer more nuanced and complex consideration of attitudes on race and racism. For example, he notes that white project dwellers in Britain “act out” in ways similar to those of black American ghetto dwellers and that, at the turn of the twentieth century, black northerners were not segregated until the arrival of southern black migrants, whom they criticized nearly as much as whites did. Through myriad other observations, Sowell analyzes the significance of class in perspectives on race and considers how intellectuals themselves are driven to their positions. --Vernon Ford