Thomas Sowell versus US Education
How YouTubers are changing the minds of young, black Americans.
Written by Hannah Gal.
Economist Thomas Sowell has been shaping the discourse for six decades and counting. A maverick black American, he remains defiant of the education system’s prevailing victimhood mentality. Mainstream media and left-wing intellectual circles have largely ignored his work, but that hasn’t stopped him from influencing millions. Why have some cultures survived while others perished? Does affirmative action actually benefit the disadvantaged? And why was the Harlem of his childhood so drastically different from today’s? These are some of the questions Sowell has tackled.
“Harlem was a safe place even at night,” he told Peter Robinson, “when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would get up, get dressed and go out to a corner newsstand where there was a little old man who was white, selling newspapers at midnight — today, he and I would both be taken in for mental observation.” Joking aside, Harlem’s schools were arguably better in the 1940s, when Sowell was growing up there, than they were in subsequent decades. So what led to their drastic decline? “Teachers became social workers, social theorists,” he argues, “propagandists for all kinds of new fads”.
For more than half a century, American education has been dominated by dogma, with history taught through the prism of oppression. Generations of Americans were led to perceive slavery as something that only affected blacks — racially motivated exploitation, invented by the White Man. They came to consider every problem in the black community as a legacy of slavery. Any hardship or failure was pinned on centuries of persecution at the hands of whites. Yet as Sowell argues, this twisted view of history is dangerously devoid of context, leading black Americans down a path of resentment, division and blame.
But a real change in outlook may be here. Countless black Americans are discovering the real history of slavery through Sowell’s online videos. A wave of Gen Zers are coming to the stark realisation that they have been misled.
Numerous viral reaction videos reveal their shock upon learning that slavery is not an exclusively black issue, that it has always been part of human society, that countless whites were enslaved, and that the very word ‘slave’ is derived from 9th century Slavic folk.
The Cartier Brothers, boasting nearly 2 million followers, have put out videos noting that slavery did not necessarily or even usually involve exploitation of people from other races, that certain aspects of current black subculture are indeed damaging to blacks, and that the devastation caused by Lyndon Johnson’s “well intentioned” welfare reforms of the 1960s persists to this very day.
They watched Sowell explain that “more whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States, or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed”, and that white slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire decades after blacks were freed in the United States. What’s more, “the principal impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists, people who would today be called ‘the religious right’, clearly, this story is not ‘politically correct’ in today’s terms, hence it is ignored, as if it never happened.”
Particularly potent is the revelation of black Americans’ post-emancipation century of growth. Starting in 1865, it saw unemployment fall and a record number of newly freed illiterates gain education. Sowell describes this social progress as unequalled in human history, yet very few black Americans are aware of it. Hence the question on these Gen Zers’ minds is: Why did it take Thomas Sowell to provide this perspective? Why were we taught that slavery was a black-American issue when in fact it has existed in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, both before and after the transatlantic trade?
Sowell’s revelations are so powerful because of they context they provide. This context exposes the degree to which school curricula are led by ideology, rather than facts. It also puts into question the entire mainstream media narrative and exposes agenda-driven reporting on practically all issues related to blacks, from the economy, housing and education to welfare, affirmative action and poverty. Commenters on these YouTube channels speak of shedding their “victimhood armour” and losing the “oppression prism”.
This, in turn, makes it possible for them to process key social trends. One example is the tragic dismantling of the black family. Black single-parent households went from 22% in the 1960s to 74% today, a rise characterised by the media and academia as a “legacy of slavery”. Yet as Sowell explains, “for more than a hundred years after the end of slavery, most black children were born to women who were married and the children were raised in two-parent homes”. This changed in the 1960s with the introduction of welfare policies that excluded the father from the family. “Centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow did not destroy the black family but one generation of the welfare state did.”
Sowell goes on to list statistics from various European countries where welfare reforms have had a similar impact — places such as the UK where slavery was never widespread. “Black or white American or British” he concludes, “the studies show the same things”.
For these YouTubers, then, Sowell’s research is an eye opener. They have listened to his remarks on such topics as black subculture, the conflicts of visions that set liberals and conservatives apart, affordable housing, Detroit’s decline, Obama’s record, why Marxism fails, DEI, anti-Semitism, wage disparities and even Sowell’s iconic conversation with William F. Buckley — where he explains how white liberals’ narrative stymies black progress.
Sowell’s common sense seems to be striking a cord. One example is Tinashe Peter reading from a hard copy of Black Rednecks and White Liberals: “blaming others for anything in which blacks lag has become standard operating procedure among white liberals”. Whether you agree with this assertion or not, it is a sight to behold. Another example is LFR Family’s followers hearing of freed slave Booker T. Washington, who wrote that “to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise”. Incidentally, LFR Family was viewing Joe Rogan’s podcast on Sowell’s wisdom, which is itself a big deal.
These videos are impacting viewers’ outlook on a host of issues. They consider the importance of personal responsibility, equal opportunity versus equal outcome, and looking to the future instead of demanding apologies for historical wrongs. As Sowell states in regard to the latter, “If you’re going to have reparations for slavery, it’s going to be the greatest transfer of wealth back and forth, because the number of Whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States.”
Tinashe Peter again reads from Black Rednecks and White Liberals: “mention slavery and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans and their descendants enslaved by Europeans, the white man and their descendants in the southern Americas ... no other historic horror is so narrowly constructed … no one thinks of war, famine or epidemics in such localised terms”. Wondering why we still see slavery as a uniquely American experience, Peter’s concludes that “we got there because essentially we have been programmed and conditioned by this liberal ideology to do exactly that, because if it’s white, it ain’t right ... because it is Western, it is seen as the greatest evil.”
This YouTube-led enlightenment raises serious questions about the value and purpose of US education. Is it not schools and universities’ responsibility to deliver the unvarnished truth? Shouldn’t teachers and administrators, as Sowell suggests, test their beliefs against evidence — rather than letting “educational dogmas of the day reign supreme until new dogmas come along?”
His contention is that academics and policymakers wrongly view this one specific minority group as a single entity that “requires treatment”. He characterises their interference, well-intentioned or otherwise, as messing with the order of things. Prime examples are the mass admission of black students into higher education in the name of equality, or Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s welfare reforms. Here Sowell quotes Frederick Douglass’s uncanny reflection on the matter:
Everybody has asked the question—what shall we do with the Negro? I have had but one answer from the beginning, do nothing with us. Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. If the apples do not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall. I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone.
Such insights have no doubt led some viewers to rethink black American leaders’ narrative and to question the worth of their leadership. Do they empower and achieve real results, or are they self-serving?
The bottom line is that Sowell is succeeding where schools have failed — delivering genuine knowledge that impacts individuals in their everyday lives. Viewers of these YouTube channels are engaging in independent thought and questioning their oppression mindset. It’s worth noting that Sowell’s work is not beyond criticism (though much of it remains invaluable). Also, it is not welfare per se that he rejects but the culture of dependence, especially when carried on for generations.
Left-wing intellectuals have never embraced Sowell, despite him being one of America’s most accomplished black scholars. But thanks to the social media pundits mentioned here, his insights are now filtering through to the mainstream. The YouTubers spreading Sowell’s message are encouraging black Americans to rethink the quest for equality of outcome, the virtue of black leadership, and perhaps most importantly, the victimhood that’s become integral to so many black Americans’ identity.
Hannah Gal is a London-based journalist and award-winning documentarian. Her credits include Quillette, the Critic, the Spectator, UnHerd, Creative Review, The BBC, Channel4 and the Jerusalem Post.
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