This tweet is for @davemcomie and others who have what I would call a "healthy" appreciation for Thomas Sowell, and use him to refute claims of racism. For fun, I went to my bookshelf and audible collection and... (1/8)

...pulled all the books I have read in part or entirely from Sowell. I found "Economic Facts and Fallacies" and "Intellectuals" particularly good reads. Needless to say...

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...I am familiar with Sowell, including "Discrimination and Disparities." Sowell, if I can recall, sees disparities as being primarily cultural in origin. Taken to its logical conclusion this is a racist argument because...

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It implies that two racial groups sharing the same environment will not navigate that environment with equal success and failure. One group "gets it eventually" - the other does not. This is racist.

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Immigrant groups navigate different environments which will have impacts in the short term. But in a non-racist society (and the immigrant group does not willingly segregate) these groups will eventually share the outcomes of the host population.

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Black folks share the same fate as the Maori, Native Americans, and Australian indigenous peoples who were subjected to racial violence - they ended up navigating a different environment from whites, producing qualitatively different cultural responses.

Using Sowell...

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...to refute the idea of racism as cause of disparity is engaging in an assymetric argument - asking someone to refute a writer not in academia, not during peer reviewed research, and not submitting his work at conferences.

Meanwhile...

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...that person ignores the hundreds of thousands of studies from sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and *increasingly economists* linking current racial disparities to past and present forms of racism.

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