Key insights from
Intellectuals and Race
Audio available
11 minute read
Published Mar 12, 2013
What you'll learn
There are many ideas about race. Economist Thomas Sowell argues that some are backed by evidence while many others are not. Many ideas about race that intellectuals put forward fall into the latter camp. Unlike other fields, where there are consequences for bad ideas, many intellectuals are immune to feedback. This means harmful ideas about race persist even when they conflict with reality.
Key insights
- • What you'll learn
- 1 There’s no question that race issues matter—the question remains of how best to confront those issues.
- 2 Asian Americans rarely come up in discussions of race relations—maybe because they complicate a simple black-and-white narrative.
- 3 The intelligentsia changed its tune on race over the course of the twentieth century, but intellectuals are still convinced they know best.
- 4 Some groups look at externals; others look at internals and see what they can change in their culture.
- 5 The word “achievement” has become synonymous with “privilege”; “underachievement” with “victimization.”
- 6 Social justice is too modest a term—it’s really cosmic justice.
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