What Thomas Sowell Got Right That Nobody Wants to Repeat

There is a man alive in America today who was born into poverty in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930, who grew up without indoor plumbing, whose father died before he was born, who was raised by a great-aunt and her two grown daughters because his mother could not afford to keep him. He dropped out of Stuyvesant High School in New York City, worked as a delivery boy, was drafted into the Marine Corps during the Korean War, and then — on the strength of nothing but his mind and his refusal to be diminished — attended Harvard University, graduated magna cum laude, earned a master’s degree from Columbia, and completed his doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. He has written more than fifty books. He has been a professor at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst, and Brandeis. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for over four decades. His work has been cited thousands of times in academic literature across economics, education, political science, and history. His name is Thomas Sowell, and he is the most important Black intellectual in America whose name most Black Americans have never been encouraged to learn.

That last fact is not an accident. It is a consequence. Because what Thomas Sowell has spent sixty years documenting, with a rigor and a precision that his critics have never been able to match, is a set of truths so uncomfortable to the prevailing orthodoxy of Black political thought that the only available response has been to pretend he does not exist — or, when that fails, to call him names. Uncle Tom. Sellout. Race traitor. The vocabulary of dismissal is rich and varied, and it is deployed with the same ferocity every time, because the arguments themselves cannot be answered on their merits. So the man must be destroyed instead.

I am not here to defend Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell does not need my defense. His fifty-six books and hundreds of academic papers are his defense. I am here to summarize the arguments — with citations, with data, with the kind of factual precision that this conversation desperately requires — and to ask a simple question: what if he is right?

The Dunbar High School Evidence

In his 1974 essay and subsequent expanded research in Education: Assumptions Versus History (1986), Sowell documented the history of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. — a segregated, all-Black public school that, for eighty-five years, from 1870 to 1955, produced academic results that surpassed those of most white schools in the city. Dunbar graduates included the first Black general in the United States Army (Benjamin O. Davis Sr.), the first Black federal judge (William H. Hastie), the first Black Cabinet member (Robert C. Weaver), and U.S. Senator Edward Brooke. In the early 1950s, Dunbar students’ standardized test scores consistently ranked above the national average — in a segregated school, in a system designed to disadvantage them, with fewer resources than their white counterparts.

What made Dunbar work? Sowell’s analysis is meticulous. The school had high academic standards that were rigorously enforced. Teachers were expected to be excellent and were, in many cases, overqualified — Black PhDs who could not find employment at white universities taught high school at Dunbar because segregation left them no other option. Parents were deeply involved. Discipline was strict. Excuses were not tolerated. The culture of the school was one of relentless expectation, and the students rose to meet it.

What destroyed Dunbar? The answer is documented and uncomfortable. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the subsequent desegregation of D.C. schools, Dunbar was transformed from an academically selective school drawing the best Black students from across the city into a neighborhood school serving only the students in its immediate geographic area. Simultaneously, the administrative culture shifted: standards were lowered, discipline was relaxed, and the ethos of excellence was replaced by what Sowell calls the “vision of the anointed” — the belief that the problems of Black students were caused entirely by external forces and that the solution was not higher expectations but more sympathy. Within a decade, Dunbar’s academic performance collapsed. The school that had once sent graduates to Ivy League universities became, by the 1970s, one of the worst-performing schools in Washington.

This is not ideology. This is history. And the lesson it teaches is one that the educational establishment has spent fifty years refusing to learn: culture and standards matter more than resources, and lowering expectations in the name of compassion is the cruelest thing you can do to a child.

The Economics That Nobody Wants to Hear

Sowell’s 2000 masterwork Basic Economics — now in its sixth edition — contains one of the most meticulously documented arguments about the minimum wage and Black employment in the economic literature. His thesis is simple and supported by decades of data: minimum wage laws disproportionately harm the people they claim to help, and the evidence is most devastating for Black teenagers.

In 1948, the year before the minimum wage was substantially increased, the unemployment rate for Black teenagers (16–17 years old) was 9.4 percent — slightly lower than the unemployment rate for white teenagers, which was 10.2 percent. By 1971, after a series of minimum wage increases, Black teenage unemployment had risen to 33.4 percent, while white teenage unemployment was 14.2 percent. By 2010, Black teenage unemployment had reached 43 percent.

The mechanism is straightforward. When the law mandates that every worker must be paid at least a certain amount, employers will not hire workers whose productivity falls below that threshold. For teenagers with no experience, no skills, and no track record, the minimum wage functions as a barrier to entry — it prices them out of the labor market entirely. And because Black teenagers are more likely to attend under-resourced schools and to live in communities with fewer entry-level opportunities, the impact falls on them with disproportionate severity. The minimum wage does not raise the wages of Black teenagers. It eliminates their jobs.

This is not a conservative talking point. This is the consensus of labor economics, documented in study after study, and yet it remains unspeakable in mainstream Black political discourse because the minimum wage has been coded as a progressive issue, and to question it is to be accused of siding with the oppressor.

The Family Structure Crisis

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, published his report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in which he identified the rising rate of single-parent households in Black communities as a crisis that would, if unchecked, produce cascading social pathologies. At the time, 25 percent of Black children were born to unmarried mothers. Moynihan was called a racist. His report was suppressed. His career in this area was effectively ended.

Today, that number is 70 percent. Seven out of every ten Black children in America are born into households without a married father present. Sowell has documented the consequences of this transformation exhaustively in The Vision of the Anointed (1995) and Intellectuals and Society (2009). Children raised without fathers are, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, five times more likely to live in poverty, more likely to drop out of school, more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system, and more likely to repeat the cycle of fatherlessness in the next generation.

Sowell’s analysis traces the acceleration of this crisis to the expansion of welfare programs in the 1960s — specifically, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which provided financial benefits to single mothers on the condition that no able-bodied man lived in the household. The program, in Sowell’s documented analysis, created a financial incentive for fathers to leave and for families to fracture. The welfare state did not cause poverty. It subsidized it, and in subsidizing it, it ensured its perpetuation.

Again: this is not ideology. This is data. And the question that Sowell forces us to ask is the one that no politician wants to touch: if the programs designed to help Black families have coincided, by every measurable metric, with the destruction of Black families, at what point do we conclude that the programs are part of the problem?

The Cultural Thesis Everyone Fears

Sowell’s 2005 book Black Rednecks and White Liberals contains his most incendiary and most carefully documented argument. His thesis, supported by extensive historical and linguistic research, is this: many of the cultural patterns that are today associated with “Black culture” in America — a disdain for formal education, a glorification of violence, a particular pattern of speech, a contempt for “acting white” — are not African in origin. They are the cultural legacy of the Scots-Irish “cracker” culture of the antebellum South, a culture that was transplanted from the borderlands of Britain and imposed upon enslaved Africans who had no choice but to absorb the cultural environment of their masters.

Sowell documents that this same pattern of speech, this same hostility to education, this same culture of violence, existed among poor whites in the South for centuries before it appeared in Black communities — and that it persisted among those whites long after slavery ended. He further documents that Black communities that were not shaped by Southern cracker culture — free Blacks in the North, West Indian immigrants, recent African immigrants — consistently outperformed those that were, producing higher incomes, higher educational attainment, and lower rates of social dysfunction. The cultural variable, in Sowell’s analysis, explains the variation in outcomes within the Black population far more powerfully than racism explains the variation between Black and white populations.

This argument is not a denial that racism exists. It is an insistence that culture also exists, and that confusing one for the other makes it impossible to solve either problem.

The Price of Truth

For these arguments — all of them documented, all of them cited, none of them refuted on the merits — Thomas Sowell has been called every name in the vocabulary of racial dismissal. He has been called an Uncle Tom by people who have not read a single page of his work. He has been called a sellout by people who could not name three of his fifty-six books. He has been called a white supremacist — a man born into poverty in a segregated South, who served in the Marine Corps, who educated himself out of nothing — by people whose credentials would not fill a single page of his bibliography.

And this is precisely the point. The ad hominem attack is always the evidence of argumentative failure. When you cannot refute the data, you attack the man. When you cannot answer the analysis, you question the analyst’s loyalty to his race. This is not engagement. It is evasion. And the cost of this evasion is measured in the lives of Black children who continue to be failed by the policies that Sowell has spent sixty years trying to correct.

Facing What Must Be Faced

James Baldwin wrote, in The Cross of Redemption, that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This is the sentence that should hang over every conversation about Thomas Sowell’s work, because the refusal to face his arguments is, in the most literal sense, a refusal to change.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin, “The Cross of Redemption” (1979)

You do not have to agree with everything Thomas Sowell has written. I do not agree with everything he has written. But you are obligated, if you claim to care about the future of Black America, to engage with his arguments on their merits — to read the data, to examine the evidence, to ask whether the policies you support are producing the outcomes you want or the outcomes Sowell predicted. Because the uncomfortable truth — the truth that Baldwin would insist we face — is that Sowell’s predictions have been right far more often than they have been wrong.

He predicted that the expansion of welfare would accelerate the dissolution of Black families. It did. He predicted that minimum wage increases would devastate Black teenage employment. They did. He predicted that lowering academic standards in the name of equity would produce lower academic outcomes. It has. He predicted that affirmative action policies that placed students in universities above their level of preparation would produce higher dropout rates. The data, documented in his 2004 book Affirmative Action Around the World, confirms that they do.

At some point, the weight of the evidence becomes its own argument. At some point, the man who has been right about everything can no longer be dismissed as a traitor to his race simply because his truths are inconvenient to the political establishment. At some point, we must ask ourselves whether loyalty to a party, to a ideology, to a comfortable narrative, is worth more than loyalty to the futures of Black children.

Thomas Sowell is ninety-five years old. He will not live forever. And when he is gone, the question will not be whether he was an Uncle Tom or a race traitor or whatever the epithet of the moment happens to be. The question will be whether we had the courage to listen to what he was saying while he was still alive to say it — or whether we chose, as Baldwin warned us we would, to remain in the darkness because the light was too painful to face.

The data is there. The books are there. The evidence is there. The only thing missing is the willingness to look.