Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, Chapter Two: Racial Fallacies

I’ve been playing around with video discussions and will be publishing my videos here and on YouTube. I’ve got some editing and sound stuff down pretty well, and look forward to finishing this series and doing some more.

Thanks for watching.

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In this video, I talk about the second of Dr. Sowell's fallacies in his new book, Social Justice Fallacies.

This discussion on fallacies explores the fallacies of racial differences because of race (genetic determinism) and because of racism. Interestingly, popular narratives have pivoted off of only one determining factor to the other, as progressives have embraced univariate explanations for differences amongst groups.

The main lesson I pulled out of this chapter was that confirmation bias is dangerous to Reason, and it takes very little effort to pull apart theories that use only one factor to explain such complex situations.

Here’s a quote pulling apart racism as the only factor in economic disparities:

"For example, the poverty rate among black American families as a whole has long been higher than the poverty rate among white American families as a whole. But, over a span of more than a quarter century since 1994, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. And in no year in more than half a century since 1959 has the national poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent. If black family poverty is caused by 'systemic racism,' do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? Do racists either know or care whether blacks are married?"

Here’s a quote summarizing how silly the previous progressive position was in regards to race being the only factor that explains racial differences. Mental tests (IQ) were used to justify the view of race being the sole reason for differences in socioeconomic outcomes while the data that disproved that theory was in the data used to justify it:

"...an internal breakdown of the mental test score data showed that black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania scored higher on the Army mental tests than white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi. If the reason for the over-all test score differences between the races were genetic, people's genes do not change when they cross a state line. But some states do have better schools than others."

Thanks for reading and/or watching!