Uncle Orson Looks at American Culture 1996 - Who Are We Really?
Who Are We Really?
Thomas Sowell
Migrations and Cultures: A World View
Sowell's premise is a provocative one. We keep looking at the problems of various ethnic groups in the U.S. and blaming American culture for their woes. But if we take a worldwide view, Sowell says, and look at how members of various cultures have performed in every nation into which they have immigrated, we begin to see that it is very likely that the performance of an immigrant group in any one country is almost entirely dependant on the culture of that immigrant group, and not on the culture of the host country (within the obvious limit that it has to be the sort of country that allows immigrants to enter in the first place).
Sowell examines — exhaustively! — the experiences of Germans, Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Jews, and Indians (from South Asia), all of whom have experienced bursts of emigration at some point in the past couple of hundred years, an era when it was possible to document where they went and how they did, economically and otherwise. The results are fascinating, and the conclusions are inescapable: If you don't like the performance of your particular group within American culture, don't blame American culture, change your own.
This, of course, has enormous implications for racial and gender politics in America today (feminists, for instance, can easily say that they are trying to change their own culture!). Sowell, himself black, has no doubt had to deal with the charge that he is somehow "inauthentic," since he refuses to accept the idea that the generally poorer condition of American blacks is entirely due to white racism. Yet whatever anyone might think of Sowell's politics or loyalty to a supposed community self-story, the fact remains that his book is a solid work of scholarship which cannot be explained away.
Indeed, this book should be taken as very hopeful, especially by American blacks and by other recent immigrants, for what it says is that however hostile American culture may seem to any one group, you can lift yourselves up by your bootstraps. In some cases it may require cultural change to achieve that, but cultures can and do change. And when American blacks put an end to the self-defeating practice of sneering at black kids who perform well in school and at work, accusing them of "acting white," and instead begin to encourage the kind of hard work and community expectations that have led to success for every culture that has tried them, we will see, not an end to racism (ask your average Chinese-American if that ever completely ends), but at least an end to generalized poverty and all the ills that come with it. Sowell's message, in other words, is that The Bell Curve is bogus. Culture isn't genetic, it can be changed, and so dysfunctional cultures can be made functional — not by outsiders, but by those whose culture it is.
And for those who belong to any of these immigrant groups, Migrations and Cultures will help you see why it is that your people have achieved the sometimes astonishing things that they have achieved — and to see which aspects of that original culture remain intact in your own families and neighborhoods.
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/reviews96/sowell.shtml
