The Book Club: Race and Culture by Thomas Sowell with Farah Jimenez | The Book Club

[Music] welcome back to the book club I'm Michael nolles and on this episode we will be reading Thomas Soul probably our most requested author on this entire show we will be reading race and culture to very controversial topics but first in our fast-paced world it is tough to make reading a priority or at least it used to be but at thinker. org they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy non-fiction giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form you can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes from old classics like Dale Carnegie's had to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life if you want to challenge your preconceptions metso Mets I don't know if you want to expand your horizons yeah May maybe okay or if you want to sound smart at cocktail parties that's something we could all use go to thinker. org that is th kr. org No E no time for that start a free trial and put your mind in motion all right let's put our minds in motion we have race and culture a world view by Thomas Soul joined by the lovely Farah Jimenez CEO of a nonprofit and chairman of broaden Liberty Farah thank thank you for coming on thank you for having me so Farah we have a rule on this show all the authors have to be dead and gone except sometimes there are some books that we want to read so badly that we kind of changed the rules a little bit so now we've changed the rules enough that you don't have to be dead but you do have to be 90 we did Paul Johnson earlier on the show with intellectuals and now we've included Tomas Soul more people have requested Thomas soul on this show probably than any other author race and culture a world viiew highly controversial stuff so much to get into here so many opportunities for us both to be canceled and lose our careers but before we do that very briefly can you just give us a quick summary what is this book about so what um Thomas soul is saying in recent culture is that it's not uh racism or Prejudice or hereditary in environment that impacts what uh are socieconomic differences amongst groups that it's much broader and deeper than that that and that he defines that as culture is what creates the soci economic differences and culture is how you view the world your mindset whether or not you Embrace education what work skills and work habits that you have um I think it's an exciting book because he's looking at it from the context of History he's looking at slavery he's looking at things that have impacted um different racial groups and then he makes the case that maybe it's not as straightforward that these um factors are pushing against individuals and therefore causing them to struggle but rather it's something innately within their capabilities um that they can change and improve upon that can make the difference in their lives the the reality is always so much more interesting than the little ideological one sentence View and uh Soul certainly gets into those realities some of which are very uncomfortable I I think one of the things that um Soul makes it really challenging um to individuals to to be willing to open themselves up to is the fact that he is saying that you can't blame others um and so the circumstance that you find yourself in as a group and sometimes as an individual because not every individual within the group is necessarily living by values that make their life more challenging um but you can't necessarily blame others for the situation that you're in that you have ultimate power and control and um you need to find a way to exercise that power and control in order to succeed I think it really speaks to much of my family's origin story my parents being immigrants being of color uh they being able to succeed in life and instilling in me and my sister very clear values that are part of the argument that Thomas Soul lays out in royon culture which is that it's not necessarily racism and Prejudice heredity environment um even politics that implicates and creates the socioeconomic divisions among groups it's more about culture and he defines culture as being mindsets the way you view the world um the skills that you have and even your work habits abits and so that it's culture ultimately that makes the difference between those groups that succeed and those that lag behind others because there is an idea here especially in the United States where we say okay the Italians are a certain way because of how American society acted on them black people are a certain way because of how American society acted on them Jews are a certain way right and it goes goes on through every single race but it's all about the environment it's just about how a certain Society has created these conditions but what Thomas Soul does here is he says well yeah there's an environmental Factor but there are broader environmental factors that actually people particularly if they've been transplanted from one place to another and in the last 200 years we've seen more people move around the world than ever before in human history you have other environmental factors that might have taken place 500 years ago or a thousand years ago that shaped a people and the people don't lose that culture just because they move from Sicily to America or from Kenya toer America or or wherever so he's he's playing with all of these factors I think the subtitle here is very important which is we talk about worldview as though that's just your ideology or that's your perspective but he's saying a worldview because he's looking all around the world so he's looking at how these groups interact around the world to try to see okay what is just particular about America but what is true of various groups and you're ABS absolutely right that is one of the reasons that the book is so compelling is that it's so easy to limit our thinking about what is race look like and culture look like within our domestic and more current contemporary world but when you look at it over time over hundreds of years um looking at slavery looking at movements of people looking at ascendance and then retrogression and that can happen even in communities that at times have been at the very top in terms of success and then find themselves lagging behind others either because they've moved or they've changed their mindset and their culture um the other thing that's really interesting about it is he's looking at it from a world perspective and a global pers perspective so the things that we tend to think of as just being uniquely American aren't necessarily true that they are reflected around the world that there are groups and subgroups that lag behind others because of the way that they exercise their culture you know reading this book I I'm reading it now in our very politically correct culture where if you say anything out of order you you'll be cancelled your life will be ruined and I think this guy is talking about race and IQ he's talking about why certain races have done better different periods of time he's he's defending stereotypes in in some places and I think how does Thomas Soul get away with it well it helps that he's black it does it does help that it's black it also helps that he himself uh was a child that was raised in poverty it helps that he himself um was not raised by his mom or his dad both one of whom died and one of whom gave him up uh to a great aunt to raise because she could not handle being a single mom of five children um and it helps that he got an education both um and in a real education in terms of a um a special admission high school that he attended and ultimately going finding him way to Harvard um but in addition he got an education in the real world um and that's what led him from being a Marxist to being what he would call himself now which is more of a Libertarian and clearly informed by by economics I think what's also important about the book is what he's not saying and I think that's what lets him say what he's saying you have to be willing to understand what he's not saying is that he's not saying that life is fair because if you trip yourself into believing life is fair you're going to think the things that he's saying are really offensive and horrible what he's not saying is that what is true for an entire group is necessarily true for every individual in that group that certain groups lag behind because of their culture and their mindset doesn't mean that there aren't individuals within that group that have quality values that have values of uh that have a different way of looking at the world and therefore have potential and he's also not saying that we are purely economic actors because you can look at it and say oh gosh you know we don't R people aren't that focused on economics as to making their decisions no that's true people are not but it doesn't mean that economics still doesn't play a role um in the way that we behave that is such a key point because when you see something like race and culture you think okay Thomas soul I mean he's This brilliant writer as you say came from absolute nothing and you know he became one of the great thinkers of the last 50 years or so but he's an economist why is an economist writing about race and culture and it's interesting because he has this economic perspective but he can also then see what is not an economic question and I love on this fairness point he writes it very clearly right in the middle of the book he says economics is a study of cause and effect not intentions and hope he's he's being very blunt here he's saying look I don't think this is fair all the time actually just before that he quotes web Deo who is a sort of leftwing civil rights leader he was a socialist to boy's rights in 1899 and this is so repeating it the individual black Workman is rated not by his own efficiency but by the efficiency of a whole group of black fellow workmen which may often be low so some few would be promoted some few would get new places but the but this is if uh if racial Prejudice were to be dispensed with overnight some few would be promoted and everything but the mass would remain as they are until a younger generation began to try harder until the idle and discouraged were stimulated and the whole race lost the omnipresent excuse for failure Prejudice whoa that is tough love from both de booys and from Soul but it's also hope and that there's a recognition because also Thomas Soul would argue that um characteristics of culture are not immutable that they can change to the positive and they can change to the negative over time as we've seen because around the time the wed boys may have been writing this there was a time where there was an ascendance in the African-American community where individuals owned buses where there was a lot of quity Education happening individuals were attending universities my alma Mo University of Pennsylvania Law School graduated one of the first African-American women um from law school around that time so this was happening um and there was this culture of I'm going to succeed because it's important for me but it's also important for my community to see this being um emulated uh now I think what's happened is that there is a cult that one would argue is not necessarily supporting people who want to strive because we view that as being in Conflict um you're adopting as when I was growing up people would say you're trying to be white and what does that mean necessarily right it means that you're embracing a set of cultur and values that don't seem to be reflective of the community that you're supposed to be ascribed to that's right there can be a social pressure not to succeed and and you know one thing he takes great issue with is the idea of the legacy of slavery as being the the reason for all sorts of of pathologies among the American black community and he says there are two sides to this one is that this idea is kind of misused not only by people trying to blame America and blame every but also by people who are I don't know it's a white supremacist or something like that who are anti-black racists and both of them are wrong because what he points out is actually at the late 19th and early 20th century black labor participation was higher than whites rates of marriage at certain points were higher than among whites then it all flips and by the end of the 20th century you see these crazy statistics where 3ars of black children are born out of wedlock things and and you know partisans on ideologues on both sides want to blame these sort of either biological factors or whatever the legacy of slavery and he's saying no it's a little simpler than that guys you know there's culture and culture can change and you can't go around blaming everybody for this you should take discreet actions to fix it I don't know if it's simpler it's interesting cuz I the way I look at it is actually harder and the reason it's harder is because it requires an individual to act and to have the knowledge enough to act it's harder um than blaming the system you're right and blaming somebody else in the groups or the environment that you grew up in it is much harder to to recognize at that moment that maybe I didn't make the best choice or maybe the choices that I made put me in a situation where my life's going to be harder and one of the moments that was most spectacular for me was um recognizing when I was working with women and children experiencing homelessness how many of them did not recognize that they were making a choice by having more than one child out of wedlock for them it was Life acting upon them that they were controlled by their environment and when those moments arose in them when they recognized they could actually make a choice that was different that they didn't have to have the fourth or the fifth and in some cases seventh baby out of woodlock they would have that moment they realized oh that is a choice and if I choose differently I can actually position myself differently so that I can have success in my life it was those were the moments and I'm not a crier where I would cry because you would recognize that awareness was going to make the difference in their life they could respond not react they could do things of intention that would change their lives and they weren't waiting for the entire system around them to change right they knew that they could have the power to take make that difference themselves but it's hard to get people to go there because it feels judgmental it feels judgmental to express that to someone when they've already made enough bad choices that maybe it's going to be harder for them to turn things around right um it feels judgmental to tell that to someone who for whom that may be part of the culture right they grew up in generations of single motherhood and so how do you communicate that without judgment but you say these are choices these are values this is a mindset you can have that really does position you for success and we see it all the time we see it in the Thomas Soul as as an individual we see it in um the condalisa Rises of the world right that they come from these experiences and they were taught and given these the mindset that that made it possible for them to make different choices that set them up for success and in some of his analysis which you know you might say is a little cold or it's certainly not sentimental it would seem that he's suggesting that actually by just looking at the facts and not sort of bemoaning the unfairness of the world that is more compassionate to people I mean he gives the example of of uh Italians and Irish fighting on the railroad lines and I think I had ancestors on both sides of that particular battle fighting while they were building the railroads and you you'd have especially in the the early wave of mass immigration to the US in the early 20th century late 19th century you would have these groups of people that that didn't work very well together and so then you'd have a situation where where employers would say well we're not going to hire the Irish Irish need not apply now there might have been individual Irishmen who were very good and stayed away from the whiskey and you know were perfectly amiable on the line but there was an economic cost to even trying to sift through to find the right one and there wouldn't be ethnic antagonisms on the line and soul basically says look that's just an economic fact and it might be difficult for some period of time before these groups assimilate but until then you can't just go blaming everybody you can't blame the employer because he wants to be able to make a profit he's not willing to incur those costs and he's careful Thomas soul to point out that yes that's the group dynamic and it is uncomfortable and disappointing for the individual who might be that one Irish man who could have gone along well with the Italians working on the reals right but it doesn't negate the fact that as a system because that's how economics works it doesn't make economic sense for this employer to sift through all of those individuals to find the one that would make it work right but what he also does is he goes further and he says the ability of the communities themselves then to do the sifting does give them economic benefit in power so look at look at what happened in communities like Harlem when you had Magic Johnson Proclaim that he's going to start making investments in this community this is when the crime started to dissipate a little but Harlem was not what it is today in terms of being so economic diverse and um really safe uh it was a time where businesses didn't want to enter because they didn't know the population and they didn't know how to present themselves in a way that you were going to be able to make money recognizing that um crime was still very high and how Cho people were going to make choices about where they were going to spend their money and he proved that it could be really successful and now we see how that Community has turned around um I think that's one of the exciting things about uh Thomas soul is that he's saying yes the systems may not work but as individuals and as groups we can make things better for ourselves if we have the right perspective and mindset what he calls culture right and yeah and if people don't take this sacaran view of things I mean I I love the example he gives of uh sapharic and ashkanazi Jews right ashkanazi Jews are Eastern Europe and saric or Spain and lived in Muslim lands and things like that and he said okay to what degree can we attribute the success of these groups to genetics and to what degree to culture and what he pointed out was in various circumstances at different times in history the ashkanazi Jews did better than the spartic Jews and then at other times the spartic Jews did better than the ashkanazi Jews so you couldn't attribute it to some mere genetic circumstance but you could attribute it to something going on within the group there there were real group dynamics here and it seems to me that right now if we are if we even mention the idea that some group dynamic could be legitimate that there could be group behaviors that are obviously not typical that are not the case for every individual but are typical over a general population you will be thrown out of society and and Thomas Soul goes so far that he essentially says stereotypes come from somewhere and we have to understand them if we want to understand these people and perhaps even change Behavior yeah and I think the reason people reject it is because we think of stereotypes only when they're negative there are some positive stereotypes my own family T would tell us that when they came to United States that people were embracing their immigration because my pares from Cuba and so the stereotype of the Cuban was hardworking diligent Highly Educated didn't matter that they were black didn't manage that they were non-english speakers and this was in the 1960s so the fact that they could come to United States and people could ignore all the surface issues but recognized the values that they bring with them are such that we want to hire them so my father without a degree was able to work as an engineer because he wasn't able to complete his education my mom was able able to open up a medical practice all of that reflects that even stereotypes can be positive in nature huh you know you're completely like Thomas so does you're completely smashing all of the uh narrative that we've been told you know from I don't know the 1619 project or from from other left-wing cultural institutions but that is a pervasive narrative I mean we are we are now told that the country is viciously Wicked racist bigoted right down to its rotten core it wasn't founded in 1776 it was founded in 169 wasn't founded in 1620 when the Mayflower landed 1619 when the slaves hit our Shores and your family's experience does make me think well wait a second this country is so rotten how why did your family come over I mean why why have uh why do million immigrants a year by some measures come over is there any way to counter this pervasive anti-American narrative uh is is there any way to to CH to revise the revision of the history well it's so hard because a lot of it is around language and what and who is able to control how we use language so I work in nonprofits and one of the things that we are really successful at doing is deciding uh what words we want to use to influence um funding and to influence the way people make it decisions about how to support the populations we support so often we will say things like um individuals are privileged which means it's out of their control or do they have an advantage or do they have an opportunity right and so how do we use the words makes people feel that either it was in their control to make the difference in their lives or out of their control um and therefore somebody else needs to act on their behalf to make their life better and I saw that a lot when I was working in in in poverty work is that how often people felt like they were the ones who had to make it possible for someone else to succeed as if you could instill education in someone else without their wanting to have it right right yeah I mean I find it's it's often the case you just heard this from the 1619 project lady you heard it from Joe Biden Joe Biden running for president he says if you don't know if you're going to vote for me or not you ain't black which must be news to a lot of black people uh that you know that you and and the woman Nicole Hannah Jones who runs the 1619 project she defended him and she said there's a difference between between being physically black and being politically black that there is a false consciousness basically if you're a black conservative and people do this to Thomas Soul or Candace Owens or to or to anybody else all of the time uh there is a bit of an irony here that it's white liberals calling these uh black conservatives you know illegitimate and racist well generally it's because there's a political gain and he does talk about that where where there's connection between race and politics and that there are groups for whom individuals for whom it's to their benefit to form groups that aren't natural in cohesion but that allow for political power to exist and so one of the challenges often is if you're a different thinker which is what I would consider myself um you struggle because people will say to you well you're not really black because you don't uh ascribe to these values or you don't live by this culture or you're not really Latina because you don't Embrace some of the um political um ideology that uh Su in the Latino Community as if Latinos were one group they don't exist anywhere else in the world right there's such diversity within that Community La relatively recent you know a lot of people don't identify right there's no monolith there's no monolith in the Asian Community there's vast diversity um but people benefit by being able to put individuals into these groups um and so that's why I think you've got these movements and that's why a Biden can say that you ain't black uh to black people um and for people not to be offended because for them it's one way of getting people to agree that in order to be black I should sign up and and vote alongside and support these particular politicians and their worldview even if it all the economics and all the research shows it's actually not benefiting me that's right you know I it's so funny because I've have had friends of mine who are white liberals come up and tigate me because I made some comment about I don't know history or something as they'll say it's sexist or racist or whatever and they'll they'll be offended on behalf of other groups of people but then my friends who were in The Other groups they like the content they're they agree with it but it their opinion doesn't matter because the the white liberal will will have some offense on behalf of somebody else and I I thought oh my gosh how on Earth have we gotten to this situation and Soul at that back chapter it's the final chapter of the book Race and History he quotes Edmund Burke the great conservative philosopher and Burke says in history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind it may in the perversion serve for a magazine Furnishing offensive and defensive weapons and supplying the means of keeping alive or Reviving dissensions and animosities and adding fuel to civil Fury and what soul adds to that in the first sentence is history is not Destiny do do you see this of this sort of propagandize you can make history read anything you wanted to read I think I think the thing I take the away the most from his book is the fact that culture is not immutable how we um we can grow and we can Embrace and be receptive to the way and he talks about that because he talks about too in terms of culture being about receptivity when you look at it in the world and that there are cultures that have been able to um Ascend in part because they've been willing to be receptive to the lessons that come from other groups in my work we call that code switching and so what we teach a lot is that this idea that there are values that exist in your community we totally get it totally get it but if you want to ascend to the next soci economic level and it's a hard and harsh reality you're going to need to adopt the values of that socioeconomic class and those tend to be different it doesn't mean that there's um lack of value in the way that you raised doesn't mean that the people that make up your community are necessarily wrong but if you have goals there's a reason that this group is in this higher socioeconomic class and what are those reasons and what can you take away from them are you receptive to learn from them and I have found that in the work that I've done in Education that those individuals who were raised by single moms or single dads or low-income families whose parents said watch that high netw worth child I'm going to send you to a school that's soci economically so economically diverse because I want you to be surrounded by a culture where you're going to learn and be equipped with the skills and the mindset that's going to make it possible for you to be that kid who goes to Harvard Law to be to be successful to be successful and they recognize that it's not going to happen by staying in their same group it's only going to happen by them witnessing and being part of a community that's in a different place you know this point on the code switching it does make me think when I think of some of my family you know in New York or friends in the Bronx you know who are a little more of that old world Italian mindset you talk in a certain way you behave in a certain way conversations flow a certain way there there is often a different mindset and then people who you know I don't know they leave or they move somewhere else or what the mindset starts to change and this is a fear I mean this is the fear of of that movie get out actually which I thought was a terrific movie because the the movie is about this fear of assimilation or adopting values of a of a class or of a group that you know you fear that you're losing your own identity and it makes you feel like you might be casting judgment on your family members and those who are part of your so-called tribe yeah but in fact you're what you're doing is you're opening yourself up to possibilities and also so there's a reason those values exist I remember once being part of a community where somebody was castigating a speaker because what he was um suggesting is that the ideal scenario for a family is if there's a mother and a father um in the household raising those children and they responded um by shouting them down saying How Could You Wish domestic abuse amongst women and for them to be enslaved in this in this marriage and I remember thinking too bad this guy doesn't know who this person is because if I'd been up on that stage I would have said and that's why you chose to be married before you had children so then there are choices that individuals make for themselves but they fear it's too judgmental to suggest that those should be the behaviors they should see in other people you know my my friend Andrew claven makes this point that the kind of liberal elite doesn't preach what it practices oh it is yes and that is one of the things often I would see in education is that we've had controversies often where if we TR try and create equity in terms of access to the most selective public high schools that people will respond in a negative way even if it's as subtle as deciding on one day that everybody in the community can apply to a selected High School why because it UPS the chances that their own children may not have that opportunity and and so what they're trying to fight is the fact that when you create a pathway that makes it really accessible for all you're making it less likely that you who have the advantage and the knowledge and the relationships might be able to benefit most highly and that is not race you're right that is socioeconomic advantages and so I think that one of the things that he's saying is that it's really important for people who are come from cultures um who who are of a particular group where their culture is not providing them those kinds of advantages that they need to embrace them and I would think one of the things I would challenge um although he is 90s so I don't know how many more books he has in him but I hopefully he's got many books left I would be really interested in his take on um not just uh culture in terms of race-based culture right culture that comes from that group but socioeconomic culture because there's such diversity and it doesn't require you to be to be tied to your race it can be tied to your socio economic place and when he's delving these questions he is saying things that you know would would cancel a lesser man you know I mean I mean he's raising real issues pointing out when he talks about slavery say like every every group in history has been enslaved and actually in the case of the Britain when the Romans went to to capture them Cicero told the Romans he said don't don't bring the Britain back to be slaves they're too stupid to be slaves leave them up in brit Britannia you know come back get better slaves here but you know all of these groups even the word slave Right comes from the slaves and so slavery has been practiced in many places it is still practiced today in other places and he's saying things that are just very very uncomfortable MH but it's because he's not afraid of the facts he's not afraid of the answers he he thinks actually knowledge is a good thing and it will help all of these groups get along better and rise up in the world and he also challenges our political actors to embrace facts to inform the way that they put together their strategies and their Solutions it's so easy to go on symbolism um so we look at things today like to fund the police right so it feels incredibly empathic um to be supportive of individuals who um who are coming out of prison and I get it wanting to address that and criminal reform is important but defunding the police what it does is it creates economic instability in communities that most need the police in order to create systems where businesses can Thrive and produce and so those communities that are hard hit are usually the communities where the lagging groups are residing so when you see that he touches on that actually as well all those years ago right right and the book Is Now 26 years old and you think about it right it's still completely applicable some of these ideas that he that he puts forth um so our I think our political actors are looking for the the things that feel immediate as a solution but aren't necessarily the things that are going to make the long-term difference in the lives of of people right and everyone's walking around eggshells in particular on these two issues on race and culture they're so afraid and soul tells us don't be afraid of the facts embrace the facts it's okay that is the only way that we will move forward which is a a hopeful view in the end yes we embrace the fact by reading this book by the way Farah thank you so much for being here uh where can people find you oh I guess they can find me on Twitter at Farah mimz Farah M gimenez they can find you on Twitter there until we get canceled for this terribly Politically Incorrect episode but thank you so much what a wonderful book and a wonderful discussion to work through these issues I suppose will be canceled next time but if if not you can find us here again I'm Michael nolles this is the book thank you so much for watching this episode of the book club on prageru prageru is a 501c3 nonprofit organization so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air please consider making a tax deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming thank you very much for