The 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education is approaching and it’s worth reading what Thomas Sowell has to say about the case here.
In Sowell’s view, Brown has had an unfortunate impact on black progress, by shifting attention away from the economic paths to improvement and instead concentrating on politics, with its assumption that the only obstacle that needed to be removed was white racism. In several of his books, Sowell has made the point that the minority groups in America that have done the best economically did not try to advance themselves through political power, for instance, the Chinese and Japanese. On the other hand, groups that have relied on government, especially blacks, have fared poorly.
