I admit there's a certain elegance to his junk

It seems Thomas Sowell has a new book.

Mr. Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author, most recently, of "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," published this week by Encounter Books.

I'll not be buying it (though I would review a free copy...).

That quote came from the credits for an OpinionJournal thing he wrote that Baldilocks linked to.

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race--that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.

Where Sowell says "race" you should read "genetically determined traits." I don't think that's what Sowell means...but what he writes makes sense if you make that substitution.

There's no substitution for "racism" that makes Sowell's editorial make sense, though.

There have always been large disparities, even within the native black population of the U.S. Those blacks whose ancestors were "free persons of color" in 1850 have fared far better in income, occupation, and family stability than those blacks whose ancestors were freed in the next decade by Abraham Lincoln.

What is not nearly as widely known is that there were also very large disparities within the white population of the pre-Civil War South and the white population of the Northern states. Although Southern whites were only about one-third of the white population of the U.S., an absolute majority of all the illiterate whites in the country were in the South.

The North had four times as many schools as the South, attended by more than four times as many students. Children in Massachusetts spent more than twice as many years in school as children in Virginia. Such disparities obviously produce other disparities. Northern newspapers had more than four times the circulation of Southern newspapers. Only 8% of the patents issued in 1851 went to Southerners. Even though agriculture was the principal economic activity of the antebellum South at the time, the vast majority of the patents for agricultural inventions went to Northerners. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Northerner.

Disparities between Southern whites and Northern whites extended across the board from rates of violence to rates of illegitimacy. American writers from both the antebellum South and the North commented on the great differences between the white people in the two regions. So did famed French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville.

None of these disparities can be attributed to either race or racism.

And so, Sowell concludes racism can't explain the disadvantages Black folks have labored under based on a review of white folks.

...wasn't supposed to notice that...

Since differences correlated to race can't be attributed to genetically determined traits, and because white Americans too have a segment of folks that don't do well on IQ tests, Sowell concludes the transmission medium for transmission of stupidity is culture.

And our culture, as we know, wasn't shaped by racism. At all. Black people were not purposefully excluded from all the programs that lifted White America out of redneck status. That wasn't racism, I guess.

You know, I have no doubt about Black folks' capabilities. No doubt of our survival (though there's as much question about the form of that survival as about any other American's nowadays). But I really wish people would stop setting up these intellectual illusions. There's a quality about Sowellian screeds that reminds me of a ray-traced three-dimensional image. Shaded to imitate depth and perspective, you could mistake it for reality when it's far enough away from you.

Sowell's editorial has no real depth...it merely draws lines to render the illusion of perspective.