Civil Rights Quotes

“However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

“Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement. Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“Cultural differences are real, and cannot be talked away by using pejorative terms such as “stereotypes” or “racism.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“One of the most central—and most controversial—premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by “society.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“If there are not equal results among groups presumed to have equal genetic potential, then some inequality of opportunity must have intervened somewhere, and the question of precisely where is less important than the remedy of restoring the less fortunate to their just position. The fatal flaw in this kind of thinking is that there are many reasons, besides genes and discrimination, why groups differ in their economic performances and rewards. Groups differ by large amounts demographically, culturally, and geographically—and all of these differences have profound effects on incomes and occupations.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many Americans so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“In short, statistical disparities are commonplace among human beings. Many historical and cultural reasons underlie the peculiar patterns observed. But the even “representation” of groups chosen as a baseline for measuring discrimination is a myth rather than an established fact. It is significant that those who have assumed that baseline have seldom, if ever, been challenged to produce evidence.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“The multiplicity of unstated assumptions behind this kind of reasoning is as much an asset in politics as it is a liability in logic. It would take pages to refute each sentence, because the implicit premises would have to be elaborated first. Even if they then collapsed of their own inconsistencies, it is not clear how many readers or listeners would have been willing to stay the course as the argument tediously unfolded. That is why it is a politically clever argument. Demagoguery flourishes where something can be said in a few catchy words that would take volumes to disprove.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

“With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies. The crucial question is not the desirability of the professed goal but the incentives and constraints created and what they are most likely to lead to.

The imposition of monthly equality in pensions, rather than lifetime equality, has the net effect of making pension plans more expensive, the more female employees there are [because women live longer than men]. Viewed as prospective behavioral incentives, rather than as a retrospective status pronouncement, this means that employers will find it more costly to hire female work- ers with a given pension plan and more costly to institute a given pension plan when there are more female workers. Reducing the demand for female workers or reducing the likelihood of creating a pension plan is hardly the intention of the courts, but it can easily be the result. It is not clear that anyone is economically better off after such a symbolic ruling.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

“How, then, can women as a group be so far behind men as a group, in both incomes and occupations? Because most women become wives and mothers and the economic results are totally different from a man's becoming a husband and father. However parallel these roles may be verbally, they are vastly different in behavioral consequences. There are reasons why there are no homes for unwed fathers.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

“The question, then, is whether assumptions are to be accepted for their plausibility and their conformity to a larger social vision, or whether even the most plausible and satisfying assumptions must nevertheless be forced to confront actual facts.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

“Affirmative action hiring pressures make it costly to have no minority employees, but continuing affirmative action pressures at the promotion and discharge phases also make it costly to have minority employees who do not work out well. The net effect is to increase the demand for highly qualified minority employees while decreasing the demand for less qualified minority employees or for those without a sufficient track record to reassure employers.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

“A third major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences in income, “representation” in desirable occupations or institutions, or otherwise disadvantaged.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or in institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses or causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion or denunciation as racism, sexism, etc.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“The civil rights vision relies heavily on statistical “disparities” in income and employment between members of different groups to support its sweeping claims of rampant discrimination.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“Equal opportunity” laws and policies require that individuals be judged on their qualifications as individuals, without regard to race, sex, age, etc. “Affirmative action” requires that they be judged with regard to such group membership, receiving preferential or compensatory treatment in some cases to achieve a more proportional “representation” in various institutions and occupations.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“In short, despite the unpromising record of politics as a means of raising a group from poverty to affluence, and despite the dangers of politicizing race, there are built-in incentives for individual political leaders to do just that.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“The civil rights vision tends to view group characteristics as mere “stereotypes” and concentrates on changing the public’s “perceptions” or raising the public’s “consciousness.” Yet the reality of group patterns that transcend any given society cannot be denied.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality

“The reality of an historic struggle for civil rights has degenerated into the hustling rhetoric of Newspeak. “Equal opportunity” now means preferential treatment. “Voting rights” now include preferential chances to win. School desegregation no longer means the right to attend any public school, regardless of race, but being forced to attend where you are told, according to race. “Equal justice for all” now means compensatory benefits for some—usually the more fortunate of those who share the political label “disadvantaged.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality