Thomas Sowell, recently profiled here by Scott Johnson, was born in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1930 and raised in Harlem. Sowell earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. That was all achieved without any government affirmative-action scheme. The high achiever was bound to draw fire from supporters of such schemes.
One of them was Lani Guinier, the first black woman to hold a tenured position at Harvard Law School. In all fairness, it may have helped that Ewart Guinier, Lani’s father, was chairman of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Lani Guinier was Bill Clinton’s pick to head the civil rights department of the DOJ. She supported racial preferences in college admissions and questioned Sowell’s blackness. The Harvard alum wasn’t going to take it.
“I don’t need some half-white woman from Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black,” responded the economist, a longtime fellow at the Hoover Institution. That was in 1996, when California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209), eliminating racial preferences in state education, employment and contracting. The disaster the preference forces predicted never came about.
As Sowell noted in his 2013 Intellectuals and Race, declines in minority enrollment at UCLA and UC Berkeley had been offset by increases at other UC campuses. More important, the number of African-American and Hispanic students graduating from the UC system went up, including a 55 percent increase in those graduating in four years with a GPA of 3.5 or higher. Lani Guinier was unmoved.
In 2015, Guinier authored The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, supporting a change from “testocratic merit” to “democratic merit.” The former Clinton pick denounced the SAT as a “proxy for wealth,” and “normed to white upper-middle-class performance.” Guinier opposed “competition and individualistic merit” and touted a “culture of collaboration rather than competition.” And so on.
Lani Guinier passed away in early 2022. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss her views in this video. At this writing, Thomas Sowell is still going strong at 93. He didn’t need racial preferences to succeed and he didn’t need a half-white woman living in Martha’s Vineyard to tell him about being black. In 2024, Americans of all shades don’t need a half-white former president living in Martha’s Vineyard to tell them about anything.
As David Garrow showed in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, the 1995 Dreams from My Father was a novel and the author a composite character. As Tablet’s David Samuels explained in “The Obama Factor,” the composite character is still running the country and responsible for “the disaster that we are living through now.”
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