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2019-06-13 Home Front: Culture Wars
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Thomas Sowell Talks About Discrimination, Race, And Social Justice
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 [The Federalist] A newly updated version of Thomas Sowell’s book, "Discrimination and Disparities," came out this spring. The author and famed economist sat down with writer David Hogberg to talk about it and his life’s work.
David Hogberg: I want to read to you something that a currently very popular actress by the name of Brie Larson said at a recent awards show. She stated that, "USC Annenberg’s Inclusiveness Initiative released findings that 67 percent of the top critics reviewing the 100 highest grossing movies in 2017 were white males. Less than a quarter were white women and less than 10 percent were unrepresented men. Only 2.5 percent of those top critics were women of color. Now you’re probably thinking right now that ... doesn’t represent the country I live in. And that’s true. This is a huge disconnect from the U.S. population breakdown of 30 percent white men, 30 percent white women, 20 percent men of color, and 20 percent women of color. So, why does that matter? ... If you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will be able to see your movie and review your movie ... We need to be conscious of our bias and do our part to make sure that everyone is in the room."
That’s an example of the main fallacy that you expose in your book, correct?
Thomas Sowell: It’s one of the many fallacies. My God! We could play the same game with basketball and get even greater skewed representation. Blacks are the vast majority of basketball players in the NBA. That quote is downright silly.
What’s become so frustrating to me over the years is people who assume that if people or events are not evenly represented, then that’s some deviation from the norm. But you can read through reams of what scholars have written and find that nowhere is this norm to be found. You can read people like Gradell and others who have studied internationally various cultural events, and they say again and again that nowhere do they find a distribution of people who is representative of the population of the larger society.
So [people like Larson] are taking something that no one can find and making it a norm, the deviations from which should cause the government to intervene to correct this supposedly rare thing.
Hogberg: What is the "Invincible Fallacy"?
Sowell: It’s what been illustrated by the example you mentioned. It’s the belief that people would be, in the normal course of events, proportionally represented in various endeavors in the way they are represented in the general population. And if that doesn’t happen it must be some kind of negative factor like either genetics or discrimination that is causing the deviation. 
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