Even wrong ideas should be heard

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 20, 2003]

When the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan first warned of the social dangers in the decline of black families back in the 1960s, and called for government policies to help deal with these dangers, he was attacked viciously for saying something that everyone now recognizes as true because the problem has grown even worse than it was when he issued his warning. [See I&V article of Winter 1995.]

The denunciation and demonization of Pat Moynihan marked a major turning point in public discussions of racial issues. From then on, the test of what you said was no longer whether it was true but whether it was politically correct. This silenced the faint hearted -- which is to say, most of academia and virtually all of the media.

Today, if you want to read an honest assessment of the black colleges, you have to go back to a 1967 article by Christopher Jencks and the late David Riesman in the Harvard Educational Review. If you want to read an honest assessment of the black middle class you have to go back to a 1962 book, "Black Bourgeoisie" by E. Franklin Frazier, one of the leading black scholars of the 20th century.

So enshrined has racial censorship become that it can literally become a federal case if you want to give IQ tests to black children. Professor Nathan Glazer of Harvard has suggested that research on race and IQ should stop.

A long time ago, it was said that the truth will set you free. But today the idea seems to be that only the right spin will set you free. And the right spin of course means the left spin. Facts can be ignored but their consequences cannot be escaped. If the facts don't matter, this means that the people who are going to have to pay those consequences don't matter.

None of those who demonized Daniel Patrick Moynihan has paid any price. But the black community has paid a terrible price because the problem he tried to point out was swept under the rug. Broken homes and children raising children have produced poisonous consequences, from educational failures to drugs and murder. A highly developed and highly rewarded racial grievance industry benefits from its ability to intimidate, silence and extort. But there is always a price to be paid. That price is paid by American society as a whole, but especially by minority communities that the grievance hustlers claim to be helping.

Even wrong ideas have a contribution to make, when they provoke open discussions and investigations that end up with our knowing and understanding more than we knew or understood before. People's lives are being saved today by medicines based on a knowledge of chemistry that developed out of alchemy, a centuries-old crazy idea of turning lead into gold. What contribution has the enforced silence of censorship ever made?

©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

-- Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is the author of many books, including Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free Press/Macmillan) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (Basic Books).

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