Thomas Sowell Explains Why Skin Color Was Never the Problem

The renowned economist has spent decades making an argument almost no one in academia wants to hear

Thomas Sowell has listened to the “reasons” (excuses) for race-based grade and test score gaps in american education for over forty years. He has never believed a word of it.

Watch the video above.

While college presidents and provosts, diversity, equity & inclusion professionals, and media panelists claim that racial differences in grades and standardized test scores are due to a culture of bias against minorities in educational institutions and classrooms, sowell has written and spoken for most of his life about how skin Color is irrelevant to students’ academic achievement; that preparation determines academic success; and that when students enter schools where their preparation cannot be matched, the outcome is inevitable regardless of students’ ethnicity.

In his 1989 book “Choosing a College,” sowell wrote about how black students at MIT whose math sat scores were above the national average had clearly demonstrated math skills well above the norm. By objective standards, those students were clearly prepared for an engineering program at a good technical school. Instead, they were competing with MIT students whose preparation ran well ahead of theirs. As such, they were at a disadvantage when compared to the rest of the students at MIT.

When a student finds themselves in a situation like that -- with superior preparation but inferior competition -- what happens to that student?

Sowell claimed that if that student attended a good engineering school that was geared toward students who have similar levels of preparation to theirs, then the student would thrive. The reason why they would thrive is not because black students cannot learn engineering; rather, it is because their above-average preparation would have allowed them to excel in an environment that acknowledged the validity of their preparation, not because learning engineering was outside of their capabilities.

Law professors have since supported Sowell’s claims. Legal scholar Richard Sander conducted extensive research on affirmative action in law schools and documented what sowell stated. In sander’s research, after controlling for both academic credentials and tier of law school attended, he discovered that black students and white students attending similar-ranked law schools passed the bar exam at virtually identical rates. However, the racial disparity only appeared when students were mismatched; i.e., placed in schools with a higher ranking than their preparation warranted, resulting in significantly lower grades and ultimately passing fewer students than other groups of students.

This is not a story about bias in grading. This is a story about misplacement.

The numbers supporting this statement are hard to refute. Data examined by law professors shows that the median GPA of a black law student is approximately 6.7% percentile rank of that of white law students attending the same tier of law school. Approximately 7.5% of black law students achieved gpas equal to or greater than that of the white median.

Numbers like those are commonly cited by educators and commentators arguing that there is systemic bias throughout classrooms across the country. Sowell’s response has always been the same. Don’t assume that there is systemic bias in grading based upon where these students are enrolled in relation to their actual preparation.

Why does Sowell’s argument infuriate so many members of academia?

Because it eliminates the villain that many members of academia need. It is much easier to place blame on individual professors, curricula, and systems than to question whether the placement itself created conditions under which a student would likely fail. Sowell has never denied the existence of racism in America. What he has consistently rejected is the idea that all gaps in educational outcomes must be evidence of systemic bias, especially when a more logical and more thoroughly-supported alternative explanation exists.

Academic grades were never about the student sitting in class based upon their skin Color. Grades were about where the student was placed academically according to their actual level of preparation. Sowell made this argument decades ago. The available data continues to prove him correct.