“These programs definitely prevent poverty—among bureaucrats, economists, statisticians, and others. I think that what this betrays is a proprietary conception of blacks … somewhat at variance with the spirit of the 13th Amendment.”
Such was the low-pH assessment of economist Thomas Sowell speaking in 1980 at the Fairmont Conference, an event he organized to discuss the state of black life and public policy in the United States. It was an interesting session, one that highlighted problems in black communities that have, in too many cases, only grown worse in the intervening years. Sowell had a more consequential audience than he might have estimated: Among those in attendance was a young lawyer working for the Senate Commerce Committee by the name of Clarence Thomas.
The third Old Parkland Conference, a series organized to carry on the spirit of Sowell’s project, was held last week at the American Enterprise Institute. A big part of what it provided was, to borrow a resonant phrase, a focus on the family.
Before I get to the meat, a word of praise for the world of right-leaning think-tankery in general—the rage-addled populists may mock all those white papers and panel discussions, but where would we be without organizations such as AEI, the Cato Institute, and my think-tank home, the Competitive Enterprise Institute? Bringing people together for the kind of exchange and conversation that happened at the Old Parkland Conference is really what institutions such as universities are there, in part, to do. So is supporting the work of iconoclastic and nonconforming thinkers, writers, and scholars—but our universities have become places of utter conformism, as have too many of our newspapers and other major media outlets. It is worth remembering that Nat Hentoff, the left-wing civil liberties journalist, ended up finding his home at Cato when the Village Voice decided it couldn’t stomach his intellectual independence, while AEI supports the important work not only of familiar conservatives but also that of heterodox Democrat-aligned figures such as Ruy Teixeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority and one of the Old Parkland panelists. My colleagues at CEI do a great deal of excruciatingly careful scholarship to which they bring many different points of view. (My own work is journalism rather than scholarship, but I am preparing for a friendly debate with one of my CEI colleagues about the dog’s-breakfast fiasco that is DOGE. That DOGE is a dog’s breakfast and a fiasco is my position; he’ll argue a different position.) It is remarkable that organizations that explicitly bill themselves as conservative and/or libertarian offer more real intellectual diversity than one typically can expect at Harvard or on the opinion pages of most of the major daily newspapers.
(Funny phrase: “most of the major daily newspapers.” How many major daily newspapers are there in the United States these days? Three?)
Economic-minded libertarians and family-oriented social conservatives end up seeing the world in ways that are, once you drill down enough, fundamentally similar. The libertarians may not care as much about abortion or the quickly fading memory of the supposed sanctity of marriage pre-Obergefell (when only opposite-sex couples had access to marriage American-style, an obligation easier to walk away from than student loans or credit card debt) and the social conservatives may not be as enthusiastic about reforming occupational licensure or reducing public spending, but the data—the damnable, infuriating data!—keep dragging them toward one another.
For example: Black women raised in low-income households tend to do about as well in life as white women and Hispanic women from similar backgrounds as measured by things such as educational attainment or individual income. But even though their individual incomes may keep up with their white counterparts, their household incomes lag behind those of white households, an outcome driven mainly by lower marriage rates. Children from single-parent households (which means, almost exclusively, single-mother households) tend to do worse in school and in the job market, and if the libertarians point out that many of those ill effects disappear once you control for income, the social conservatives will retort that this amounts to begging the question, because families with two married parents tend to earn a lot more money than single-mother families do. If you are looking for a master variable, it isn’t income.
That was one of the interesting themes the Old Parkland speakers kept returning to. The United States has seen some convergence along racial lines (including insalubrious convergences such as the increase in out-of-wedlock births among white and Hispanic women), convergence that has been accompanied by a modest but meaningful shift of black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party. But the old racial polarization is being supplanted by class polarization. The left typically sees a raw-power political opportunity in that—“We Need Class Politics to End Our Second Gilded Age,” as Jacobin put it—but reformers who are more interested in building things than in punishing perceived class enemies are working from the same set of facts.
Yet they are reaching different conclusions.
If you have spent any time around elite progressive circles, you surely have noticed a curious paradox: Our left-wing friends may talk like Marxists from the 1930s or feminists from the 1970s, but they live—overwhelmingly—like Republicans from the 1950s. They get married. They go to college. They secure and keep steady employment, often at large institutions such as universities and government agencies or major corporations. They save and invest prudently: You’re never going to read about Rahm Emanuel losing his life savings to some fly-by-night gold-and-crypto-backed Belizean real-estate Ponzi scheme. Chuck Schumer was married by 30 and is still with the same wife 45 years later, and she (a former vice chancellor of City University of New York and currently the chief operating officer of the New York Public Library) brings a great deal to the marriage. Progressives talk like I, Rigoberta Menchu but they live like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
All of the caveats apply, of course, and you could hear all of them from the stage at the Old Parkland Conference: Of course there are bad marriages that sometimes have to be dissolved; of course there are limits to the “success sequence” (finish high school, get a job, keep that job, get married, then have children) and no single program of personal action fits every need or situation; of course there are limits to what government action can do when it comes to encouraging (persuading? requiring?) people to be better husbands and fathers, better wives and mothers, better to themselves. No, we aren’t going to solve the problem of violent crime—our best hope is to energetically suppress it, knowing that this will prove imperfect.
The class changes are interesting. The racial situation remains shocking.
When Thomas Sowell opened the Fairmont Conference in 1980, he noted the remarkable fact that black Americans, who make up less than 15 percent of the population, at the time accounted for the majority of homicide victims—which is to say, there were more victims than those of every other race combined. The news has not improved: From 1980 to 1999, one of the worst periods for violent crime in American history, the homicide rate for black men was 54 per 100,000; it declined, along with crime more generally, at the turn of the century, and by 2021 it was … right back up to 54 per 100,000. Black Americans are 13.6 percent of the population and made up 54.1 percent of homicide victims in 2021.
Is there an economic approach to that? Is there a family-formation approach? And what about the other problems that still beset black Americans at much higher rates than Americans overall?
And is it maybe the case that the economic approach and the family-formation approach are the same thing?
Economics comes from the Greek word for household management—what earlier generations of English-speakers might have called husbandry, as though the language itself were attempting to point us in the direction of the answers we seek.
The conference covered a lot of the big pieces: housing, relocation, COVID-related learning loss, crime, and, over and over, the centrality of healthy, stable families to black advancement. (And to all advancement.) Glenn Loury offered a powerful—and, it seemed, almost tearful—indictment of the wishful thinking and willful falsehoods that occlude so much of our thinking on these issues, a plea to face the facts as we find them and as they are.
These are hard and complex subjects, handled intelligently, forthrightly, and with care.
The gulf between this kind of conversation and our quotidian politics is difficult to overstate.
Words About Words
I’ve never really understood the objection to what is sometimes called “cultural appropriation,” which is, upon examination, simply another way of saying “culture.” The story of human beings and their civilization is that people move around and bump into each other. Usually, they fight—but, even when they fight to the point of utter conquest, they generally manage to learn something from one another. “Conquered Greece conquered Rome,” as Horace put it (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit), acknowledging that much of what the Romans thought of as their own high culture was simply Latinized Greek.
Captive Greece captured, in turn, her uncivilised
Conquerors, and brought the arts to rustic Latium.
So coarse Saturnian metres faded, and good taste
Banished venom: though traces of our rural
Past remained for many a year, and still remain.
Not till later did Roman thought turn to Greek models,
And in the calm after the Punic Wars began to ask
What Sophocles, Thespis, Aeschylus might offer.
Romans experimented, seeing if they could rework
Such things effectively.
Ironically, as Horace noted, the same Romans who borrowed so freely from the conquered Greeks later adopted for themselves an attitude of rigid cultural conservatism. (Yeah, I know: note to self, etc.) He asked about that reverence for the old and established: “If the Greeks had detested novelty as much as we do, what would there be in our own time to call ancient?”
Horace was good about novelty: He coined or popularized a number of phrases still in common use, including “in medias res,” “quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus” (“Homer nods,” as James Taranto used to title his corrections), “ab ovo,” and more.
(In medias res and ab ovo are offered as contrasting narrative strategies: Why bore the reader with excruciatingly detailed back story—ab ovo, from the egg—when you can just start with the action, “in the middle of things”?)
I was thinking about cultural appropriation because of the shirt I’m wearing this morning. Today is to be a warm and sunny one, and I put on a guayabera, which (for the few who won’t know) is a semi-formal shirt most often seen in Latin America and the Caribbean, designed to be worn untucked and in warm weather. Maybe it is climate change driving cultural change, but, even a decade ago, it was unusual (at least in my experience) to see an Anglo man wearing a guayabera—even though it is, like the straw Panama hat (and its cousins, the sombrero and the straw cowboy hat) an eminently sensible garment for warm weather. It is only recently that you’ve seen a lot of us gringos wearing such shirts, which now are marketed as western wear–adjacent kit for the sort of Texans who can be heard joking/not joking about secession over margaritas.
Speaking of gringos—that word takes us back to the Greeks.
Gringo, a not-entirely-nice term for us pale-faced settler colonialists you can see from time to time mowing our lawns in the New World ruins of the Spanish Empire, is the subject of a popular (and false) folk etymology or two, both rooted in the Mexican-American war: One has it that American soldiers could be heard singing the song “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” or perhaps “Green Grow the Lilacs,” leading to the nickname “green-goes,” and another holds that Mexican troops saw the olive uniforms of their enemies and demanded “green, go home!” But the term gringo predates that war by a long time and probably originated in Spain rather than in Mexico.
Another explanation of the term suggests that it is an abbreviation and alteration of peregrinos, meaning pilgrims or travelers (the peregrine falcon is so called because it is a far-ranging bird), but most specialists in the field do not believe that to be the origin. The consensus view is that it comes from griego, meaning Greek, with the Spanish expression, “Está hablando griego” meaning roughly the same thing as the English colloquialism “It’s Greek to me.”
Language is so central to the human experience of culture that for much of the world and for much of history “foreigner” and “doesn’t speak my language” were effectively synonyms. While there is some uncertainty about its ultimate origins, the word barbarian probably originated from Greeks lampooning the speech of non-Greek speakers as sounding like gibberish: “Bar bar bar bar bar.” Hence bárbaros, meaning both foreigners and Greeks who spoke a Greek that was seen by the tastemakers as excessively local and idiosyncratic. When the Arabs invaded North Africa, they adopted the word to describe the supposedly uncivilized locals they encountered, known in English as the Berbers.
A name such as Berber, given to a population by foreigners, is an exonym, another example of which is Comanche, who in their own language call themselves Numinu (or “the People”; many of the world’s peoples have named themselves “the People,” over time) but who were known by neighboring tribes by the Ute word (komantchi) for “enemies,” or, literally, “those who want to fight all the time.”
In sum, approximately: Gringos speak Greek, barbarians don’t.
Elsewhere
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here.
You can buy my other books here.
You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here.
In Closing
New York is banning most “smart” phones—meaning internet-connected phones—from public school classrooms. “Smart” phone is one of those phrases like “adult” entertainment—the reality and the words are basically at odds.
I was interested to read that the New York Civil Liberties Union opposes the ban. That is great news from the NYCLU—I can only assume that all of the real civil liberties issues in New York have been solved now that the NYCLU has turned its attention to this matter. Well done, New York! I knew you had it in you.
