Mixing and Matching
by Thomas Sowell
Recently
by Thomas Sowell: The
Invincible Dogma
Apparently
the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not
enough to occupy the government's time, because the Obama administration
is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income
housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the
government's preconceptions.
Behind all
this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there
is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random
distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption
is that the absence of evenness or randomness – whether in employment,
housing or innumerable other situations – shows a "problem" that
has to be "corrected."
No speck of
evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail
at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United
States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence,
of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population
– in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history.
Nothing is
more common than for people to sort themselves out when it comes
to residential housing, whether by class, race or other factors.
When there
was a large Jewish population living on New York's lower east side,
a century ago, Jews did not live at random among themselves. Polish
Jews had their neighborhoods, Rumanian Jews theirs, and so on. Meanwhile
German Jews lived uptown. In Chicago, when Eastern European Jews
began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods, German Jews began
moving out.
It was much
the same story in Harlem or in other urban ghettoes, where blacks
did not live at random among themselves. Landmark scholarly studies
by E. Franklin Frazier in the 1930s showed in detail how different
neighborhoods within the ghettoes had people of different educational
and income levels, with different male\female ratios and different
ways of life living in different places.
There was nothing
random about it. Within Chicago's black community, the delinquency
rate ranged from more than 40 percent in some black neighborhoods
to less than 2 percent in other black neighborhoods. People sort
themselves out.
None of this
was peculiar to blacks or Jews, or to the United States. When emigrants
from Scotland went to Australia, the Scottish highlanders settled
separately from the Scottish lowlanders. So did emigrants from northern
Italy and southern Italy.
Separate residential
patterns that are visible to the naked eye, when the people are
black and white, are also pervasive among people who physically
all look alike. Charles Murray's eye-opening new book, "Coming Apart,"
shows in detail how different segments of the white American population
not only live separately from each other but have very different
ways of life – and are growing increasingly remote from one another
in beliefs and behavior.
None of this
matters to politicians and ideologues who are hell-bent to mix and
match people according to their own preconceptions. Moreover, like
many things that the government does, it does residential integration
more crudely than when people sort themselves out.
Back in the
days when E. Franklin Frazier was doing his scholarly studies of
the composition and expansion of black ghettoes, he found the most
educated and cultured elements of the black communities living on
the periphery of these communities.
It
was these kinds of people who typically led the expansion of the
black community into the surrounding white communities. By contrast,
government programs often take dysfunctional families from high
crime ghetto neighborhoods and put them down in the midst of middle-class
neighborhoods by subsidizing their housing.
Whether these
middle-class neighborhoods are already either predominantly black
or predominantly white, the residents are often outraged at the
increased crime and other behavior problems inflicted on them by
politicians and bureaucrats.
But their complaints
usually fall on deaf ears. People convinced of their own superior
wisdom and virtue have no time to spare for what other people want,
whether in housing or health care or a whole range of other things.
April
17, 2012
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page.
The
Best of Thomas Sowell
Copyright ©
2012 Creators Syndicate
|