That can warn us against blind alleys and counterproductive efforts

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 87.

Intense family loyalties have led middleman minorities to take young relatives into their businesses, even when these might have to be brought from overseas in India or Lebanon or elsewhere. Among the Lebanese living in other countries, for example, "a successful emigrant would send back to others from the same district in some town or region of the country of settlement." In Argentina or Sierra Leone, for example, established Lebanese would lend money to new arrivals or create business partnerships with them. This has been just one aspect of strongly felt mutual obligations within families. Some middleman minorities have been noted for their remittances to family members in the countries from which they came or in other countries in which they have settled. Local populations have long resented this as exporting their countries' wealth - a charge often made against the Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Lebanese in many countries. Even in the early years of Jewish poverty in the United States, those in America managed to send money back to family members in Eastern Europe, not only for subsistence but also to pay for their passage to the United States. These international transfers of wealth, though large in the aggregate, were no net reduction of the wealth of the country from which they were sent because the middleman minorities had already added to the pre-existing wealth of the countries in which they settled and were sending abroad only a fraction of that net addition.

The central role of families - their cohesiveness, cooperation, and loyalties - has long been a common denominator among middleman minorities around the world. Their successes have not been simply the individual successes of "cream rising to the top" in isolation, though such groups have in fact turned out many remarkable individuals in many fields. Other groups, without the same strong and stable family backgrounds found among middleman minorities, have succeeded disproportionately in those few areas where purely individual talents are the over-riding factors, such as sports and entertainment. In the United States, the Irish in the nineteenth century and blacks in the twentieth century became spectacularly successful in boxing and baseball, as well as among singers and other entertainers, despite their lagging behind other groups in business, science, and other fields with more pre-requisites of cultural or social capital.

Both the nineteenth-century Irish and the twentieth-century blacks were noted for high rates of broken families, violence, alcoholism and crime. It is hardly surprising that both groups succeeded, not only as well as others, but far more so than most others, in fields where only the individual's abilities mattered. Such fields attracted a disproportionate share of their most able and ambitious young people, who often lacked the social prerequisites for widespread success in other fields. While intergroup comparisons have been discouraged by the taboo against "blaming the victim," blame is in fact irrelevant. Certainly no individual or group has any control over the past from which their social and cultural legacy has come. What intergroup comparisons can tell us is which things have turned out to produce what results under what circumstances. If nothing else, that can warn us against blind alleys and counterproductive efforts - and against demagogues who would lead the young, especially, into those blind alleys and into self-destructive attitudes and behavior.