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A Preference for Illusion
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17024 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1990 |
1,839 Words |
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Eugene J. McCarthy
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PREFERENTIAL POLICIES;
An International Perspective
Thomas Sowell
New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1990
192 pp., $17.95
Thomas Sowell might have titled his book "through history with affirmative action." The author makes a most important point in his opening chapter, namely, that what we call "affirmative action," and think of as a contemporary innovation, has been around for a long time - almost as long as recorded history. Affirmative action is manifest in any preferential treatment by a government, or society, of a designated group.
Sowell explores this phenomenon in ancient societies and civilizations briefly, however, concentrating his reports, reflections, and judgments on this century. In order to keep his subject from becoming unmanageable and overly complex, he also limits himself to those preferences mandated by government, leaving aside the multiple prejudices and preferences operative in social relations. He gives special attention to programs in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the United States.
Preferred Majorities
Sowell breaks his study into three major preferential relationships. First, there is preferential treatment of majorities in economies they control. Here, government action demonstrates the danger Tocqueville called "the tyranny of the majority." Tyranny may be too strong a word in some cases, but certainly the exploitation and abuse of minorities by majorities is well known.
In the cases cited in the book, principally South Africa and the American South after the abolition of slavery and before the civil rights movement, the preferences of the majority have been maintained not by custom but by law. In these cases, discrimination preceded the law, which was adopted, it appears, to sustain the prejudices and give them what measure of moral support may be attached to legality.
Preferences claimed by the majority, whether they be in housing, employment, transportation, or other areas are, the author concludes, uneconomic. Sustained by political force, they are ultimately politically and economically destabilizing. He reports the significant fact that in the nineteenth century, transportation was racially unsegregated in southern cities, including Montgomery, Alabama. Laws imposing separate seating for blacks and whites on streetcars were passed in the early twentieth century, and the streetcar companies opposed them for economic reasons - and still opposed them for the same reasons when they were abolished.
The second category of government tally supported preferences analyzed by Sowell are those in which majorities are favored in economic areas controlled by minorities. The advantages obtained by the majorities in these instances are more clearly defined than in Sowell's first category. The claim for preferential treatment, sometimes offered as defensive action, is usually made by an indigenous population that has been displaced from an occupation by a group in the society that may or may not be indigenous, but is ethnically or otherwise different and takes on new
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