Lew Rockwell quotes economist Thomas Sowell:
In the period from 1954 to 1964, for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s – when there was little or no civil rights policy – than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.
The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years from 1964 to 1966 (after the Civil Rights Act) was in fact less than in the one year from 1961 to 1962 (before the Civil Rights Act). If one takes into account the growing black population by looking at percentages instead of absolute numbers, it becomes even clearer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years. The percentage of employed blacks who were managers and administrators was the same in 1967 as in 1964 – and 1960. Nor did the institution of “goals and timetables” at the end of 1971 mark any acceleration in the long trend of rising black representation in these occupations. True, there was an appreciable increase in the percentage of blacks in professional and technical fields from 1971 to 1972, but almost entirely offset by a reduction in the percentage of blacks who were managers and administrators.
Lew Rockwell has some more evidence :
Are blacks underrepresented in academia because of “racism”? This thesis began to be advanced in all seriousness in the late 1980s, even though US universities were tearing each other limb from limb in competition for the small number of qualified black candidates. And that, not “racism,” is the issue. The 25 blacks who earned doctorates in mathematics in the US in 2009, for example, were only 1.6 percent of all doctorates in the field given out by US universities. For engineering the figure was 1.8 percent.
That year, not a single black student earned a PhD in agronomy, animal breeding and nutrition, astronomy, astrophysics, chemical and physical oceanography, classics, horticulture, logic, marine science, number theory, nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, paleontology, Spanish, theoretical chemistry, or wildlife/range management. Perhaps this, rather than the automatic assumption of white wickedness, has more to do with it.
An article well worth your time.
