The message of Thomas Sowell's "The Economics and Politics of Race" is simple and easy to understand: human cultures are not equal and some of them are better than others, their patterns of values having a more decisive role in the social perfomance of their respective members than any alleged, or even real and appaling, discrimination.
Sowell demonstrates that ethnic groups perform differently, even when they are subjected to a similar hostile social condition, like the chinese, the jews or the blacks in the USA, in the beginning of the 20th century.
The reason? A strong commitment, or not, to such values as hardworking, stable family ties and a firm will of improving their own social fate rather than blaming third ones by that same fate.
Similarly, when the pretense source of damage disappears - for example, in societies where certain ethnic groups are largely the majority and "bias" against them is inexistent -, not only their poor social behavior does not vanish, but, contrarily, worsens in a terrible way...
Concluding, culture really matters!
I have always operated that race doesn't matter. People are people, and nobody wants to be in poverty. Perhaps the debate shouldn't start with race, but it should start with economic mobility. We want to see that everybody has a chance to move up, and that book is assuming that some races and cultures are too backwards to want to move up and not live in poverty.
Correlation doesn't equal causation. There are many impoverished white people in America. I typically thought that the right wing blamed economic immobility on the government and the welfare system, but blaming it on the culture and biology of minorities is completely new to me. I don't buy it.
