https://americanmind.org/essays/the-bigo...l-justice/
Kind of a long article. Picks up when it talks about Thomas Sowell's books.
"...Economist Thomas Sowell, who just turned 90, has devoted a great deal of attention over his career to analyzing inter-group differences occurring around the world and across many centuries. The trilogy he wrote in the 1990s—Race and Culture; Migrations and Culture; and Conquests and Cultures—is his most comprehensive examination of the issue. His conclusion is that wide, persistent disparities are a fact of life in every heterogenous society. If all disparate socioeconomic outcomes are bad (except, perhaps, for purely random ones) then the pursuit of justice requires constantly reducing and ultimately eliminating every such disparity. According to Sowell, however, this supposed ideal is in fact contrary to the operation of every large, complex society known to the disciplines of history and anthropology. He offers so many particulars that it becomes clear the supply is infinite. A century ago, for example, Jews were 6% of Hungary’s population and 11% of Poland’s, but accounted for the majority of physicians in each country. Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority, about 5% of the population, owns some 80% of the nation’s invested capital. In the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire, 75% of Serbo-Croatian adults were illiterate in 1900, as were 40% of Poles, but only 6% of Germans....
If white privilege explains virtually everything about how whites come out ahead of blacks, how can “Jewish privilege” not explain how Jews come out ahead of Gentiles? How can “Asian privilege” not explain the educational and economic advantages that Americans of Asian ancestry enjoy over whites, blacks, and Hispanics? After all, the social justice framework demands summary rejection of the idea that there are reasons other than racism why some groups, including ones that have endured virulent bigotry within living memory, get along better in the modern world than other groups....
The third problem with the social justice consensus follows directly from the second. Since it rejects Enlightenment principles for formulating, evaluating, and debating ideas, it only makes sense that modern anti-racism also rejects Enlightenment principles about living together peacefully and fairly: inalienable rights, humans’ inherent equality and dignity, constitutionalism, tolerance, pluralism, and governments which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Social justice opposes and threatens liberal democracy by rejecting such principles, along with institutional pillars like a free press and independent courts, as devices that perpetuate and legitimate the oppression of the oppressed...."
