Thomas Sowell, recently profiled here by Scott Johnson, was born in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1930 and raised in Harlem. Sowell earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. That was all achieved without any government affirmative-action scheme. The high achiever was bound to draw fire from supporters of such schemes.
One of them was Lani Guinier, the first black woman to hold a tenured position at Harvard Law School.
In all fairness, it may have helped that Ewart Guinier, Lani's father, was chairman of Harvard's Department of Afro-American Studies.
Lani Guinier was Bill Clinton's pick to head the civil rights department of the DOJ. She supported racial preferences in college admissions and questioned Sowell's blackness.
In 2015, Guinier authored The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, supporting a change from "Testocratic merit" to "Democratic merit." The former Clinton pick denounced the SAT as a "Proxy for wealth," and "Normed to white upper-middle-class performance." Guinier opposed "Competition and individualistic merit" and touted a "Culture of collaboration rather than competition." And so on.
He didn't need racial preferences to succeed and he didn't need a half-white woman living in Martha's Vineyard to tell him about being black.
In 2024, Americans of all shades don't need a half-white former president living in Martha's Vineyard to tell them about anything.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/01/sowell-strikes-back.php
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