Former Marxist Thomas Sowell tells Mark Levin how 'systemic racism' isn't backed by facts

Monday on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin interviewed economist and Hoover Institution senior fellow Dr. Thomas Sowell, author of the new book, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." After discussing the benefits of charter schools as described in his book, Levin asked Sowell about his youthful embrace of Marxism and why leftist ideology cannot stand up to facts.

"The Left has the better vision; it's only when you turn from the vision to facts that suddenly everything collapses like a house of cards," Sowell said.

"I think many, if not most, of the people in the movement that created the Soviet Union were probably idealists wanting a better world. They had no idea what kind of world they were in fact creating," he added.

Levin also asked Sowell what he thinks the Left today means in protests against "systemic racism."

"I have no idea what they mean, and I'm not sure they have any idea what they mean, in the sense that you can ask them a factual question and get a factual answer," Sowell responded. "For example, one of the things I came across in writing a previous book was the poverty rate between blacks and whites. And, if I remember the numbers correctly, something like 22 percent of blacks were in poverty, 11 percent of whites were in poverty. Which, ‘Well, that shows the racism.’"

But Sowell looked further into the numbers and found that the poverty rate among black married couples for the year he researched was  7.5 percent.

"In other words, black married couples not only have a lower poverty rate than blacks as a whole, they have a lower poverty rate than whites as a whole,” Sowell explained. The facts did not support the allegation of systemic racism.

Listen:

Sowell tied the way the Left thinks to how our school system is failing America.

"They're not taught how to test things against facts; they're just taught to repeat these slogans. And when you try to talk to them in terms of facts, they think that you're trying to confuse them."

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