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Commentary By Jason L. Riley

Abigail Thernstrom, RIP: America Needs More Like Her

Culture Race

The social scientist who studied race always put intellectual honesty ahead of political correctness.

It’s hard to compete for attention with a pandemic, but the passing of one of the country’s leading social scientists should not go unremarked. Last week Abigail Thernstrom died at 83, and at the risk of writing about something other than the coronavirus, here’s why her contributions to our policy debates will be missed.

Thernstrom was a political scientist by training who taught briefly in the 1970s, but she made her mark over the past four decades writing and editing books about race relations, voting rights and education. As a scholar she was the full package, someone who could write clearly, with authority, and for an audience beyond her fellow intellectuals.

Like several other prominent conservatives, from Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan to Thomas Sowell, Abby started out on the political left. In her case, it was the far left. She was born and raised in a New York City suburb among Communists and their sympathizers. And she met her husband and frequent collaborator, the historian Stephan Thernstrom, in graduate school at Harvard when they both attended a lecture given by the socialist writer I.F. Stone.

The couple’s masterful “America in Black and White” was published in 1997 and is best described as a successor to Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s classic 1944 study, “An American Dilemma.” Myrdal argued that America’s founding principles of freedom and equality were at odds with its racial policies toward blacks, particularly in the South. Without playing down the country’s racist past, the Thernstoms chronicled the progress of blacks since that period. They showed that America’s racial attitudes rapidly improved in the postwar period and beyond. In 1944, only 42% of whites opposed racial discrimination in hiring, but by 1963 it had climbed to 83%. By 1964, 2 out of 3 blacks already could report having white neighbors, and by 1994 it was 5 out of 6.

As impressive was the economic progress the Thernstroms reported. In 1940, 87% of black households were poor. By 1960, it was down to 47%, even though the landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and the Great Society programs had yet to be enacted. Between 1940 and 1970, blacks increased their years of schooling at a faster pace than whites, and the percentage of blacks in white-collar jobs quadrupled—all before the era of affirmative action. “There was a substantial black middle-class already in existence by the end of the 1960s,” they wrote. “In the years since, it has continued to grow, but not at a more rapid pace than in the preceding three decades, despite a common impression to the contrary.”

While most of us would consider this good news, detractors see inconvenient truths. If you are a civil-rights activist, and the civil-rights battles for blacks have been largely fought and won, your relevance is questionable. If you are a politician who insists that government programs are necessary to address black poverty, evidence of the rapid rise of the black middle class in the absence of such programs undercuts your argument.

The famous backlash to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the state of the black family spooked a whole generation of academics, who subsequently shied away from blunt discussions of racial inequality. But Abby wasn’t the shy type. She understood that you don’t help people by lying to them about their predicament or urging them to blame their problems on others. She made a career of doing something that ought to be common among public intellectuals but isn’t: gathering facts and reporting her findings without bias and based on the evidence. Neither ideological nor doctrinaire, she acted in the tradition of social scientists like Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson, who put intellectual honesty ahead of political correctness. Race scholars today too often tiptoe around the truth so as not to upset the racial-grievance apple cart or risk getting shamed on social media. Not Abby.

In her 2009 book, “Voting Rights and Wrongs,” she explained how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been manipulated by Congress and the courts to ensure that minorities are elected to office through racial gerrymandering. In a 2003 book, “No Excuses,” which she co-wrote with her husband, they argued that the racial achievement gap in the classroom has less to do with education spending and “racist” tests and more to do with cultural attitudes toward education and the lack of school choice. Criticism of self-defeating black behavior or the left’s distortion of the Voting Rights Act may be justified, but neither observation will win you any popularity contests on cable news or in the faculty lounge. One of Abby’s finest attributes is that she never let that stop her from telling it like it is. We need a hundred more just like her.

This piece first appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal