Statistical differences as grievances

Did you know that baseball coaches of minority races are found more often coaching at first base than at third base? (Now what might this mean?!) And further, the third-base coaches become team Managers more often than first-base coaches. (Aha!) From the 1964 Civil Rights Act straight to the lunacy of today's quotas and discrimination lawsuits, one never knows what to expect next.

In Bean-Counters and Baloney, Thomas Sowell shows how the multiculturalists' relentless recitation of statistics is driven only by the desire to demonstrate "social injustices." No matter what! Nothing, of course, must suggest that there are genuine differences between and among ethnic and racial groups. Following are excerpts:
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The bean-counters have struck again – this time in the sports pages. Two New York Times sport writers have discovered that baseball coaches from minority groups are found more often coaching at first base than at third base. Moreover, third-base coaches become managers more often than first-base coaches.

This may seem to be just another passing piece of silliness. But it is part of a more general bean-counting mentality that turns statistical differences into grievances. The time is long overdue to throw this race card out of the deck and start seeing it for the gross fallacy that it is.

At the heart of such statistics is the implicit assumption that different races, sexes and other subdivisions of the human species would be proportionately represented in institutions, occupations and income brackets if there was not something strange or sinister going on.

Although this notion has been repeated by all sorts of people, from local loudmouths on the street to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States, there is not one speck of evidence behind it and a mountain of evidence against it.

Ask the bean-counters where in this wide world have different groups been proportionally represented. They can't tell you. In other words, something that nobody can demonstrate is taken as a norm, and any deviation from that norm is somebody's fault! ...

At our leading engineering schools – M.I.T., CalTech, etc. – whites are under-represented and Asians over-represented. Is this anti-white racism or pro-Asian racism? Or are different groups just different?

As for baseball, I have long noticed that there are more blacks playing centerfield than third-base. Since the same people hire centerfielders and third-basemen, it is hard to argue that racism explains the difference. No one says it is racism that explains why blacks are over-represented and whites under-represented in basketball. Bean-counters only make a fuss when there is a disparity that fits their vision or their agenda. ...

In countries around the world, all sorts of groups differ from each other in all sorts of ways, from rates of alcoholism to infant mortality, education and virtually everything that can be measured, as well as in some things that cannot be quantified. If black and white Americans were the same, they would be the only two groups on this planet who are the same. ...

The bean-counters are everywhere, pushing the idea that differences show injustices committed by society. As long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it – and the polarization they create will sell this country down the river.

Read complete article here.