He might, but it's harder now than it was when Thomas Sowell was a boy. His grandparents were uneducated, but they wanted better for him and pushed him to achieve. By his own admission, he didn't understand why he should get an education until he worked the kinds of jobs you get without an education.
Today, those jobs aren't available to American teenagers with no skills, and neither is the motivation to work for food.
From just having read “A Personal Odyssey” I don’t recall Sowell having much contact with grand parents. In fact he was not raised by his mother, but by an aunt as I recall who didn’t let him know that she was not his mother until he was in his teens. He was passionate about education as a youngster, seeing it as advancement and competition of an enjoyable nature.
He literally dropped out of high school in Harlem. Plain hard work and inate intelligence got him to his doctoral level and clear thinking and lack of fear did the rest. He claims that unlike younger kids that followed a decade behind him he had no built in inferiority complex nurtured by a fear of white people — he fought and beat up a white kid at 12 and his last one at 34 — so he knew they were just people like him.
I have read a number of his books and countless columns and articles, but reading his biographical book gave me a fresh understanding.
He makes it plain that he isn’t a registered party member and does not normally even vote. He is unsatisfied by almost all political involvement he has had, would be the impression I took away from the book.