The Homeless Mascots of “the Anointed”

For four semesters a quarter-century ago, I taught nearly two thousand University of Texas at Austin freshmen and sophomores how to think critically about both liberals and conservatives — but I did show my moderate conservatism by using as a primary textbook free market economist Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed (Basic Books, 1994).

Maybe I could get away with that because Sowell, now 94, is not only brilliant but black. Several students did complain, particularly about a section Sowell titled “Mascots of the Anointed.” The “anointed,” Sowell showed, were those in academia and media who thought they knew how to reconstruct American society, and adopted particular groups as “mascots, often without much regard for what that does to other groups or to the integrity of the system as a whole.”

Sowell’s use of the word “mascots” upset some students. The University of Texas mascot is a longhorn steer. The Colorado mascot is a buffalo. Oregon has a duck, LSU a tiger, and Georgia a bulldog. Sowell is comparing humans to animals, the complainers said. I made things worse by saying, following my 1995-96 Washington experience with welfare reform, that some politicians treated the poor as pets: put some food in their bowls and don’t be concerned if they’re encouraged to lie around most of the day.

Sowell wrote that homeless individuals often became “mascots of the anointed.” Sleeping-on-the-streets miseries “enable the anointed to score points against a benighted society.” Sowell wrote about requests that homeless advocates receive: “We need a witness for a hearing. Can you get us a homeless family: mother, father — father out of work in the past four months from an industrial plant — white?”

Last week I praised Andrea Elliott’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Invisible Child. Early in her homelessness reporting, Elliott published in The New York Times a five-part series starring a homeless child, cute Dasani Coates. The next month brought the January 1, 2014 inauguration of Bill de Blasio as New York City’s new mayor — and freshly-minted media star Dasani, after years of life with a poor and dysfunctional family, became the object of politicians’ affections.

De Blasio announced, “We can’t let children of this city like Dasani down.” He and Letitia James, his second-in-command as “public advocate,” invited Dasani onto the inaugural stage and made sure she had a new winter coat. Dasani then held the Bible for the swearing-in of James, who told the crowd that the 12-year-old was a beacon of “enduring hope” and “eternal optimism.” To complete Dasani’s mascot status, James lifted Dasani’s arm, called her “my new BFF” (best friend forever), and said that if de Blasio failed, “you better believe Dasani and I will stand up.”

Forever did not last long. First, the New York Post headlined two days later, “Public advocate caught in lie over Times homeless story.” Other news outlets joined in hooting at the lie, which was James taking credit for the Times‘s finding Dasani. When the newspaper noted that James had nothing to do with the discovery, she responded, “I commend The New York Times for highlighting this important issue on their front page but, to be clear, I was not a source behind The New York Times‘s feature on Dasani and did not intend to imply so.” That compounded the lie, since her implication was clear. It would have been better for James simply to admit that Dasani was a mascot.

The University of Texas at Austin adopted the Longhorn steer “Bevo” as its mascot in 1916. The current mascot is Bevo XV, which means a new Bevo takes over about every seven years. Dasani did not have even seven days as “best friend forever,” perhaps because the lie by James meant that any further appearances of the two together would reinvigorate the politician’s embarrassment. James gained election as Attorney General of New York state in 2018, by which time an abandoned Dasani had been in and out of legal and educational trouble.

An Associated Press puff piece about James in 2023 had the headline, “Who is Letitia James? NY attorney general has long history of taking on powerful targets, including Trump.” A better headline would have emphasized her taking on and then dropping a powerless mascot.