Black Rednecks and White Liberals

The main problem with this thesis, aside from the fact that it is yet another attempt to blame everything on the South, is that these pathologies did not manifest until the northern migration. Gangs, disintegrating families, epidemic drug and alcohol abuse, rampant illegitimacy all occurred after Blacks moved north and were plugged into the welfare state. Part of the reason Blacks are returning South is that they are more comfortable there, have more in common with white Southerners than hypocritical yankees, and fit comfortably into a culture of faith. At least he is trying to look out of the box....but blaming ANYBODY at this stage of the game is not part of the solution. Its the problem.

This book makes excellent sense and I really liked the history the author delves into. There's so much insight here that I had a paradigm shift! I recommend it to anyone who was as ignorant as I before I bought it. It's not about racism, but about culture and how it is propagated through ignorance and arrogance.

I can only imagine how many sleepless nights a scholar like Thomas Sowell must cause the uber elite liberal "leaders" of America. Surely the Jesse Jacksons and Teddy Backstrokes cringe at the thought of another best-selling book by Thomas Sowell.

Like Sowell's other work, only this time with a direct assault, this book destroys foundations of liberal thought, particularly with regard to "fixing" race problems and preserving ghetto culture. Sowell has comprised six essays to attack liberal mythology head on.

Sowell examines key beliefs behind many actions, policies and trends trumpeted by the ideological Left which have resulted in counter-productive and oftentimes dangerous consequences. The biggest example today is liberals' almost sacrosanct view of black ghetto culture. In this venue, Sowell explores the history of ghetto culture and traces it, not to African origins, but rather to the white southerners who brought it with them from the British and Scottish highlands.

Sowell explains that their behavior and culture consisting of "an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship,... and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery", had nothing to do with the existing American institution of slavery. These attitudes were passed down to the white Southern descendants of these northern English and Scottish immigrants, and would soon become the cultural heritage of many Southern blacks.

Sowell points out that although most Southern blacks and whites moved away from the redneck culture over the generations given its destructively counterproductive effects, it survives today among the poorest and least educated ghetto blacks and, since the 1960s, has been revered by today's white liberal elite. Many liberal intellectuals celebrate black ghetto culture as "authentically" black and denounce any criticism of it (or any attempt to change it) as "blaming the victim." As the author brilliantly puts it:

"By cheering on counterproductive attitudes, making excuses for self-defeating behavior, and promoting the belief that "racism" accounts for most of blacks' problems, white intellectuals serve their own psychic, ideological, and political interests. They are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies."

This sort of clear minded, hit-the-nail-on-the-head thinking makes one wonder if the Jesse Jackson's of the world are really blind of the actual harm they are creating for the very people they profess to be helping, or are they fully aware that their actions only serve to worsen the problems. Of course, to admit that the latter appears to be the more accurate conclusion, one can only surmise that such leeches do what they do and say what they say purely for their own self interests and promotion.

A compilation of six compelling essays, any one of which, such as "Black Education" or "History versus Visions" is worth the price of the book. This may very well be Thomas Sowell's best work, and that, in and of itself, is a tall order.

Monty Rainey
[...]

What impressed me most about this compellation of essays was how copiously researched and documented they were and the cogent manner in which they were presented. Unlike the predisposed antagonistic review below that attempts to obfuscate the reader by using words like "putative" rather than "alleged" like the rest of us great unwashed, Mr. Sowell comes to the reader without intellectual pretense. Btw, Mr. Sowell isn't "alleging" a link between white rednecks and southern blacks, he's averring it...how's that for obfuscation?

It is convenient and utterly lacking in erudition (still obfuscating) to dismiss Sowell's contentions because they don't have at their core a proactive antagonist who (the collective "who") usurps the downtrodden at every turn. It's tantamount to that oft used contradictory argument that if the cops make an arrest in a black or Hispanic neighborhood, it's because they focus more attention on that neighborhood, but if they aren't around when a crime is committed in that same neighborhood a day later, it's because they don't care enough about what goes on there to pay it much heed. These kinds of reflexive arguments are indicative of the predisposed, un-erudite liberal elitists who seem to be quite deft at finding the root cause of all the ills visited on black America at the hands of the white majority, but are hard-pressed to explain why a continent predominated by blacks and governed by blacks has been a virtual cesspit for thousands of years. What they can't seem to grasp is that it has little to do with race, on either continent, and everything to do with culture and political/economic systems.

I just read an incredible book by Kenneth Bucchi that illustrates in a less cerebral and more corporeal way, how people are affected more by the factors Mr. Sowell speaks of than those commonly accepted by the left side of the political isle. If you happen to read Bucchi's book, which I highly recommend you do, pay particular attention to the two main characters, Bucchi and an African-American gentleman named Box. They came from diametrically different backgrounds and were thrust into a world that neither of them could possibly have been prepared for and yet, all things being equal, they both performed most admirably and courageously.

I'd like to share two observations about Dr. Sowell's thesis regarding Black Rednecks:

Firstly, if "residual effects of slavery" is used as an explanation for psycho-social pathology found within inner city black ghettos, then "lineal" effects of white Southern redneck culture upon former slaves must also be acknowledged by the Left. Why? This is so because Leftists reflexively use the "victim card" and so to deny these lineal effects would thwart such usage.

That is, to do otherwise, as Sowell seems to hint, is to suggest that what has become known as redneck values independently arose within the slave population(1); and this, of course, would be anathema to the Left. Yet, Sowell makes the historical evidence clear: Northern New England vs Southern Redneck cultural differences existed between blacks who lived in the North as opposed to the South. And so, behaviors thought to be culturally and "authentically black" need to be deconstructed, in particular, by the Progressive Black Left.

Secondly, there appears to be a confluence between the 60's counter-cultural revolution and black redneck culture brought forward to that time; that is, the counter culture provided a religio-political psychology(2) which helped to perpetuate an already existing "oppositional-defiant-value-laden" black redneck life style.

Peculiarly, members of the White Left and Black Left tend to engage Sowell's cultural analyses via Nietzschean ressentiment(3); that of invoking a "progressive play" in which "master morality" and "slave morality" become part of a metanarrative through which a backdrop of "cosmic justice"(4) may be better served while the "sins of the West"(5) remain in a state of perpetual adjudication.

This book is classic Sowell as he unpacks "the vision of the anointed"(6): religio-political epiphanies of racial socialism.

Endnotes:

(1) ~Black Rednecks, p.63: "...Whether black redneck values and lifestyle are a lineal descendant of white redneck values and lifestyle, as suggested here, or a social phenomenon arising independently within the black community and only conincidentally similar, it is still a way of life that has been tested before and found wanting, as shown by its erosion over the generations among whites who experienced its counterproductive consequences."

~Sowell's, "The Quest For Cosmic Justice", 1999, p. 17-18: "...many observers of nineteenth-century America saw striking social and economic differences between Southern whites and Northern whites--the Southerners having less education, poorer work habits, less entrepreneurship, more violence...Yet if one traces back to Britain the ancestors of these Southerners, one finds the very same social patterns in these and other things, long before they crossed the Atlantic or saw the first black slave...Those who settled in the South came from different regions [in Britain and] with very different cultural patterns...."

(2) See John McWhorter's "Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America"(2000) and "Authentically Black: Essays For The Black Silent Majority"(2003); cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism as well as the "new black double consciousness" are respectively-eloguently deconstructed. In addition, see McWhorter's recent essay entitled, "Watts, 40 Years Later", Washington Post, 08/15/05. For further analysis, please see David Horowitz's "The Politics of Bad Faith"(1998) and "Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About The 60's"(2005) by Free Press.

(3) See "Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault" by Stephen Hicks, pp.193-194: "...And so the weak[slave moralists] invent a rationalization--a rationalization that tells them they are the good and the moral because they are weak, humble, and passive...[and because they are]...on the side of the weak and the downtrodden." So adopted, this rationalization has become part of a master-slave metanarrative which characterizes so much of Leftist liturgy; ironically, this remains so even though socialist faith is, nonetheless, the "historical loser."

(4) ~The Quest For Cosmic Justice, p.6-7: "With people across virtually the entire ideological spectrum being offended by inequalities and their consequences, why do these inequalities persist? Why are we not all united in determination to put an end to them? Perhaps the most cogent explanation was that offered by Milton Friedman: A society that puts equality--in the sense of equality of outcomes--ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."

~Black Rednecks, pps.263-267; p.264: "Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently more manageable issue of social justice..."

(5) Black Rednecks: pps. 62, 262, 264-266, 268, 270, 275, 281, and 289; p.270: "Studying Western imperialism in isolation from other, non-Western, imperialism--such as that of Genghis Khan or the Ottoman Turks--makes all the injustices, oppressions, and horrors incident to imperialism itself seem like depravities peculiar to the West. The tendentiousness of such a view of history stands out particularly when efforts are made to depict the United States as especially guilty of sins common to the human race around the world..."

~While having an abiding respect for those lives which were lost as a result of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as well as the Sub-Saharan slave trade, this reviewer laments the fact that members of the Black Left pecularily remain both chronically and morbidly preoccupied with only the sins of "dead-white-males", seemingly looking back as far as colonial Jamestown, 1607; a preoccupation of which has thus far prevented an honest examination of the sins of slavery and genocide as they exist upon the African continent.

(6) See Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As A Basis for Social Policy", published by Basic Books, 1995; p.5: "It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed."

In this Book, Dr. Sowell has provided historical precedent and well documented reason for virtually everything I've felt true about our society but until now had only instinct and the anecdotal evidence before my eyes as the basis for my belief. That's a pretty encompassing statement, but it's true. Virtually every paragraph of this book is revealing and delivers body blow after body blow to long held beliefs and socially accepted notions of "history" which have done so much to damage our society over the last half century. Thomas Sowell is without peer as a historical sociologist and in this book, he lays bare the facts against the politically correct social holograms we are spoon-fed every day. It is my intent to commit this book to memory and to see to it that anyone for whom I care reads it and understands its meaning.

One of Sowell's very best books. The title essay gives a plausible explanation of how black culture was derived from a harmful Celtic culture and is as harmful to blacks as it was the Celts and to white southerners. Another essay shows Germans weren't particularly antisemitic compared to the US and the rest of Europe but they were manipulated by the Nazis. Still another shows that blacks in good schools perform at least as well as whites, so black education deficiencies are caused by bad public schools and harmful cultural influences. Amazing insights in these 7 essays.

What can you say? A great book by a great author! Dr. Sowell does it again. Truth and more truth in an enjoyable package.

Bought this to get an insight into alternative thought in our society. Went in very skeptical...came out with the feeling that this guy has done his homework and does in fact offer solutions and causes for racial issues not found anywhere in the mainstream. Well worth the time to read, even if you disagree.

Some reviewers have taken issue with the thesis of Sowell's title essay, questioning how much Southern blacks would have been exposed to the influence of poor whites. This is a legitimate objection, and Sowell's thesis may suffer from being too narrow in its characterization of Southern white culture. Which is to say, the characteristics he identifies with poor whites of mostly Scotch-Irish background were characteristics also of the white upper classes in the Old South, where the masculine ideal was the gallant Cavalier with his Hotspur masculinity and touchy sense of honor, and where labor was seen as lowly drudgery rather than virtuous self-reliance. This was the value system of the white society in which the slaves were forced to exist, exacerbated by status relations among the slaves themselves, where the less onerous tasks of house slaves were privileged over the hard labor of field hands, and these attitudes survived among both races into the post-war and Jim Crow eras. The gangbanger elevation of a minor (or imagined) slight into a killing offense is identical with the sense of honor demonstrated by the Mafioso and the Southern hillbilly, but it is also the sense of honor that led Southern gentlemen into the Civil War. (It also, of course, is what inspired the attitudes in so many Southern whites that made the Civil Rights movement such a dangerous struggle.)

That flaw of over-particularity notwithstanding, this is a fine book, arguing persuasively the ways in which historical development shapes ethnic groups and the responses to them by outsiders.