Black Rednecks and White Liberals (Hardcover)

by Thomas Sowell (Author) "THIS WAS SAID IN 1956 IN INDIANAPOLIS, not about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South..." (more)
Key Phrases: other middleman minorities, successful black schools, black rednecks, Eastern Europe, New York, New England (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
One of America's foremost black conservative intellectuals returns with this provocative collection of contrarian essays. Hoover Institution Fellow Sowell, author of Ethnic America, argues that "internal" cultural habits of industriousness, thriftiness, family solidarity and reverence for education often play a greater role in the success of ethnic minorities than do civil-rights laws or majority prejudices. The title essay posits a "black redneck" culture inherited from the white redneck culture of the South and characterized by violent machismo, shiftlessness and disdain for schooling. White liberals, gangsta-rap aficionados and others who lionize its ghetto remnants as an authentic black identity, Sowell contends, have their history wrong and help perpetuate cultural pathologies that hold blacks back. Sowell also examines the cultural achievements of such "middleman minorities" as Jews and expatriate Chinese whose frequent persecution, he feels, represents an animus against capitalism. And he defends Western culture itself against charges that it was uniquely culpable for slavery; in fact, he contends, it was uniquely responsible for eradicating slavery. Many of Sowell's arguments-that the 20th-century resegregation of Northern cities was a response to the uncouthness of black rednecks migrating from the South, or that segregated black schools often succeeded by suppressing redneckism with civilized New England puritanism-will arouse controversy, but these vigorously argued essays present a stimulating challenge to the conventional wisdom.
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Review
Thomas Sowell is persuasive and provocative and always scintillating. I’ve read all his books and never been even faintly disappointed. -- Fred Barnes, executive editor, The Weekly Standard, and Fox News commentator

Tom Sowell is a national treasure, America’s most perceptive, productive, and thoughtful commentator on racial and ethnic issues. -- Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, authors of America in Black and White

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books; FIRST EDITION (stated) edition (June 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594030863
• ISBN-13: 978-1594030864
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (89 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,935 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

409 of 442 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Once again, Sowell is at his best!, May 9, 2005

By	Blake Posey "Blake" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This is indeed a terriffic thesis documented with thousands of references, suggesting that the 'culture' in the South is responsible for the ghetto culture, not 'racism' alone. The reasons are due to how the Britains lived in the outskirts of England(the lawless regions) before moving into the antebellum South, carrying their anarchic, chaotic culture with them. He also details how slaves lived under the rule of their masters, and how the black culture actually had their own elite/mulatto/light skinned class that continually discriminated against the dark skinned, uneducated blacks that were woven into the cracker culture from the onset. He also compares the northern blacks to the southern blacks, showing how the northern blacks were much more educated because the 'north' had 4x more schools than the south, scored higher on tests, had a higher graduation rate, etc.

The northern region itself used discrimination methods not just against black rednecks, but to white rednecks. He notes that racism in the north started when ghetto blacks moved up north, being that the whites and blacks both were uncomfortable with the redneck culture within their community. Racism hardly existed in the north until the migration of blacks from the South after the emancipation of the slaves. He also notes that there weren't just white slaveholders. There were many black slave holders as well, notably in the southern regions of Louisiana.

In his thesis regarding the history of slavery, he notes that it was the Western civilization itself that took a stand against slavery around the world, and spent a huge amount of time and effort in order to push this ideology to free slaves from South America into Africa and throughout the world. He specifically notes that Britian was the primary force behind this movement. The Arab region and Africa both ignored emancipation of their slaves and continued to drive the slavery racket, even under pressure from Western nations. He also brings to light the fact that America was the only country that uses the black/white-slavery issue as a political based on race, even though slavery wasn't constrained to one race in other countries as well. Arabs enslaved Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians. This happened throughout the world, and still does in some parts of Africa.

In the chapter 'Are Jews Generic' he makes the case clear that it's not just Jews that are consistently lashed out at, but there are other ethnic groups just like jews that are condemned not because of who they are, but because of how successful they are when immigrating into new societies to flourish and expand their family buisnesses. Being that some parts of the primary society at hand lag behind in economic terms, they tend to take their anger out on the small segments of society that move in and become middlemen by buying and selling goods in order to become successful from nothing. Envy drives the force of hatred among different types of ethnic groups, whether it be the Armenians, Jews, tribes from Indonesia, Asians, etc.

I have yet to get into the Black Education thesis, but had to post in regards to the rant above about how Sowell skirts the main facts of history, when the whole book is based on empirical evidence about the history of slavery and the Southern culture. Not only that, the reader that has beef with Sowell states that Sowell lashes out at the culture that participates in gang related movements, ie gangsta rap culture, etc because this behavior is not new. This type of behavior existed 200 years ago, and is just the expression of the ghetto culture that hasn't been brought out of poverty, mainly because our politicians praise this behavior as 'black culture', when in fact it originated through the redneck culture.

How can you argue against empirical evidence? Especially when you see a trend, evidence that comes from several sources?

I give this book 5 out of 5 stars. Vintage Sowell at his best. He compiles three decades of research into this one book.

Definently go out and buy this book!!! It's perfect to have by your side in order to counter the rhetoric used in todays political atmosphere.

Excellence.

258 of 291 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a fine work (file under "cultural studies"), May 8, 2005

By	Caswallon S. Barrios - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My advice to naysayers - even if your perspective is crippled by being an high income person and/or a "yankee" - is to read the book. In 1989 Grady McWhiney published "Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South" and described the vast cultural divide between North and South that existed prior to the War. As any careful reader would've noticed, *all* of the stereotypes that would later be applied to African-Americans were first applied to White Southerners by Northerners. This is a reality. And the Civil War taught us, if nothing else, that the South was - in the emerging industrial world - an anachronism. Thomas Sowell takes these observations as his point of departure. I can imagine that the people who'll most take offense at the book are caucasian, elitist, self-styled "liberals" who want to maintain *their* static, monolithic idea of "Black Culture" as some kind of museum piece. This is an articulate, searching text that goes well beyond the traditional Liberal/Conservative ping-pong.

93 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, except for title essay, May 17, 2005

By	Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

That Thomas Sowell hasn't yet won the Nobel Prize for Economic Science reflects more poorly upon the economics profession's infatuation with mathematical formulas than upon Sowell's lifetime achievement. Personally, I've learned more from Sowell than from any other living economist, with the possible exception of his old teacher, Milton Friedman.

Now in his mid-70s, Sowell's latest book of essays, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, doesn't break much new ground. But it forcefully summarizes many of his recurrent themes in a half dozen extended meditations on historical issues of great relevance to the contemporary world.

For example, in "Are Jews Generic?" Sowell outlines the tendency of the masses to persecute "middle-man minorities" such as Jews, Armenians, and the Overseas Chinese, precisely because of the value of their contributions to the economy.

In "Germans and History," he defends that much maligned nationality against insinuations, such as in Daniel Goldhagen's bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners, that German history should be viewed as inevitably leading up to the Nazis. Sowell concludes, with his characteristic concern for the universal fallibilities of mankind:

"The racial fanaticism of Hitler and the Nazi movement ... were not historically distinct characteristics of Germans as a people. On the contrary, the rise of such a man as the leader of such a people should serve as a permanent warning to all people everywhere who are charmed by charisma or aroused by rhetoric."

Unfortunately, the title essay, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," is the most questionable in the book.

Yet it features many acute observations. For example:

"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."

The central conceit of the essay is that blacks' troubles today in large part stem from their having absorbed the self-defeating culture of poor Southern whites.

As Sowell wrote in the Wall Street Journal (April 26 2005):

"The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only `authentic' black culture -- and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct."

But when examined closely, Sowell's theory exhibits major problems. Indeed, I suspect Sowell is really trying to get blacks to reject ghetto gangsta culture as not authentically black, but a borrowing from poor white trash. When I explained to my wife what I thought Sowell might be doing, she replied: "Hey, if it works, I'm all for it."

There's no question that for scores of years after the Civil War, the South was the poorest, worst educated, and least enterprising part of the country. The fairly rapid improvement in the wealth and health of the South after the spread of air conditioning following WWII, though, suggests that some of what Sowell sees as long-term cultural weaknesses were simply the initiative-sapping effects of too much heat and humidity.

Still, as historian David Hackett Fischer's landmark 1989 book Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America documented in overwhelming detail, the cultural patterns laid down by different groups of British settlers before 1776 still explain much about today's America.

Following Grady McWhiney's book Cracker Culture, Sowell attributes much of "redneck culture" to the Scotch-Irish, those bellicose Protestants from the violent Scottish-English border region and their descendents who had settled Ulster. During the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Scots-Irish migrated to America, especially to the Appalachian backcountry.

Sowell in turns attributes many aspects of current black culture to the Scotch-Irish, such as a tendency to react tumultuously to being "dissed." For example, President Andy Jackson, the exemplar of Scotch-Irish manhood, was admired by his followers for having fought several duels.

Certainly, the Scotch-Irish were more prone to brawl than the two dominant cultures of the 17th Century North, the intellectual Puritans of New England and the pacifist Quakers of Pennsylvania. But those two elite, self-selected religious groups were exceptional. The typical human culture has no doubt been closer to the Scotch-Irish than to the Puritans or Quakers. So correlations between the old Appalachians and the current ghetto-dwellers aren't proof of causation.

Even more damaging to Sowell's hypothesis, the Scotch-Irish tended to stay away from the blacks. They went to the highlands, both because disease was less of a problem for Europeans in the cooler uplands than in the lowland South, and because they disliked having to compete with slave labor.

Today, the state with the least educated whites is the prototypical Scotch-Irish state of West Virginia, which had so few slave-owners that it seceded from Confederate Virginia and joined the Union during the Civil War. Other heavily Scotch-Irish states like Tennessee and Kentucky have limited black populations, too.

Slaves tended to be owned mostly by big slave-owners on the tobacco and cotton plantations of the Southern lowlands. The planters were often descended from the second sons of minor aristocrats in southern England -- just as poor whites in the lowland South often originated among the servant and farm worker classes of southern England.

African-Americans may have assimilated more of the lowland Southern quasi-aristocratic prejudices, such as for grandiloquent multi-syllabic words (e.g., Jesse Jackson's style of speaking) and against manufacturing and shop keeping, than they inherited Scotch-Irish populism.

Consider Liberia. Freed slaves who were sent to Liberia reproduced the white Southern lowland social structure -- with themselves as the slave-owning aristocrats and the native blacks as the slaves.