Customer Reviews

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

5 star:		(88)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

Yes, this title sounds provocative and I am sure some people shy away from the book because of it. But you shouldn't hesitate to get a copy of this book and read it cover to cover. It is a collection of six fine essays on the topic of race, ethnicity, historical honesty, education, and the corrupting power of political influence on each of these topics.

While I cannot recreate all the information and structure of each essay, and summarizing them in some way does them a bit of an injustice, I do want you to know why I am so enthusiastic about this book and want you to read it. The title essay, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" demonstrates that so much of the urban "black" culture is really not African in origin, but comes from the now extinct culture of northern Britain. The folks who brought their culture with them from Scotland and environs tended to settle in the South, owned slaves, and became what we call Rednecks. The slaves took on the culture of their masters and this leads to the term Sowell uses in the title.

Protecting a dysfunctional way of living because it is in some way African is not only masochistic, it is a false concept. Instead, the rejection of education and literacy, casual sexual attitudes, and the failure to structure life to prepare for the future are actually artifacts of the slave master culture (that portion of slave holders who were Rednecks, that is). Sowell contrast this reality with what is done by White Liberals to protect Urban Blacks to the detriment of those supposedly being helped.

The second essay, "Are Jews Generic" brings up the reasons why not only Jews, but other minorities around the world (Chinese emigrants, for example) have become "middlemen" and why this has led repeatedly to resentment and persecution. Hence the idea of what we too often think of as "the Jew" can be generic and applied to different minority cultures and practices. Quite an interesting article.

"The Real History of Slavery" is my favorite essay in the book. Without mitigating the horrors, sins, guilt, or suffering caused by American enslavement of Africans, Sowell puts it in a broader context. His point is to show that the notion of slavery was actually part of human culture everywhere in the world. It wasn't considered racist. That is, it wasn't until the notion of human equality was enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and the idea of human equality and freedom took hold in the West. It was then the West that used their Imperial power to destroy the slave trade to a large degree (it still exists in some Muslim countries) all over the globe. This is a very fascinating and informative essay.

"Germans and History" asks the question of whether the rise of Hitler was something built into the German culture that flowered or whether it was a freak event. Sowell demonstrates the rise of the German culture and how Germans had suffered at the hands of others over the centuries. The author concludes that Hitler was not peculiarly German, but was using global trends including the arguments put forward by the American Eugenics crowd (you know them now as Planned Parenthood) and the kind of genocide pioneered by the Ottoman Turks on the Armenians in order to gain a political plurality, seize control, and then execute his murderous plan. As Sowell notes, what is frightening is that this implies that it could arise again in another culture if the right circumstances met with another leader of Hitler's violent extremism and racial hatred.

"Black Education: Achievements, Myths, and Tragedies" is an excellent history of education priorities in various cultures, in the Slave culture, and what was done to educate the Freed Slaves (and prevent their education), and what has been done to miseducate entire generations of children in the name of desirable social ends. Sowell compares what was accomplished in Black schools like Dunbar High before Brown v. Education and what has not been accomplished since then. This is a superb essay.

The concluding essay sums up material from the previous five essays and compares what is taken from us when history is not presented honestly and is corrupted by "visions" of the past. No matter how well meaning, it damages us all because history is our cultural memory. Sowell notes: "We do not have a choice whether or not to discuss history. History has always been invoked in contemporary controversies. The only choice is between discussing what actually happened in the past and discussing notions projected into the past for present purposes." This essay is full of great material and powerful insights.

While I do recommend more books than most folks have time to read, there are a few that I urge you to read and this is one of them. Get a copy and read it closely. You will benefit from it, be challenged by aspects of it, and learn from all of it. Excellent!

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.

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.

Thomas Sowell is undoubtedly one of America's great intellectual treasures. Sowell offers an alternate explanation (compared to the politically-correct party line) about the lot of African Americans as well as beliefs about the Jewish and German peoples. He does this via 6 essays.

His first essay, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" is first in placement and priority. Sowell postulates that the "redneck" culutre actually originated in Ireland, Scotland, and the northern regions of England at a time when those areas were anything but civil and stable. This violent culture was carried across the sea to our southern states (partly because the northerners refused them permission to settle up north). This became the "redneck culture" that dominated the south even before the Civil War, characterized by lack of discipline, out-of-wedlock births, violence, and taking pride in ignorance.

Sowell argues that the Black value system is essentially the "red neck" value system, and that Black language is essentially "red neck" language. Whereas the Irish and Scottish left their uncultured lifestyles behind, and whereas most southerners have done the same, this "red neck" culture is not only propigated in the Black community, it is celebrated. But, Sowell points out, embracing the values of that culture sabotages any attempt to rise within society. Fasicinating and extensively documented thoughts!

The second essay, "Are Jews Generic?" analyzes the blessings and plights of society's "middlemen." Great reading.

The third essay is a fascinating one about "The Real History of Slavery." Sowell tells us that slavery was practiced on every continent, toward every race, and that it was the West which put an end to it around the globe.

His chapter on "Germans and History" is a fair assessment of what happened during the Nazi years and the plight of scattered ethnic Germans after WWII. A must read.

Sowell's firth essay is titled, "Black Education: Achievements, Myths, and Tragedies." Sowell is wise enough to ask the simple question, "Why do educators refuse to look at the success stories of Black education and model programs after them?"

His last essay, "History versus Visions" talks about the rewriting of history and in many ways refers back to the first essay.

Whether you agree completely with Sowell or not, you will probably find this book thought provoking, extremely reasoned, tediously documented, and interesting to read. Sowell is a brilliant man who is capable of noting the obvious. Great work!

In six well-researched and -written essays, Dr Sowell challenges both conventional and emerging feelings on social relations in the US. He tackles both white guilt and black resentment. His central point is that blacks in the US may have had a tough time in this country, but other ethnic groups across the world have had comparable problems and that the black community's future well-being is in their own hands.

"Black Rednecks and White Liberals" sets the tone for the rest of the book. In it, he details how the failed mainstream black subculture derived from a failed frontier Scots-Irish culture that came from the English-Scottish border and Northern Ireland to the southern US in the 18th Century. Other reviewers have argued whether or not the Scots-Irish culture was really a failed one, but I could easily recognize in my own Southern background many of the traits Dr Sowell mentions. Despite that argument, the bottom line is that this culture has been around for a long time, and the dominant culture has always looked down on it, no matter the skin color of its members. This was true when Southern whites immigrated to the Midwest in the mid-20th Century and when Southern blacks made the same move a few years later. In fact, you can see that attitude today when you observe how Hollywood heaps scorn on "hillbillies;" the one ethnic group everyone's still allowed to pick on. Instead of accepting that culture as "valid" or "authentic," the black community needs to adapt their culture to the more dominant one. That means respecting education, rejecting promiscuity, and valuing industriousness.

"Are Jews Generic?" explores the concept of economic middlemen minorities. These fringe entrepreneurs are ethnically distinct from the larger culture, but thrive because of their initiative, contacts, and skills. Influential middlemen minorities include Chinese in south Asia, Lebanese in west Africa, Koreans in the US, as well as Jews in Europe and North America. Their success frequently results in resentment from the larger community, especially among segments who feel exploited by the middleman minority, yet were either unwilling or unable to stake the middlemen's risks. Andrew Young's recent comments about Arab and Korean shopkeepers serve as an excellent illustration. Because of their greater assumed risk and proportionately higher overhead, small merchants will almost always charge more than a "big box" retailer. Yet they meet a need that is otherwise unmet, mostly because they recognize a need and are willing to make the extra effort.

"The Real History of Slavery" is probably the most controversial essay in the collection. Slavery is now so abhorrent to enlightened Western thought that we find it hard to realize that the philosophical objection to slavery is barely 200 years old. As a case in point, my Bible study group was studying the Book of Exodus, and many people just couldn't comprehend why the Bible discussed how to treat slaves instead of commanding manumission. As Dr Sowell points out, slavery has been a part of every society in human history, and still exists today. In those cultures, slavery is one of those natural events that can happen to people; and, because one's lot in life is fixed, one has no recourse. The Enlightenment created the conditions for a mass movement against slavery so strong that the West took military action to end it. Yet the history of slavery in the US has a racial aspect mostly unseen elsewhere. Why? According to the essay, the "natural" inferiority of blacks was offered by antebellum white Southerners to justify slavery in light of philosophical objection and economic unfeasibility (historical inevitability also comes to mind, but that phrase is far too Marxist). Our biggest problem with the history of slavery is dealing with that history. Unfortunately, we tend to assign modern sensibilities to our forefathers. For example, the Founding Fathers recognized the inherent disconnect between the Declaration and the existence of slavery, but also knew that insisting on a slave-free US in the 1780s would have resulted in no US. With politics being the art of the possible, their compromise was probably the best they could have done at the time. While it's easy to use 20/20 hindsight, our ancestors seem to have done the best they could with the hand they were dealt.

"Germans and History" discusses the spread of German culture and raises the root question of overall German complicity in the Holocaust. Dr Sowell points out their industriousness, and how in many cultures they acted as a middleman minority. He also points out how narrowly Hitler was elected in 1933, and lets one infer that the German people were not guilty of the rise of the Nazi dictatorship and its following evils. I had a lot of problem with this thesis. As examined in other books (notably Hitler's Willing Executioners), the German population was generally aware of Hitler's intent toward the Jews (and others) and, if not totally supportive of the Final Solution, at a minimum didn't object too strongly. Many Germans, notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer, took a stand against Nazism. Yet most of the people in 1930s Germany seem to have sold their birthright for economic stability and to avenge the Treaty of Versailles. It's sad how thin the veneer of "civilization" can seem sometimes.

Dr Sowell examines education in "Black Education: Achievements, Myths and Tragedies." He points out that blacks who received a secondary education 100 years ago received a much better one than they do today. While definitely not advocating segregated education, Dr Sowell emphasizes that those students attended all-black schools with black teachers. In my opinion, many of the problems Dr Sowell describes in the black education today apply to US education in general. The idea that everyone must have a minimal education places a premium on the certificate instead of the education, forcing many to look for shortcuts. It's also difficult to increase quantity and expect the quality to remain unchanged. Additionally, the entitlement mentality has infested education. Look no farther than Harvard, where students now agitate for a minimal "B" average since their acceptance into Harvard is a major accomplishment alone. Unfortunately, too many Americans have entrusted education to "experts" who emphasize form over function, as well as allowing our educational system to be dominated by a labor union more interested in padding membership rolls and political agitation than the product of their business.

"History vs. Visions" presents a superb culmination to the book. History's main value is its ability to teach us lessons for the future. Cherry-picking historical events and subsequently misinterpreting them, turns history into a fiction designed to prove an already-decided conclusion. We cannot condemn our predecessors for fictionalizing the past for their own purposes (George Washington and the cherry tree) when we are willing to do the same for our more "politically correct" goals (Christopher Columbus brutally invading Paradise). We have enough fiction in the libraries; history should focus on facts, pleasant or not.

Dr Sowell has written a complex, but very readable book. Read it and be prepared to be intellectually challenged.

To a seventy-year-old southern white Redneck born into an Appalachian foothill family that saw little need for education beyond basic reading and writing this books hits home.
With ancestry of German, Scots-Irish, Irish, Scottish and family links to Jews, I have spent most of my life working in construction in the Washington DC area with more black people than white. Dr. Sowell in Black Rednecks/White Liberals gives me the intellectual framework to place my life experiences into.
When I first came to Washington in 1952 at the age of sixteen I was working with 4 or 5 black guys who was always down on a young black man who seemed to be a very nice young guy who took the riding without complaint. I asked one of the guys why they were so hard on John and his answer to me was that John was a "Dunbar nigger" who thought he was white. The black man who said this to me had red hair and blue eyes; John had a very dark complexion. John was working to save money to attend college that fall.
Read Black Rednecks/White Liberals to gain an understanding of this most complex but very Redneck reaction to a black man who wanted an education. It was the same reaction that most of my friends and I directed toward white guys in my white North Carolina High School who hit the books.

I miss the days when I could open my local paper to the editorial page and read the latest bit of common sense from Thomas Sowell. Those were also the days when Mona Charen and Michelle Malkin also graced the same section of the newspaper. Nowadays I have to wade through clowns like Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof just to spend a few precious minutes with Cal Thomas and George Will. Frankly, I prefer Sowell. Nothing against Thomas and Will, or any of the other conservatives in the paper, but no one matches Sowell when it comes to cutting through the latest liberal skullduggery. He's not shrill, sanctimonious, or arrogant--far from it. His columns, essays, and books are archetypes of scholarly calm and seriousness. I've read several of his eye-opening books over the last four or five years, all of them five star efforts, so I headed straight for the library when I heard he had another tome coming out. And here it is, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," a book that lays waste to yet more liberal inanities. The title of the book, however, is a bit misleading as the essays contained within go far beyond an examination of race in America.

Two of the six essays in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" do directly discuss the seemingly endless chasm that exists between blacks and whites in the United States. The first chapter in the book, entitled appropriately enough "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," sees Sowell putting forward a convincing thesis, namely that the social pathologies currently plaguing many inner city African-Americans--a propensity to solve problems with violence, anti-intellectualism, promiscuity, and flamboyant rhetoric among them--are not traits unique to the black experience in America. These exact same traits appeared somewhere else first, namely among whites in certain locales in England who then carried these behaviors into the antebellum American South. Blacks then adopted these traits during the slave era and carried them across the country during their migrations north in the early twentieth century. As the second essay, "Black Education: Achievements, Myths, and Tragedies" makes abundantly clear, these traits began to decrease rapidly thanks to certain black schools and colleges before the introduction of LBJ's Great Society programs fused with liberal "caring" defined these pathologies as a black culture to be protected at all costs. Enter the race hustlers, who saw the benefit of keeping a majority of black Americans in poverty so as to justify their own positions as leaders.

The other essays turn away from the black/white dichotomy to examine Jews, Germans, and global slavery. In "Are the Jews Generic?" Sowell explains that the holocaust and anti-Semitic pogroms throughout the history of the West are part of a larger global phenomenon that has also happened to certain Chinese, Armenian, Indian, and Lebanese populations. He calls them middleman minorities, or groups of people who move into a region or country in order to act as go betweens connecting the means of production to consumers. Their emphasis on education, hard work, and clannishness has always provoked irrational hatred and jealousy from a less educated, less hard working, and less clannish society. In "Germans and History," the author contends that the effort to tar all Germans with the brush of National Socialism is a historical fallacy easily disproved in part by looking at German diasporas. "The Real History of Slavery" makes the claim that none other than western civilization, often labeled the great enabler of slavery by liberal and left-wing academics, not only eradicated bondage in the United States but across the globe as well. The book concludes with Sowell taking multiculturalism to task by condemning their tendency to examine the past through the lens of modern morality in "History versus Visions."

If I had to isolate one common theme present in all of the essays of this book, it's undoubtedly the idea that culture matters. Sowell is not a moral relativist, not someone who believes that all cultures are egalitarian merely because they exist in nature. As the essays in this book show, it's western civilization in all of its baroque beauty that affords the human race its best hope for the future. Western civilization's emphasis on hard work, civil rights and liberties, and education for those who want it will ultimately level many, but not all, differences between cultures. That's not to say that the West has not suffered its share of grievous problems. Sowell acknowledges the horrors of the past numerous times. What he does argue, if somewhat indirectly, is that part of what has made this philosophy work so well is its ability to recognize and repudiate great evils, even evils inherent inside itself. The essay on slavery is a case in point--no other culture ever attempted to rid itself, let alone the rest of the world, from the scurrilous curse of human bondage. Western culture also freed the world of National Socialism and (less effectively as of this date) the scourge of communism.

Like any other scholarly work, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" contains areas that are problematic. For instance, Sowell's use of dueling as evidence of the irrational propensity to violence in poor white southern culture fails to convince when one considers that all levels of society in Europe and America practiced this form of violence and, in the case of the former, did so for centuries. Moreover, I could easily see a leftist pulling out the "aha!" card after reading the chapter on middleman minorities. If violence directed against these groups arises from their position as connecting links between production and consumers in a capitalist society, a leftist could argue that that provides even more proof of the evils of capitalism. Obviously, this isn't the case since all forms of government have used middleman minorities, but I wish Sowell had underscored this point better. Nonetheless, the author receives another five star rating from this reader. I eagerly await his next collection of essays.

Thomas Sowell should be commended for the extensive research he has done. "Black Rednecks, White Liberals" and "History of Vision" had the most profound impact on me.

As a black child growing up, I was consistently criticized by other blacks for not behaving in what they felt was true black culture. Now I have further confirmation that those kids were truly misguided and such situations demonstrate the danger of people not being cognizant of history. It would be one thing if Thomas Sowell were just writing information without any empirical evidence, however, he lists all of his sources and there are many.

I believe leaders such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel need to read and acknowledge the truth that has been outlined in "History of Vision". Sowell explains perfectly how people are so addicted to their vision that they are willing to ignore hard facts or twist them to make their vision valid. This is a man more blacks should be listening too and not the demagogues aforementioned.

His essays are long and people who aren't into history may have a hard time getting through the chapters. However, it's still worth the read, and I plan to read Sowell's other books he's written.

The book contains several chapters which are actually rather independent articles, having almost no references to each other and can be read separately. They cover wide range of subjects such as: southern redneck culture accepted by some of today's blacks, and it's roots; reasons of hatred against and persecution of so-called middleman minorities, such as Jews, Armenians, Chinese in Asia, etc., history of slavery around the world, and how did it end; history of black education in US, and others. Each article is very balanced, gives a broad historical prospective, and good level of understanding of problems, and most of them are totally eye opening because of dispelling of well-entrenched myths. This is one of a small number of books which one should read if he wants to be a smarter person.