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Black Rednecks and White Liberals Paperback – April 24, 2006
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- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEncounter Books
- Publication dateApril 24, 2006
- Dimensions6.02 x 1 x 8.97 inches
- ISBN-101594031436
- ISBN-13978-1594031434
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With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.Highlighted by 1,373 Kindle readers
When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.Highlighted by 1,353 Kindle readers
Nowhere was the effect of the white liberalism of the 1960s on the social evolution of black culture more devastating than in the disintegration of the black family.TheHighlighted by 1,315 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"These people are creating a terrible problem in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or other, they absolutely refuse to accommodate themselves to any kind of decent, civilized life."
This was said in 1956 in Indianapolis, not about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South. Nor was Indianapolis unique in this respect. A 1951 survey in Detroit found that white Southerners living there were considered “undesirable” by 21 percent of those surveyed, compared with 13 percent who ranked blacks the same way. In the late 1940s, a Chicago employer said frankly, “I told the guard at the plant gate to tell the hillbillies that there were no openings.” When poor whites from the South moved into Northern cities to work in war plants during the Second World War, “occasionally a white southerner would find that a flat or furnished room had ‘just been rented’ when the landlord heard his southern accent.”
More is involved here than a mere parallel between blacks and Southern whites. What is involved is a common subculture that goes back for centuries, which has encompassed everything from ways of talking to attitudes toward education, violence and sex—and which originated not in the South, but in those parts of the British Isles from which white Southerners came. That culture long ago died out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American South. Then it largely died out among both white and black Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettoes.
It is not uncommon for a culture to survive longer where it is transplanted and to retain characteristics lost in its place of origin. The French spoken in Quebec and the Spanish spoken in Mexico contain words and phrases that have long since become archaic in France and Spain. Regional German dialects persisted among Germans living in the United States after those dialects had begun to die out in Germany itself. A scholar specializing in the history of the South has likewise noted among white Southerners “archaic word forms,” while another scholar has pointed out the continued use in that region of “terms that were familiar at the time of the first Queen Elizabeth.” The card game whist is today played almost exclusively by blacks, especially low-income blacks, though in the eighteenth century it was played by the British upper classes, and has since then evolved into bridge. The history of the evolution of this game is indicative of a much broader pattern of cultural evolution in much more weighty things.
Southern whites not only spoke the English language in very different ways from whites in other regions, but their churches, their roads, their homes, their music, their education, their food and their sex lives were all sharply different from those of other whites. The history of this “redneck” or “cracker” culture is more than a curiosity. It has contemporary significance because of its influence on the economic and social evolution of vast numbers of people—millions of blacks and whites—and its continuing influence on the lives and deaths of a residual population in America’s black ghettos that has still not completely escaped from that culture.
From early in American history, foreign visitors and domestic travelers alike were struck by cultural contrasts between the white population of the South and that of the rest of the country in general—and of New England in particular. In the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted white Southerners with white Northerners in his classic Democracy in America, and Frederick Law Olmsted did the same later in his books about his travels through the antebellum South, notably Cotton Kingdom. De Tocqueville set a pattern when he concluded that “almost all the differences which may be noticed between the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern states have originated in slavery.” Olmsted likewise attributed the differences between white Southerners and white Northerners to the existence of slavery in the South. So did widely read antebellum Southern writer Hinton Helper, who declared that “slavery, and nothing but slavery, has retarded the progress and prosperity of our portion of the Union.”
Just as they explained regional differences between whites by way of slavery, so many others in a later era would explain differences between blacks and whites nationwide by way of slavery. Plausible as these explanations might seem in both cases, they will not stand up under a closer scrutiny of history.
It is perhaps understandable that the great, overwhelming moral curse of slavery has presented a tempting causal explanation of the peculiar subculture of Southern whites, as well as that of blacks. Yet this same subculture had existed among Southern whites and their ancestors in those parts of the British Isles from which they came, long before they had ever seen a black slave. The nature of this subculture, among people who were called “rednecks” and “crackers” in Britain before they ever saw America, needs to be explored before we turn to the question of its current status among ghetto blacks and how developments in the larger society have affected its evolution.
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- Publisher : Encounter Books (April 24, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1594031436
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594031434
- Item Weight : 12.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.02 x 1 x 8.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #29 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- #35 in Discrimination & Racism
- #37 in Ethnic Studies (Books)
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[material in brackets are comments by Raymond R. White]
People from the borderlands of Britain, mostly from the areas between northern England and southern Scotland, to the Colonies and the United States brought their cultures with them. They came most numerously to the southern colonies and states. See Albion’s Seed by Fischer. Malcolm Gladwell cites a study of the ease with which southerners tend to take offense.
There had been only clan law in the borderlands for hundreds of years. If your clan did not react violently to incursions by other clans, you were likely to be dispossessed. Revenge raids & killings were more frequent there. Also highland Scotland and around Ulster. Turbulent areas. During the 1700’s lowland Scotland advanced rather spectacularly, so those of lower culture came to America earlier. Irish immigration was mostly from northern Ireland where fighting was common. Later Irish immigration came from southern Ireland in the middle of the 1800’s.
Sowell cites many visitors to the US south making remarks that whites there, especially in rural areas, had little use for education, avoided regular work, and were likely to take offense & engage in violence for that reason. Pride, Honor. Their sexual mores were quite loose as well (fitting uncertain conditions). drunkenness, lack of self-restraint.
Poverty: lack of entrepreneurship, lack of industriousness.
Much southern industry was performed by northerners or immigrants.
Butter & cheese production were very low while cattle were abundant.
Natural resources often went unexploited.
Illiteracy of 20% in 1850 vs 1% in New England.
Sexual offenses severely punished in New England, much less so in the south and in areas from which southerners came.
The speech patterns are traceable to Britain’s lawless areas.
dis dat ain’t y’awl yaller ax for ask bile for boil acrost for across
do for door I be for I am
No African words are found in black speech:
Even in colonial times most African Americans had been born here.
A majority of southern whites have moved beyond the negative subculture and so have ~2/3 of African Americans. Growth of the welfare state and ineffectiveness of policing & courts have allowed redneck African American culture to persist.
Negative cultural values came from British immigrants from Britain’s borderlands. These white people had no history of recent slavery. The American black population picked up the negative values from the whites around them.
Free Blacks tended to move north within the south and within the US as a whole. New England influenced education produced many highly productive American Blacks.
While free Blacks were more often mulatto (37% vs 8% of slaves), their documented cultural advantages had more to do with their successes than did their genes.
Laws restricting free Blacks in the north tended to be relaxed as cultural behavior improved. They became more oppressive as larger numbers of previously enslaved Blacks moved north.
Observers and objective statistics bear out the general differences in white cultures in the South vs the northern areas.
The conformity of opinion about slavery enforced in the South drove out dissenting people and habits of entertaining alternative views.
White liberals have vociferously defended the bad cultural practices of Black rednecks as authentic “Black culture”, ignorant or pretending to be ignorant of where it came from. [this is a partisan political strategy].
Pretense that crime is not much higher in urban Black communities, ineffective policing, welfare support all help the maintain redneck cultural values.
Glorification of gangsta rap, denial of attitudes vs. other minorities,
White liberals seem unconcerned about educational and skill gains that could be made by cultural changes among Black rednecks. They are intent upon using the situation of Black Americans to attack [western] civilization.
Crediting slavery with the poor cultural attitudes of southern whites and Blacks is untenable when alternative hypotheses are heard. Caribbean Blacks went through slavery without becoming rednecks and show very different cultural attributes.
Wherever the redneck cultural values & behaviors came from, changing them will do far more for African Americans than will calling them authentically Black culture.
Are Jews Generic?
The Real history of Slavery
Slavery was a world-wide and ancient practice, most often of people of the same or closely related ethnicities. Today (circa 2000) slavery exists in Mauritania, Sudan, parts of Nigeria and Benin [also in the Uhygir region ruled by China 2021].
[When European economic advance & social organization empowered them] Europeans brought slaves out of Africa, creating distinct racial differences between slaves and slave-owners. Racism grew out of slavery rather than the reverse. Especially true in southern US, where moral pressure against slavery called forth justifications based on race.
Has sense of grievance ever improved a people’s progress?
The struggle against world slavery took about a century. The American Civil War was a small and atypical part of that struggle.
Consolidation of European and Asian polities into nations reduced local slave-raiding. Slaving persisted in the Balkans and in other areas of smaller, weaker polities. Africa then became the source of slaves for Europeans.
Very late in its development only Western Civilization produced a revulsion to the institution of slavery. No other people of the world did this or joined in.
While the day of emancipation in Brazil was a day of delirious celebration, the 1855 proclamation in the Ottoman Empire caused revolt that was quelled by repeal until 1860 when no enforcement was attempted.
Roots author Alex Haley says he tried to create a myth to live by.
At the peak of the slave trade, Africans kept more slaves for themselves than they sold to Europeans.
Except for the Portuguese, Europeans did not participate in the actual slave raids, so were insulated from the brutality of them .
Britain maintained warships off the Atlantic coast of Africa and off of East Africa to deter slave trading from the time of the Napoleonic wars to … .
Within the Empire, slave owners were compensated for freeing their slaves.
By 1860 the Atlantic slave trade was pretty much ended, but not the East African trade into Arab lands.
Governor Gordon of the Sudan (working for Egypt under Britain earlier worked to abolish slavery) died in 1885 as the Mahdi defeated him to re-institute the slave trade, which then lasted at least until Kitchener’s arrival in 1898.
Most women & girls died as did most castrated males in crossing the Sahara into Arab slavery.
Plenty of people in the West defended slavery, while no defense was needed in the rest of the world.
1705 Most of the Quaker leaders of Philadelphia owned slaves.
1756 only 10% of leaders did.
1758 Quakers of Philadelphia banned slave ownership by members.
Most slave boats escaped detection in the Red Sea and East Africa.
Cuba 1886 (gradually from 1880).
All of the Western hemisphere by 1888.
Earlier all of Western Europe [Britain 1833] and then offshoot nations. European imperialism at its height brought about the end of slavery.
Pirates raided the Philippines for slaves until the US took over in 1898.
French Senegal slavery going just fine to 1904.
Portuguese Guinea did not end slavery until ~1910.
Mauritania 1981.
Most of the African slaves imported into the Western hemisphere wound up on plantations. It has been argued that plantation slavery was more brutal than servant-slavery, which was certainly true within say the United States.
However:
Accounts of miseries and mortality of slavery in most of the world are rare, as no anti-slavery movements developed to record them.
Thomas Jefferson seconded a motion in the Virginia House of Burgesses to allow slave owners to free their slaves (1769). It was defeated.
Thomas Jefferson’s criticism of George III for overriding colonial Virginia’s attempt to outlaw slavery was removed from the draft of the Declaration of Independence by southern pressure.
Jefferson drafted a Virginia state constitution that prohibited any future importation of slaves 1776 (defeated).
1783 Jefferson tried to add to the Virginia constitution a proposal for gradual emancipation of slaves (defeated).
1784 Jefferson proposed that all western territories make slavery illegal.
This would have included Mississippi & Alabama. Defeated by one vote.
Jefferson inherited slaves as part of a mortgaged estate. He was constrained to maintain the property.
1787 Congress declared for no slavery in the northern territories (Northwest Ordinance).
1832 Virginia legislature voted 58 to 73 to abolish slavery.
1790 35,000 free Africans in the south. Nearly 140,000 by 1810.
An attempt by colonial Georgia to outlaw slavery was overruled by London; likewise a Pennsylvania tax on slaves.
Washington freed his slaves by leaving some in the north and by his will.
There was a much smaller number of Africans in Mohammedan countries than in the Western Hemisphere. Marriage and sex were suppressed among the slaves and childhood mortality was extremely high. Slave reproduction was repressed. [Population samples of DNA will confirm this.]
The influence imposed on most countries with slaves came from outside, decisions imposed by people who did not have to live with the consequences of freeing slaves.
The argument that any wealth and human capital of descendants of slave owners was produced by slaves evades evidence that
Where slavery was more predominant, people are less rich & less skilled.
Brazil imported several times the number of slaves that the US did, without producing higher culture or wealth.
Much slavery was simply to show off wealth & power, not to produce them.
Attitudes towards work previously done by slaves weakened work ethics and personal ambitions.
Creation of disdain for all work.
The Western moral dislike of slavery is used against the West, but not other cultures. No reparations of other cultures are asked or expected. It occurs to no one that the more hierarchical cultures of the world own moral guilt for past slavery.
“It was the rise of modern free societies and their accompanying ideologies the West which made slavery stand out in stark contrast, and it was the emergence of a general questioning of institutions and beliefs in the eighteenth century – also in the West – that brought slavery into question.”
[Per capita GDP had risen by 2 to 3 times from 1000 AD to 1700 in Britain and Western Europe, while rising only 4% in the rest of the world.
per capita GDP
Year World US W Europe UK
1000 450 400 425 400
1500 566 400 790 714
1600 596 400 907 974
1700 616 527 1032 1250
1820 667 1257 1243 1706
The innovations leading to these increases in per capita GDP resulted from
cultures that questioned & tested conclusions/ways of doing things more rigorously than had previous generations.]
Black Education: Achievements, Myths, and Tragedies
Dogma of the ed elite: you can’t expect children who are not middle class to do well on standardized tests. The tests are culturally biased and do not predict future academic or life success. Except that many schools have produced high scores from low-income, highly segregated schools.
and high scores are predictive of academic & life success.
Schools that have succeeded include private, public, secular, and religious.
Currently and back into the 1800’s.
The M-Street or Dunbar (High) School 1870’s to 1955. all black. DC
1892-3: parents were 51 laborers, 25 messengers, 12 janitors, &
1 doctor. Many low level federal employees: clerks & messengers.
Not middle class.
More of mixed blood? Not by the colors showing in class pictures.
Less funding than the other 3 DC high schools. Outscored 2 of them.
Less tardiness & absenteeism than the other 3.
No entry test, not selective.
Some self-selection by parents serious about education.
High quality principals and teachers as less discriminatory pay and few jobs for highly qualified blacks.
Reputation such that some selective colleges did not require entry tests for Dunbar grads.
1970’s study showed more black PH.D.s from Dunbar than from any other US high school.
IQs averaged 111 in 1939 & 1950.
Educational dogma is that the school does not matter—when in fact it does.
Brown vs. Board of Education resulted in Dunbar being made a neighborhood school. The neighborhood was mostly redneck blacks who, in too large a proportion, were uncontrollable. Teachers used to stay many years but then began to retire asap. Previously Dunbar had drawn from all the black population in DC. No one at all said or did anything to preserve the quality school that had been operating for 85 years.
Fewer Dunbar grads went to college in 1993 than 60 years before.
Edward Brooke was a Dunbar grad.
Other exceptional schools: St. Augustine in New Orleans, Houston, PS91 of Brooklyn (the only one in its district to score at or above national norms in reading.
Harlem public schools were comparable to those of white working class people on the lower east side in the 1940’s.
In the past parental involvement was absent and not essential. Now parents are expected to teach by covering homework.
Educational dogmas trump documented successful results: Ingleside, CA, Houston TX, Garfield High (Jaime Escalante—driven out). While Esalante worked one fourth of the nation’s Hispanic students to pass AP Calculus came from Garfield. State & Federal bureaucrats do not pay the prices.
Portland Ark. violates ed dogmas: uses Directed Instruction (called “teaching”). This is shown to be especially effective with at risk students, instead of “facilitating”. They put reading first.
No single formula is the answer. KIPP follows this idea, keeping effective teachers and letting others go. The secret ingredient is WORK.
Ethnically segregated schools, with lower class (poor) students have been successful everywhere.
Diversity is not a requirement [useful for working with different kinds of people]
Afrocentricity does not help and is historically nonsense.
More blacks usually gets the school lower scores.
Most free blacks could read 1850.
Black English or Ebonics is northern English-southern Scottish from before the Scottish Enightenment.
Lower class whites in GB still show many of the negative attitudes of rednecks.
Black education in US started with white teachers as too few blacks were educated enough to teach or administer.
As black colleges replaced white admin & teachers with blacks their performance deteriorated. Race over merit had too much influence.
Self-interest over zeal for improving students.
W.E.B. Du Bois emphasized educating the talented tenth; Booker T. Washington emphasized self-improvement for all.
Black Studies have been warped by low quality hires, too many at once.
Affirmative Action places black students among those who are better prepared for work at the particular college. [See Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath) p63-98 data showing the top of any class (major) in top or mediocre colleges go on to perform in their area, while the rest of those in the major do not. This suggests that affirmative action is very bad for careers].
Gap in years of schooling of males 5.4 black, 8.7 for whites 1940 fell to less than 2 years by 1960.
1940 87% of blacks below poverty line
1960 47%
1970 30%
1980 29%
Faster progress before civil rights laws and welfare increases.
Successful schools are ignored by educators, politicians, community activists, and intellectuals. There is no political or financial advantage to emulating successful black schools [so bad public schools remain the most significant form of systemic racism that we have. ]
In the first place, Thomas Sowell goes into depth on the rednecks "aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery". He provides vivid examples of how the south's lack of success, whether academically, financially, or socially, can be blamed not on race or slavery but rather on a common subculture that affected both whites and blacks. Sowell exposes us to the fact that "as late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. These differences in mental ability cannot be attributed to genetic factors or racial discrimination because they do not explain how blacks from the north scored better than whites from the south, further proving that some cultures can be counterproductive.
Despite Thomas Sowell's excellent work, I had to make sure that his sources were credible and that there weren't any hidden assumptions or common fallacies. Thomas Sowell sites work from highly accomplished historians, sociologists, and social workers on the top of their field. For example, he cites work from Forest McDonald, an exceptional American Historian, who even got the highest federal government award in humanities. With sources like these, it would be strenuous too, even at the least, not consider the expressed arguments. I do believe Thomas Sowell gives an oversimplified explanation of the way that the groups of redneck migrants affected culture. He provides specific information on the differences in culture as well as the way the rednecks reacted differently towards social issues, but he doesn’t show us how all of this had a profound impact on the south, other than the quotations of the northern disapproval towards the south and the economy not to mention societal problems they had. I would have enjoyed this chapter more if it had a detailed illustration of how exactly the redneck culture impacted the south, not just an explanation of the ways that they differed. He showed us the problems without an explanation of how they came to be, always attributing the problems to the redneck culture. I'm not saying that he can't be right, but all I am saying is that I would've liked more detail.
Consequently, Thomas Sowell has shown me how culture can have a dramatic impact on groups of people. He even led me to reevaluate my life as well as my cultural customs and see which habits have been unfavorable to my family and which ones have been beneficial. His credible sources and relevant information on the redneck culture have led me to agree with his premise. I disagree with the fact that the redneck community had all to do with the lack of the souths prosperity, nonetheless, I do agree that it had a negative impact, as the statistics Sowell provided us with gave remarkable insights into the negative results the redneck culture had on both whites and blacks in the south. The ultimate purpose of his work on the redneck culture was to provide us with a historical foundation to understand the problems in the black community today--especially, if not only, to understand the problems in the ghettos. I would certainly recommend this work because it has historical teachings that go beyond the historical period being discussed; these teachings can be applied to our lives now and can help to illuminate, not to mention, expand our understanding of the problems America is facing today.
In brief, Thomas Sowell's work on the redneck culture has been a product of extensive research. Highly qualified sources, properly structured essays, and his elucidating life teachings were a delight to read. Connecting my previous knowledge on the formation of cultures, and now reading this book, I can conclude that culture is the collective accumulation of actions that led our ancestors to success in their specific environments, and that is specifically the reason why it can be counterproductive when groups of people migrate to locations with customs and habits that are no longer effective, if not, counterproductive in their new location.
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Central to this situation is slavery, which as Mr. Sowell explains with clarity is not just a trade conducted by white people, nor is one just affecting the United States. The truth is that slavery has been an integral part of human history, one involving all peoples of the world, indeed it was that combination of Christian roots and the Enlightenment that led white people to try to bring this trade to an end across the world during the 19th Century. Suppression of this fact has been used to imply that slavery in the United States was in some way more heinous that anywhere else, and because of this white people are the worst villains of history.
In a broad sweep this book does not limit itself to this aspect, but goes onto to issue correctives to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior. Noting as he does so that before the social programmes of the early 1960's began to undermine the progress black people had made in the US, there was evidence that when the effort was put in by good teaching, the intellectual gap to the average white in similar circumstance was closed.
If I had any influence I would make this book compulsory reading for all students and politicians, maybe that would counter the current drift away from the dreams of Martin Luther King and more towards the implementation of segregated barriers. Humanity is regressing.
It's not a book for everyone, because of its heavily detailed academic writing style, but then again how many casual readers pick up a book about real history of slavery and the culture of Jews and Black's in America
All, what are now considered liberals, should read this and be red pilled, but of course they won't.
From the outset, Sowell seems to go all out to denigrate black people in what seems to be an effort to portray blacks as being responsible for their own miss fortunes through poor choices and attitude.
In essence, he blames black poverty on “ghetto culture”, dismissing the notion and impact of systemic racism that exists throughout many institutions in the US, particularly the criminal justice system which discriminates against blacks. Also, there’s no mention of the discriminatory practice of “redlining”, which is a practice of restricting financial and other essential services to residents of a particular area based on their race or ethnicity (predominantly blacks). There’s also no mention of voter suppression, which is a strategy still in effect today and is intended to restrict the black vote.
Other observations are as follows:
ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
Thomas’s trivialisation of the Atlantic Slave Trade is probably the most disturbing aspect of the book. He repeats the argument that slavery has been around for many centuries and was practiced by all cultures, including blacks. Whilst we know that this is true, there is nothing that compares to the industrial scale of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Thomas also downplays the brutality of slavery suggesting that white slaves and the seaman transporting involved in the transportation of black slaves suffered equally. If Sowell were to trivialise the Holocaust in the same way that he does the Atlantic Slave Trade, he’d quite rightly be castigated for this. Strangely, Sowell denies that racism was inherent to the Atlantic Slave Trade.
He also very much downplays the substantial contribution the Atlantic Slave Trade made to the British economy. London's importance as a world city today, with a thriving financial service sector, owes its success largely to profits made from the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Whilst Britain spearheaded the abolition of slavery, this wasn’t purely for altruistic reasons.
GERMANS
Whilst Sowell lavishes praise on Germans, he omits any mention of the part the German Empire played in the ideology of Scientific Racism, particularly in Africa. This included in the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people that took place in Namibia in the early part of the 20th century. This was a campaign of ethnic extermination.
Much of the book seems to be almost an apology to white people for them unfairly being seen (by some) to have a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist policies. This phenomenon has been given the name "White Guilt" and has been around since the 1960's.



