Black Rednecks and White Liberals
reviewed by Dutch Martin
29 September 2005
Black Rednecks and White Liberals may be Thomas Sowell’s best work to date on contemporary racial, cultural and ethnic studies.[/i]
As a scholar and public intellectual, Thomas Sowell has never been afraid to tell it like it is. His respect for logic, objective analysis, and a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the world’s many cultures and ethnic groups puts him in a class all by himself. When it comes to pure scholarship and critical thinking, Sowell is a gourmet chef in an industry infested with short-order cooks.
In his new book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (Encounter Books, 2005), Sowell takes a virtual sledgehammer to the very foundation of the leftist orthodoxy. I could literally hear that foundation cracking and crumbling with each turn of the page. Consisting of six hard-hitting, factually grounded essays, 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.
Sowell begins by tracing the origins of black ghetto culture all the way back to the British Isles from which white American Southerners immigrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These particular immigrants, from the socially turbulent regions of the northern borderlands of England and the highlands of Scotland, brought with them a set of pre-existing attitudes, values and behavioral patterns which, as Sowell points out, had nothing to do with the already existing American institution of slavery. These pre-existing attitudes formed the basis of a “redneck” or “cracker” culture, a 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.” This was 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 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 condescending attitude toward black pathology also explains why most liberal academics and education “experts” are quick to demand more money to fix failing public schools, yet turn a blind eye to the manifold examples of inner-city private and charter schools across the country that have a track record of successfully educating poor minority schoolchildren. Sowell points this out in his essay on black education.
In “The Real History of Slavery,” Sowell blows the lid off of the common practice among liberals and black civil rights “leaders” of viewing the problems of today’s ghetto blacks as “a legacy of slavery.” More importantly, he provides a thorough understanding of an institution, as horrible as it was, that had existed in virtually every inhabited part of the world centuries before the emergence of Western civilization. For one thing, slavery was never really about race; it was about the powerful taking advantage of the powerless. In fact, racism was the result -- not the cause -- of slavery in America. Furthermore, slavery was much more than merely an abstract moral issue. The social and political realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made slavery in America -- and the task of ending it, which ultimately culminated into the American Civil War -- much more complicated than those prone to making moral judgments today assume it should have been. Therefore, for our Founding Fathers, simply ending slavery via, say, constitutional decree was not only unfeasible, but virtually impossible given the reality of their era. As the author poignantly puts it:
We cannot assume twenty-first-century options, or even present-day knowledge, when judging decisions made in the nineteenth century. Nor can we assume that we have superior knowledge of the social realities of an earlier era that we never lived through, compared to the first-hand knowledge of those who confronted those realities daily and inescapably.
The rest of the essays in the book are so comprehensive and thought-provoking (which is typical Thomas Sowell), that it would take far more space to discuss them than allowable for an 800-word book review. Suffice it to say that Black Rednecks and White Liberals just might be Thomas Sowell’s best work to date on contemporary racial, cultural and ethnic studies.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals is available on Amazon.com.
Dutch Martin is a columnist for The Right Report and a member of Project 21, an African-American leadership network based in Washington, D.C.
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