- Sowell, Thomas.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005.
ISBN 1-59403-086-3.
-
One of the most pernicious calumnies directed at black intellectuals
in the United States is that they are “not authentic”—that by
speaking standard English, assimilating into the predominant
culture, and seeing learning and hard work as the way to
get ahead, they have somehow abandoned their roots
in the ghetto culture. In the title essay in this collection,
Thomas Sowell demonstrates persuasively that this so-called
“black culture” owes its origins, in fact, not to anything blacks
brought with them from Africa or developed in times of slavery, but
rather to a white culture which immigrants to the American
South from marginal rural regions of Britain imported and perpetuated
long after it had died out in the mother country. Members of this
culture were called “rednecks” and “crackers” in Britain long before
they arrived in America, and they proceeded to install this dysfunctional
culture in much of the rural South. Blacks arriving from Africa, stripped
of their own culture, were immersed into this milieu, and predictably
absorbed the central values and characteristics of the white redneck
culture, right down to patterns of speech which can be traced back
to the Scotland, Wales, and Ulster of the 17th century. Interestingly,
free blacks in the North never adopted this culture, and were often
well integrated into the community until the massive northward
migration of redneck blacks (and whites) from the South spawned
racial prejudice against all blacks. While only 1/3 of U.S. whites
lived in the South, 90% of blacks did, and hence the redneck culture
which was strongly diluted as southern whites came to the northern
cities, was transplanted whole as blacks arrived in the north and
were concentrated in ghetto communities.
What makes this more than an anthropological and historical footnote
is, that as Sowell describes, the redneck culture does not work
very well—travellers in the areas of Britain it once dominated and
in the early American South described the gratuitous violence, indolence,
disdain for learning, and a host of other characteristics still manifest
in the ghetto culture today. This culture is alien to the blacks who it
mostly now afflicts, and is nothing to be proud of. Scotland, for example,
largely eradicated the redneck culture, and became known for learning
and enterprise; it is this example, Sowell suggests, that blacks could
profitably follow, rather than clinging to a bogus culture which was
in fact brought to the U.S. by those who enslaved their ancestors.
Although the title essay is the most controversial and will doubtless
generate the bulk of commentary, it is in fact only 62 pages in
this book of 372 pages. The other essays discuss the experience
of “middleman minorities” such as the Jews, Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire, Lebanese in Africa, overseas Chinese, etc.; the
actual global history of slavery, as a phenomenon in which people of
all races, continents, and cultures have been both slaves and slaveowners;
the history of ethnic German communities around the globe and
whether the Nazi era was rooted in the German culture or an
aberration; and forgotten success stories in black education
in the century prior to the civil rights struggles of the mid 20th
century. The book concludes with a chapter on how contemporary
“visions” and agendas can warp the perception of history, discarding
facts which don't fit and obscuring lessons from the past which
can be vital in deciding what works and what doesn't in the real
world. As with much of Sowell's work, there are extensive end
notes (more than 60 pages, with 289 notes on the title essay
alone) which contain substantial “meat” along with source
citations; they're well worth reading over after the essays.
July 2005 