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 Black
Rednecks and White Liberals
A review of the book by Thomas Sowell…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 12/7/05
No topic
of public conversation in America is more riddled with hypocrisy
and dishonesty than is race. Nearly every day we find examples
of this corruption. Just recently, ex-Secretary of Education
William Bennett was attacked for remarks taken out of context
and paraded as “racist” insensitivity. His crime?
Indirectly calling attention to the indisputable fact that
blacks commit crimes at a rate far beyond their proportion
of the population. Or consider the shameful charges of racism
leveled at the Bush administration by the usual race-industry
suspects after Hurricane Katrina. Time after time, the facts
and truth about race in America are sacrificed to the agenda
of race-mongers and their guilty white-liberal enablers.
The cause of this sorry state of affairs is the transformation
of a once-noble Civil Rights movement into the Civil Rights Industry,
a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and the Social
Welfare Plantation. This collection of academics, activists,
pundits, bureaucrats, lupine lawyers, and all-around busybodies
has reduced the discussion of race in America to a crude melodrama
in which the prime mover is white racism, and black people are
kept helpless victims in chronic need of rescue by big-hearted
liberals and race-tribunes like Jesse Jackson. The economic and
political gains made by black people are ignored, while the true
sources of the problems and dysfunctions afflicting many black
communities are obscured.
Thomas Sowell has
long been an exception to this mendacious received wisdom.
A senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and
author of numerous books on economics, ethnicity, and immigration,
Sowell consistently thinks beyond the narrow confines of the
received wisdom, relying rather on historical evidence, clear
thinking, and sheer common sense to produce analyses and ideas
imminently more useful and closer to the truth than are the stale
bromides and clichés of most academics and pundits. The
current collection of essays exemplifies these qualities on a
number of topics, including black underclass culture, black education,
Jewish and German ethnic identities, slavery, and the role and
importance of history in evaluating utopian visions. All are
unified by Sowell’s concern to look beyond the fashionable
myths and comforting illusions of those he has elsewhere called
the “anointed,” the self-selected caretakers of unexamined
ideas, narrow orthodoxy, and comforting nostrums.
The title essay, “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” is
exemplary in its willingness to examine the actual evidence and
follow it beyond the jealously guarded boundaries of conventional
wisdom. Sowell’s topic is the persistent black cultural
dysfunctions––sexual irresponsibility, interpersonal
violence, anti-intellectualism, substandard speech, hypersensitivity
about being “disrespected,” and feckless attitudes
towards work––that are either blamed on white racism
and the legacy of slavery, or transformed into virtues reflecting
a black “identity” whose roots supposedly go back
to Africa. Sowell instead suggests that many of these attitudes,
shared with poor-white “rednecks” or “crackers,” reflect “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.”
Sowell buttresses
his argument with historical evidence describing the habits
and character of the “borderlands” from
which white Southerners emigrated. These “fringe areas”––the “no-man’s
land” between Scotland and England, the Scottish highlands,
and Ulster County, Ireland––were “turbulent,
if not lawless regions, where none of the contending forces was
able to establish full control and create a stable order.” In
this world of lawlessness and constant physical danger, living
for the moment prevailed, values such as industriousness and
entrepreneurship seemed fruitless, long-range planning and prudence
made little sense, and education and culture even less: “Manliness
and the forceful projection of that manliness to others––an
advertising of one’s willingness to fight and even to put
one’s life on the line––were at least plausible
means of gaining whatever measure of security was possible in
a lawless region and a violent time.” Anyone familiar with
underclass black culture and poor Southern will recognize the
persistence of these attitudes centuries later.
For these cultural
habits went along with the blacks who migrated from the South
to northern ghettos. From speech patterns and
the neglect and disdain for education, to the penchant for personal
violence and feckless living, these habits, obviously altered
by subsequent experience in different environments, nonetheless
defined the “black culture” many today idealize as
remnants of an African cultural identity and hence the only authentic “blackness.” Sowell’s
critical point, however, is that the antinomian hedonism of the
sixties––coupled with the growth of a paternalistic
welfare state that eroded notions of personal responsibility
and rewarded irresponsible behavior–– has worsened
the effects of these dysfunctions and “allowed borrowed
and counterproductive cultural traits to continue to flourish
among those blacks who had not yet moved beyond that culture,
thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive,
dangerous, and self-destructive sub-culture in many urban ghettos.”
Moreover, as Sowell
points out, this mainly white idealization of dysfunctional
cultural habits––best exemplified
by Norman Mailer’s ridiculous racist essay “The White
Negro”–– came at the worst possible time. The
political, social, and economic improvement of black American
life, which had in fact begun long before the civil rights movement
and which should have been accelerated by the new opportunities
opened up by those legal and political gains, began to regress
for a significant number of black people. And the race-industry’s
enshrinement of white racism as the most important cause of those
dysfunctional and destructive behaviors has provided an alibi
for failure that insidiously perpetuates the notion of black
people’s inability to achieve. The black underclass thus
remains a caste of permanent passive victims locked into inferiority
even as their cultural depredations are transformed into lucrative
pop-cultural commodities.
Sowell’s analysis, of course, no matter how well supported
by historical evidence, will be rejected as “blaming the
victim” by the race industry, particularly since it cuts
against the grain of the orthodoxy repeated by the schools, popular
culture, and media, all of whom obsess over white racism and
the “legacy of slavery” as the fons et origo of contemporary
black problems. In this regard, Sowell’s essay “The
Real History of Slavery” is particularly illuminating.
As Sowell points out, given how widespread and persistent slavery
has been historically, to think of it solely in racial terms
is intellectually parochial. And when one considers that Islamic
societies enslaved more black Africans than did Europeans, to
focus only on European enslavement of Africans is to abandon
the search for historical truth in order “to score ideological
points against American society or Western civilization, or to
induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population
today.”
Equally significant,
Sowell argues that the existence of slavery is not as important
or interesting as the abolition of slavery,
a movement that arose only in the West, even as other civilizations
continued (and continue today, in some Islamic countries) to
practice slavery and see it as an acceptable institution. The
first heroes in the fight to end slavery were the British, those
wicked imperialists and colonialists of politically correct history,
who used their navy to harass and restrict the global slave trade,
and who in the 19th century spent the equivalent of 5% of their
annual economic output to compensate slave-owners for the confiscation
of their property. And this antipathy to slavery is wholly a
Western idea: “No non-Western nation or civilization,” Sowell
writes, “shared this animosity toward slavery that began
to develop in the Western world in the late eighteenth century,
reached it peak in the nineteenth century, and continued to fuel
the anti-slavery efforts” made necessary by the persistence
of slavery in Africa and the Middle East.
In this larger context
of global slavery, as Sowell shows, the American version was
not particularly brutal compared to how
horribly slaves were treated in other parts of the world. Those
who obsess over the evils of slavery, then, should be talking
about Islamic slavery if their real concern is to document the
brutality and inhumanity of bondage. But of course, the goal
isn’t to reinforce a moral principle but to leverage some
political advantage out of white guilt. Why else would so many
people not know that Africans were sold to Europeans by other
Africans, or that Islamic slavers were plying their brutal trade
long after a bloody civil war ended slavery in the United States?
On numerous other issues such as the treatment of slaves, the
troubled ambivalence of many Southern slaveholders like George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or John Randolph, and the myth
of the “legacy of slavery,” Sowell bypasses the easy
moral smugness of those who selectively condemn the sins of the
past from the comfort of the present, and instead gets closer
to the complexity and contradictions with which those in the
past grappled and which the true historian today should attempt
to elucidate and understand.
The other essays in
Sowell’s collection display this same
respect for historical evidence, no matter how much it troubles
the political pieties or orthodoxies of the present. His essay
on “Black Education,” with its history of Washington
D.C.’s Dunbar High School, for decades a factory of black
excellence and achievement, is a sobering reminder of how grievously
costly to black people has been the pedagogical fads and political
snake-oil like diversity that have driven out the old-fashioned
virtues of hard work and personal accountability, the virtues
that helped those earlier blacks achieve in the teeth of discrimination
and scanty opportunity.
Anyone interested in fresh insights into race and achievement
in America, as well as the proper uses of history for elucidating
the present, should read Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Sowell
does what any genuine intellectual should do: respect the evidence
and tell the truth no matter whose ox is gored. -one-
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
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Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
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