Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Tags:  non-fiction,

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a collection of six essays by American economist and social philosopher Thomas Sowell. Sowell is a traditional conservative in that he views moral character, cultural values, and individual habits as the primary determinants of one’s fate in society. He is sharply critical of the liberal notion that group identity and inter-group social dynamics primarily determine one’s fate.

Each of the six essays refutes, with varying success, the traditional liberal interpretations of history. Whether you agree with Sowell or not, he will make you think about events and issues that are generally not even addressed in current history and cultural studies courses. Though at times he seems to cherry pick facts to support his preferred interpretations, he nevertheless forces readers to confront historical facts that are difficult to reconcile with the current canonical liberal interpretation of history.

The opening essay, which has the same title as the book, describes the culture of laziness, violence, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, contempt for education and neglect of property imported from northern England and Scotland to the southern colonies in the eighteenth century. Sowell calls this the Cracker or Redneck culture, and notes that it prevailed in much of northern England and Scotland before the enlightenment transformed those areas in the late eighteenth century. Immigrants from those areas settled in the American south and essentially transplanted the Cracker culture to new soil.

Sowell presents a number of first-hand visitor accounts from Alexis de Tocqueville, Frederick Law Olmstead and others attesting to the stark cultural differences between the industrious and educated North and the backwards, languishing Southern states of the early US. He goes on to argue that current ghetto culture mirrors the old redneck culture, even down to the level of a touchy, brittle pride that is easily offended, provoking violent response.

This is where Sowell lays out some of his chief complaints against white liberals and their “support” for black culture. First of all, he notes, ghetto culture is not black culture. It may be an over-represented subculture, amplified by television, film and music, but it is not representative of black culture as a whole in the US.

Second, ghetto culture does not represent African heritage. It descends directly from the redneck heritage of the early South. It’s the remnants of an older, unfortunate white culture whose lawlessness the English eventually stamped out in their own country centuries ago.

Third–and this is Sowell’s biggest complaint–white liberals who claim to support equality and justice for American blacks often describe ghetto culture as unique to and essential to black identity. It is neither. Many progressive liberals claim that a refusal to honor this culture amounts to racism, an inherent rejection of essential blackness. Sowell finds this infuriating. In celebrating a culture (in fact, a small subculture) of violence, promiscuity and neglect, white liberals are in fact cheering blacks on to their own destruction.

The book’s second essay, Are Jews Generic?, examines a pattern of racism that appears throughout many societies around the world. In Europe and US, Jews have often been reviled as greedy money lenders or merchants who accumulate wealth while the broader majority population struggles. Sowell points out Chinese expatriot communities in Southeast Asia and Lebanese traders in West Africa have followed the same economic path as Jews in the West and have faced the same violent prejudices.

Sowell calls these groups the “middleman minority.” As a minority arriving a new land with no money and no rights, each group initially worked as peddlars, buying and selling whatever they could carry, because that was the business that required the least capital to start. In the course of traveling and interacting with people throughout the region, these groups began to understand what was needed where within a society, and were able to move goods from one region to another. They evolved into merchants. Often, as the only people with cash on hand, they lent money as well.

Each of these middleman minority cultures valued thrift, hard work, education and family ties, often at levels far above those of the majority culture. If they hadn’t valued these things, they would not have succeeded in a business that demanded constant initiative and hustle and a strong network of agents to gather information and to secure and move goods.

In all regions where these middleman minorities have arisen, they have been deeply resented. In times of populist patriotic sentiment, they have been targets of mob violence and mass deportation. Sowell shwredly notes that people are less likely to resent individuals or groups that were born wealthy, and are more likely to resent those who started out poor and then rose to prominence. “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.”

The Real History of Slavery traces the history of slavery throughout the world. Sowell notes that the practice existed on all continents, among almost all cultures, going at least as far back as written records exist. The pattern is the same in all instances: when a stronger population could exploit and enslave a weaker population, they did.

Sowell notes that throughout history, among all cultures that practiced slavery, none considered it a moral issue until the British in the eighteenth century. While ancient philosophers throughout the world delved into pressing social, moral and political issues, none discussed the moral implications of slavery. It was simply a fact of life that warrented no comment.

That changed in the eighteenth century as the British public was appalled by accounts of the slave trade in Africa, as reported by British missionaries. Not only did Britain outlaw slavery in its own empire, it patrolled the seas for more than a century, intercepting slave ships and eventually shutting down almost all of the African slave trade in the Atlantic and much of East African slave trade with the Arab world.

When British ambassadors to foreign courts expressed their moral opposition to slavery, most non-Western rulers were simply baffled. In their minds, slavery was a fact, no more subject to moral judgment than the existence of birds or stones, and nothing needed to be done about it.

The Americas lagged a century behind Britain in their opposition to slavery. The US didn’t end the practice until 1865, after a bitter and bloody war. The practice continued in Brazil until 1888.

Given this history, Sowell takes issue with the prevailing liberal narrative that the practice of slavery was a unique evil of the white race perpetrated against the black race. It was indeed an evil, but Sowell laments the irony that the society that finally gathered the moral courage to abolish an unjust and near universal practice of the human race–a society that paid for that abolition in the bloodiest war in its history–is the one most heavily criticized for ever having practiced it.

Sowell’s intention in pointing out these facts is not to excuse the practice of slavery or the damage it caused. He simply asks that if you’re going to blame a society for its evils, you should also be willing to commend it for its virtues. He notes that in virtually all of the non-Western cultures where Britain tried to end the slave trade, they were met with indifference or hostility, even long after slavery had been abolished in the Americas. The concept of individual freedom didn’t exist outside of Western society. It did exist in the West, and the West believed in it strongly enough to put their lives on the line for it when no other cultures did. You can criticize a culture for its past wrongs and moral failings, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Germans and History describes a long history of economic and cultural achievemant among the Germans inside and outside of Germany. It also examines their historical acceptance and assimilation of Jews, beginning in the nineteeth century, before delving into the cataclysmic tragedy into which Hitler led the nation in the nineteen thirties and forties.

This essay is not so much an apology for German history as a warning of how easily an educated and open-minded public can be led astray by a calculating demagogue. This is one of the most chilling essays in the book, especially given the similarities between the current political climate in a number of countries and the climate in nineteen thirties Germany, when a rabid minority exploited political, economic and psychological weaknesses to gain control, leading both the country and the world into unnecessary catastrophe.

The essay on Black Education examines the history of Dunbar High School in Washington, DC and a number of other high schools and colleges that taught to high standards and produced a remarkable number of black leaders. Sowell notes that the more successful schools descended in spirit from the schools opened by New England missionaries in the South after the Civil War.

These schools operated on the Enlightenment priciples that knowledge and achievement were open to all through a process of inquiry and diligent work. Sowell notes that the achievements of the schools’ graduates declined as the standards of the schools themselves declined. He also points out the divide these schools exposed in the black community between those who strove for higher achievement and those who characterized such striving as “acting white.” He traces the hostility toward education among a subset of the black community to the traditional white redneck contempt for education in the rural South, which in turn had its roots in the pre-enlightenment Cracker culture of Northern England and Scotland. This echoes one of the book’s recurring themes, that many of the most lamentable elements of black ghetto culture in the US descend from the most lamentable elements of the white population in the pre-war American South.

The book’s final essay, History versus Visions, is a direct attack on the current prevailing liberal interpretration of Western history. Sowell’s primary objection is that projecting current ideologies onto past cultures and past events will never give you an accurate understanding of history. He cites a number of examples in support of his argument, two of which embody his point well.

The first is that contemporary observers often fault the framers of the US constitution for not outlawing slavery from the get go. The constitution itself should have banned it, and the fact that it didn’t is evidence that the founders were racist.

Sowell’s second example is the wording of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery in the US but did not condemn it as evil or immoral. Some modern commentators have criticized the proclamation’s tepid language.

In both cases, Sowell points out, the political figures were doing what they had to do to advance a position in the difficult political reality of the time. If the founders had banned slavery in the constitution, the southern states would never have joined the US. This was a certainty. For all we know, the confederate states, as a separate and independent country, might still be practicing slavery today.

With regard to the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was issuing an edict that would have to withstand legal challenges from powerful enemies. If the goal was truly to end slavery, surviving those legal challenges was more important than expressing moral sentiments. As Sowell notes, the high moral language of protests and activism sounded good, but it didn’t end slavery. The proclamation did.

Future generations may look back on us with the same moral judgments we apply to our own ancestors, asking why we didn’t simply abolish all the injustices we could clearly see. Why did twenty-first century America permit such economic inequality, they might ask? Why couldn’t everyone have healthcare? Why did they spend so much on arms and engage in war? All of those things are bad, and the fact that people tolerated them must mean they were all evil.

The truth, obviously, is more complicated. We don’t so much tolerate injustice as suffer it, and progress is always slower than we would like.

Sowell’s book directly addresses a number of questions that many readers may consider taboo. The biggest of these is how much a person’s own attitudes, behaviors and values affect their economic success and personal wellbeing. Many progressives believe that one’s lot in life is determined entirely or almost entirely by one’s group identity and by intergroup power dynamics. Individual abilities and character traits don’t count.

Sowell takes aim at this perspective in particular, describing a number of historical and cultural facts that progressive identity politics don’t or can’t account for. While his annoyance with liberals comes through more clearly in the later essays, particularly History versus Visions, the first three essays present a lot of material that the progressives’ view of history simply doesn’t account for. The true mark of an excellent book is that it makes you want to dig in further and learn more, to see things from multiple perspectives, because it often takes multiple perspectives to make sense of a complex world.