Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell (Part 1)

I have just started listening to the audio-book Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. The book is a collection of 6 long essays which broadside the sacred cows of the politically correct crowd.

In the first essay Sowell explores the history of black ghetto culture and traces it, not to African origins, but instead to white southerners who brought it with them from the British and Scottish highlands. Sowell contends that much of what passes as black identity today, including “black English,” has its real roots in those whites called “rednecks” and “crackers” centuries ago in Britain, before they crossed the Atlantic and settled in the South.

Sowell describes this behavior and culture as 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”.

Sowell does make clear that even though most Southern blacks and whites have moved away from the redneck culture over time because of its counterproductive nature, it still survives today among poor ghetto blacks and it is this ghetto culture that has been elevated as being “authentically” black.

“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.”