Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell (Part 2)

I finished listening to the audio-book Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. As mentioned earlier, the book is a collection of 6 long essays which broadside the sacred cows of the politically correct crowd. This book definitely gets 2 thumbs up.

Sowell’s discussion regarding the history of slavery is most compelling. Sowell gives some history to the slavery issue, detailing that slavery did not begin with the importation of black slaves to the Americas, but that it existed for thousands of years prior in all nations and cultures. In most of the world slavery was not limited to a single race, Arabs were likely to enslave Europeans, Asians would enslave other Asians. It was the development of the shipping industry and the plentiful supply of Africans, supplied by other Africans, that produced the race based slavery in the Americas.

What really is amazing about the history of slavery though is how it was ended. Britain took on the role of the world’s moral policeman and devoted, at tremendous cost, a phenomenal amount of their nations military strength to put an end to slavery throughout the world. Today we have a hard time understanding how people justified slavery, but the fact is they did, and saw nothing wrong with it. It was a fact of life, no matter how unpretty. It would take Britain almost a century to intimidate and cajole other countries into giving up the practice.

Sowell also makes the point that, if we want to understand history, we must study the past in context and not judge people’s actions by today’s standards. What we have been taught about slavery are generalizations made to fit a political/social agenda. He points out how many of the founding fathers, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, are considered hypocrites, instead of viewing these men as creatures of their time, doing what they could in the circumstances life had placed them.

The other essays are just as good, showing how middle men are necessary for an economy and are hated because of it, whether they are Jews in pre-war Germany, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, or Korean 7-11 owners in black neighborhoods. He points out that these ethnic groups are despised not because of who they are, but because they are successful and that the masses, who refused to work at such low starting wages and long days, take out their anger on these groups.

The victim mentality that keeps so many from attaining all that they can be is summed up well in this quote:

“There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.”
–Eric Hoffer