Sowell on "Black Rednecks"

Some time ago, I got wind of the fact that Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite pundits, was coming out with a new book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, soon. Well, it came out this week, and I'll be adding it to the "must read" list. From the Amazon website's description of the book:

Black Rednecks and White Liberals takes on not only the trendy intellectuals of our times but also such historic interpreters of American life as Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted.

In a series of long essays, this book presents an in-depth look at key beliefs behind many mistaken and dangerous actions, policies, and trends. It presents eye-opening insights into the historical development of the ghetto culture that is today wrongly seen as a unique black identity--a culture cheered on toward self-destruction by white liberals who consider themselves "friends" of blacks.

Having read some of Sowell's other works, including Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? and The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy, I am looking forward to this book. Sowell invariably delivers his hard-hitting factual analysis in an interesting and thought-provoking way. I have my disagreements with Sowell: He favors the "nuclear option," for example, but he is invariably thought-provoking at a minimum.

A sample is available from the web site of the Wall Street Journal. (I am not sure whether this is a series of excerpts or a shorter piece based on research for the book.) The article focuses on just one aspect of the book: How culture figures in to the various disparities observed throughout history between blacks and whites in America. Sowell's thesis:

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race--that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.

If this disparity is not due to race, it is equally hard to explain by racism. To a racist, one black is pretty much the same as another. But, even if a racist somehow let his racism stop at the water's edge, how could he tell which student was the son or daughter of someone born in the West Indies or in Africa, especially since their American-born offspring probably do not even have a foreign accent?

What then could explain such large disparities in demographic "representation" among these three groups of blacks? Perhaps they have different patterns of behavior and different cultures and values behind their behavior.

We have all heard "black culture" being blamed for these disparities before, but Sowell does something very interesting here that I have not seen before. It is a popular and fascinating subject in some parts of academia to study how extensively white culture has borrowed (often without knowledge) from black culture throughout the South. (Cuisine is one of the most blatant examples.) But Sowell proposes that black culture in America was profoundly shaped by a certain subculture of the English.

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.

Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks--not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

This is an idea I have not heard before, and it will be interesting to see it fleshed out in the book. The main thing that I can see here that gives me pause is this: How does one go about measuring how much of a given group lives in a "redneck culture?"

-- CAV