Charen Reviews Sowell's Latest

I recently mentioned (and pointed to a brief essay based on) Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Having recently completed the book, I contemplated writing up a short review. Mona Charen at Jewish World Review beat me to it. She pretty much is right on the money.

The title refers to the first essay, which argues that many of the traits commonly considered "authentically black" are actually the inheritance of the white redneck culture amid which many blacks lived for centuries. These include hair-trigger touchiness on the part of men, anti-intellectualism, pride, sexual license, backwardness and laziness. Speech patterns that persist among ghetto blacks today — "ax" for ask, "bile" for boil, "do'" for door, and "dis" for this — are traceable to the regions of Great Britain from which white Southerners came. Black and white children from the South lagged academically behind their peers in the rest of the nation throughout the 20th century. This is well-known. What is less well-known is that "black soldiers from some Northern states scored higher on mental tests than whites from some Southern states during the First World War."

If this essay sounds interesting, you can get a good idea of what the rest of the book is about by reading the whole review.

Needless to say, I have a few disagreements with Sowell here and there, but his fundamental dedication to facts and logic so strongly dominates this book that I quite agree with Charen that the book is a "must-read." You will learn a huge amount from this thought-provoking book.

And on the subject of thought-provoking.... It may have been beyond the scope of what Thomas intended to present in his book, but an interesting angle from which to read it is this: What does each chapter tell us about the importance of long-range thinking in the development of individual human beings and, by extension, of entire cultures? For example, Sowell discusses the lawless milieu in which the redneck culture originally developed in the British Isles. He hints that the culture arose in response to the need to be belligerent just to survive and to the inability to plan ahead inherent in that environment. When you might get killed at any moment, why not live for the moment? Indeed, the pugilistic, indolent, range-of-the-moment culture that arose is an understandable response to such pressures. And such a culture would also self-perpetuate as Sowell notes that it has when, for example, the welfare state separates modern rednecks from the consequences of their behavior in the context of a society ruled by law that does not condone many of its norms.

That's just one of many things one might consider when reading this book. I think that Sowell's insistence on facts and logical analysis, as well as the conclusions he has reached will effect thinking on matters of race and ethnicity -- and for the better -- in the long haul.

-- CAV