Black Rednecks and White Liberals

[El Tejon]

For the APS Book Club.  Just finished Thomas Sowell's new book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

It is a collection of six essays:  Black Rednecks, Are Jews Generic?, The Real History of Slavery, Germans and History, Black Education and History versus Visions.

It's thesis is that Black subculture is a transfer of Southern white culture which was brought into the South by the Border Britons, North English and Lowland Scot.  This culture of living for the moment, sloth, anti-intellectualism, sexual patterns and low regard for human life has been a millstone around African-Americans and white liberals foster this subculture to maintain power over African Americans by playing to lies and fraud in the way history is taught in American schools.

This book is nothing short of brilliant.  It should be required reading in all government schools, especially those that are heavily African American.

[Fjolnirsson]

Thanks, I'll have to pick that one up.

[mtnbkr]

They had him on one of the NPR "interview" shows the other day.  He's an interesting fellow.  Once I finish Jared Diamond's Collapse, I'll have to look it up.

Chris

[Stand_watie]

I don't know about Thomas Sowell's neck of the woods, but black rednecks, while not "the norm", also aren't uncommon in rural east Texas.

I see a guy who wears western wear, including a belt with little confederate flag emblems on it, when I pick my daughter up from school sometimes. It amuses me to no end to think what that would do to Al Sharpton's blood pressure. The all time great that I think I've seen though, was a black man in a stetson, riding a horse along the rough of a golf course, while talking on his cell phone. I'd like to have a picture of that (with the golf cart duffers silouetted in the background) captioned "Be who you want to be"

[The Rabbi]

there was an excerpt in the Wall St Journal the other day.  He makes a very persuasive argument about it.  Part of it is the question of why Carribean Blacks come here and are usually succesful as entrepreneurs etc but native born Blacks seem to lack that.  They share the same genes so it cannot be genetic.  So he attributes it to culture, as outlined in the post.

[duck hunt]

We grew up next door to black rednecks.  Our neighbor Harold was forever loading his hunting gear into his ancient wood-paneled Wagoneer in the wee hours of the morning.  I'd pass him as I was coming home from nightclubs; he'd be leaving in his full camo jumpsuit and blaze orange hat.  His was the first vehicle I ever saw sporting the "Hunting and Fishing -- American Traditions" sticker.

He sold the Wagoneer after a while, and years later I was in a diner downtown and a young black kid pulled up driving it.  He got out and came in the diner, and the counterperson greeted him by name -- Harold.  He was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt, Carhartts and work boots.  I had to ask where he got the vehicle, just to see if it was the same one.

"I found it in the Trading Post," he said, "and when I went to look at it and saw the guy was a black redneck named Harold, I had to buy it!  What are the odds there'd be two of us?"

True story.

[RevDisk]

"I found it in the Trading Post," he said, "and when I went to look at it and saw the guy was a black redneck named Harold, I had to buy it!  What are the odds there'd be two of us?"

Bwahaha.   It really is a small world.

[Werewolf]

Not a hijack but an interesting aside:

It's thesis is that Black subculture is a transfer of Southern white culture which was brought into the South by the Border Britons, North English and Lowland Scot.

In Attack and Die - Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage by Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson the authors say pretty much the same thing.

They define the Border Britons, North English and Lowland Scot culture as being Celtic. They state that the Celtic attitude abhoring the defense, being impatient with drawn out campaigns and honoring the attack above all is the major reason for the Defeat of the Confederacy. In other words they claim that the culture of the south doomed them to defeat from the get go.

They make a good argument and if true it seems that the Celtic culture impacted whites in the South to a very great extent too.

[JAlexander]

It's thesis is that Black subculture is a transfer of Southern white culture which was brought into the South by the Border Britons, North English and Lowland Scot.  This culture of living for the moment, sloth, anti-intellectualism, sexual patterns and low regard for human life has been a millstone around African-Americans....

Interesting idea, I may have to read the book.  However, I'm currently reading a book entitled Freedom Colonies:  Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow by Thad Sitton* and James H. Conrad, and it indicates that the above idea isn't entirely true.  Apparently freed slaves started acquiring land throughout the South after the Civil War, and in Texas the numbers peaked in 1900, with 31% of black Texans owning land.

While I imagine that there's some truth to Mr. Sowell's hypothesis, I think the creation of the welfare system deserves some of the blame for the cultural problems we're facing at the moment.  It's possible, though, that I'm not giving him enough credit.  I guess I'll just have to read the book.

James

*I highly recommend Thad Sitton's books to anyone interested in Texas folk history, especially Texas High Sheriffs.  It's a collection of compiled and edited interviews with sheriffs who served between the 1920s and 1970s, and while it isn't always pleasant, it is fascinating.

[El Tejon]

James, Sowell does speak to zones of "redneck liberation" in the Black culture where teachers from the North successfully implemented a "weed and feed" in the South via schools, most famously Dunbar in Washington D.C.  The redneck culture was destroyed/surplanted via education and an educated Black upwardly mobile class modeled along Yankee lines emerged.

No doubt Welfare State is destructive, however the death culture of redneckdom existed long before the Welfare State.  The existence of redneck culture predates the Welfare State by hundreds of years as Sowell details.

Werewolf, I enjoyed that book as well.  Thanks for bringing it up.  Maybe I'll re-read.  We need a Book Club §!

[JAlexander]

James, Sowell does speak to zones of "redneck liberation" in the Black culture where teachers from the North successfully implemented a "weed and feed" in the South via schools, most famously Dunbar in Washington D.C.  The redneck culture was destroyed/surplanted via education and an educated Black upwardly mobile class modeled along Yankee lines emerged.

I'll definitely have to pick it up, then.  The phenomenon that I mentioned, though, was separate from Nothern-sponsored schools.  These folks bootstrapped themselves up and created enclaves of self-sufficiency based on land ownership within the larger white culture.  The communities were centered around churches originally, and it wasn't until ten of fifteen years (or more) after end of the war that schools started to become common.  Even then, most black children went to school sporadically because of the requirements of the farms that most of them lived on.  So it sounds as if the freedom communities and the schools sponsored by the North happened independently.  

I'm getting off-track, though.  I'm glad to see that someone is fighting the tide of PC scholarship, and for that reason alone I'd be inclined to read Mr. Sowell's book.

James