Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Thomas Sowell presents six interconnected essays that challenge widely held beliefs about race, ethnicity, slavery, and education. Drawing on more than a quarter-century of research, Sowell argues that misconceptions about these topics have poisoned social relations and policy, and that exposing them requires evidence from around the world and across centuries. He warns in the preface that uninformed solutions have themselves been a major social problem, and that the book seeks understanding rather than proposing remedies.

The title essay, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," argues that cultural patterns commonly attributed to Black Americans actually originated among white settlers from the northern borderlands of England, the Scottish highlands, and Ulster County, Ireland. Sowell cites mid-twentieth-century accounts of white Southern migrants to Northern cities provoking the same complaints later directed at Black ghetto residents, including inability to hold jobs, lawlessness, and neglect of children. These settlers brought values including aversion to steady work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, and improvidence from turbulent regions of Britain where no stable social order existed. Because most emigration to the American South occurred before social reforms transformed these regions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the transplanted culture survived in America long after it died out in Britain.

Sowell documents these patterns in detail, presenting data on the South's economic backwardness: Despite having 40 percent of the nation's dairy cows in 1860, the South produced only 20 percent of the butter and one percent of the cheese. German farmers in the same regions achieved far higher yields through disciplined work habits. Southern illiteracy rates and patent filings lagged far behind the North, and white soldiers from several Southern states scored lower on World War I mental tests than Black soldiers from Northern states.

The essay's central argument is that Black Americans, having lived among white Southerners for generations, absorbed this redneck culture. Sowell contends that what was later called "black English" closely followed dialects from parts of Britain, not Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois, the prominent Black scholar, described Black improvidence in the 1890s in terms nearly identical to earlier descriptions of white Southerners. To challenge the assumption that slavery explains all Black cultural patterns, Sowell contrasts native-born Black Americans with West Indian immigrants, who also had a history of slavery but brought a different culture and had higher incomes, lower crime rates, and greater business ownership.

Sowell describes the New England cultural enclaves established among Southern Black people after the Civil War. The American Missionary Association (AMA), a Northern missionary organization, sought to replace existing Black culture with one emphasizing correct English, strict morality, industry, and thrift. These enclaves produced a disproportionate number of future Black leaders, including Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr. The essay also documents how massive Black migration from the South to Northern cities in the early twentieth century caused improving race relations to deteriorate. In Chicago, two-thirds of Black residents had lived in majority-white neighborhoods as late as 1910, but after mass migration, attempts by Black people to move into white neighborhoods were met with bombings. Sowell argues that Black advancement was driven primarily by internal cultural transformation, noting that Black poverty fell from 87 percent to 47 percent between 1940 and 1960, before any serious civil rights legislation.

Sowell concludes the essay by arguing that white liberals perpetuated counterproductive redneck culture among Black Americans through the welfare state, lax law enforcement, and an intellectual climate that treats any internal explanation of Black problems as "blaming the victim." Out-of-wedlock births among Black Americans rose from 22 percent to 70 percent between 1960 and 1994, and the post-1960s "identity" movement, Sowell contends, turned redneck culture into a badge of racial identity that cut off ghetto residents from more successful Black Americans who might have served as examples.

The second essay, "Are Jews Generic?," argues that Jews are one example of a worldwide phenomenon of "middleman minorities," groups such as the overseas Chinese, Armenians, Lebanese, Ibos, and Gujaratis that serve as economic intermediaries between producers and consumers. Sowell contends that the economic function itself generates resentment, because middlemen appear to create wealth without producing tangible goods. These groups typically arrived in poverty and rose through frugality, family labor, and long hours. The essay documents their disproportionate economic dominance: Jews were 60 percent of all merchants in Hungary despite being 6 percent of the population, while the Chinese controlled an estimated 70 percent of Indonesia's private domestic capital despite being less than 5 percent of the population. Mass expulsions of middleman minorities have repeatedly caused economic collapse without reducing hostility.

The third essay, "The Real History of Slavery," argues that slavery was a worldwide institution of far greater scope than is commonly depicted. Sowell notes that at least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates from 1500 to 1800, that the word "slave" derives from "Slav," and that slavery existed across Asia and the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere. He traces the anti-slavery movement to eighteenth-century Britain, arguing that Western civilization alone developed a moral revulsion against slavery, and credits conservative religious activists, first Quakers and then Evangelicals like William Wilberforce.

The essay examines the moral dilemmas faced by American founders who opposed slavery. Jefferson attempted to include an anti-slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence and proposed banning slavery in all western territories in 1784, losing by one vote. Congressman John Randolph of Virginia made provision in his will for his slaves' freedom, land, and support, summoning a doctor as witness on his deathbed to ensure his wishes would be honored. Sowell argues that slavery cannot explain contemporary social problems among Black Americans, since Black marriage rates were slightly higher than white rates from 1890 to 1940, and out-of-wedlock births rose sharply only in the 1960s, nearly a century after emancipation.

The fourth essay, "Germans and History," asks whether Nazism represented the culmination of German culture or a monstrous aberration. Sowell surveys centuries of German history, describing Germans as bearers of advanced skills to Eastern Europe, where they established mining communities, universities, and agricultural practices. He argues that pre-Hitler Germans' record on tolerance compares favorably with most Europeans: Anti-Semitic parties never received more than 7 percent of the vote between 1871 and 1928, and nearly half of all Jewish marriages in Germany between 1921 and 1927 were to non-Jews. The negative public reaction to Kristallnacht, the 1938 night of organized violence against Jews and their property, led Hitler to proceed with maximum secrecy thereafter. Post-war Germany's voluntary reparations payments exceeded $55 billion, a sum unparalleled in history.

The fifth essay, "Black Education: Achievements, Myths and Tragedies," challenges the dogma that children from low-income backgrounds cannot perform well academically. Sowell presents the history of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., where in 1899 Black students averaged higher test scores than students in two of three white high schools. Parental occupations in the 1890s included laborers, messengers, and janitors rather than professionals, refuting the claim that these were middle-class children. Dunbar graduates included the first Black graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the first Black general, the first Black Cabinet member, and the first Black federal judge. The school's 85-year record was destroyed when it became a neighborhood school after Brown v. Board of Education: The student body changed radically, experienced teachers retired, and the school quickly declined. Sowell presents contemporary examples of successful minority schools using methods opposed by the education establishment, such as phonics, directed instruction, and frequent testing, and argues that work and discipline are the common denominators of academic success.

The final essay, "History versus Visions," argues that history is too often distorted to serve contemporary agendas. Sowell contends that the prevailing intellectual vision attributes all intergroup differences to external causes while suppressing internal explanations. He presents Scotland and Japan as cases where painful awareness of one's own backwardness, combined with determination to learn from more advanced societies, produced dramatic advancement. Eighteenth-century Scots embraced English language and culture and became one of the most intellectually productive peoples in Europe, while nineteenth-century Japan rose from feudal backwardness by systematically emulating the West. Sowell argues that Western civilization's distinctive contributions, particularly universalism and the rule of law, are threatened when history loses its integrity, and warns that societies sealed off from factual reality risk catastrophe.