This explosive new book challenges many of the long-prevailing assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans, about slavery, and about education. Plainly written, powerfully reasoned, and backed with a startling array of documented facts, 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. An essay titled "The Real History of Slavery" presents a jolting re-examination of that tragic institution and the narrow and distorted way it is too often seen today. The reasons for the venomous hatred of Jews, and of other groups like them in countries around the world, are explored in an essay that asks, "Are Jews Generic?" Misconceptions of German history in general, and of the Nazi era in particular, are also re-examined. So too are the inspiring achievements and painful tragedies of black education in the United States.

"Black Rednecks and White Liberals" is the capstone of decades of outstanding research and writing on racial and cultural issues by Thomas Sowell.

Some reviewers have taken issue with the thesis of Sowell's title essay, questioning how much Southern blacks would have been exposed to the influence of poor whites. This is a legitimate objection, and Sowell's thesis may suffer from being too narrow in its characterization of Southern white culture. Which is to say, the characteristics he identifies with poor whites of mostly Scotch-Irish background were characteristics also of the white upper classes in the Old South, where the masculine ideal was the gallant Cavalier with his Hotspur masculinity and touchy sense of honor, and where labor was seen as lowly drudgery rather than virtuous self-reliance. This was the value system of the white society in which the slaves were forced to exist, exacerbated by status relations among the slaves themselves, where the less onerous tasks of house slaves were privileged over the hard labor of field hands, and these attitudes survived among both races into the post-war and Jim Crow eras. The gangbanger elevation of a minor (or imagined) slight into a killing offense is identical with the sense of honor demonstrated by the Mafioso and the Southern hillbilly, but it is also the sense of honor that led Southern gentlemen into the Civil War. (It also, of course, is what inspired the attitudes in so many Southern whites that made the Civil Rights movement such a dangerous struggle.)

That flaw of over-particularity notwithstanding, this is a fine book, arguing persuasively the ways in which historical development shapes ethnic groups and the responses to them by outsiders.

The title is deceiving. It's not a Right-Wing Anti-Liberal book, or a book complaining about Activists, or even a book pushing a political agenda.
This book should be Mandatory reading for all High-schools. If the title was a little different, I'm sure this would be possible.

It's an actual look at the history of people, and how, and where, they got their idiosyncrasies. This book is amazing in it's thoroughness. It teaches to look at the history of people at the time they were in that history, not as backward looking modern people coloring history with our own personal ideals. It shows the modern point of view on a subject, then goes back and shows how many things were overlooked. How modern taught history is leaving out most of the details in favor of politicizing history to further modern agendas.

I got dirty looks from people, and even had people walk up to me, while reading this. I had to put a different cover on it.
For the Schools it would be better called "The History of Cultures, and how they rise or fall".

Reading Thomas Sowell's essay collection is a frustrating experience. "Black Rednecks and White Liberal" is one of the most schizophrenic books I have ever read.

On the one hand, Sowell is a deeply informed and very insightful thinker. He brings a wealth of knowledge to the topics he discusses. With great erudition he casts light on many interesting questions, and he manages a wide ranging global outlook, which I found very useful. I learned a lot from "Black Rednecks".

On the other hand, Sowell is a highly partisan conservative. He will often stop an otherwise enlightening discussion to engage in petty, unfair, and unsubstantiated polemics. His account is biased and he makes sins of omission and commission.

In my review I will focus more on Sowell's sins than on his virtues. Partly because Amazon reviewers are so overwhelmingly in favor that I hope my review can act as a corrective. Partly because I dislike polemics and polemical writing, and partly because criticizing is more fun.

In the title essay, Sowell raises a fascinating possibility. I have long known that their culture is a main cause for the relatively poor status of America's Black. Blacks who do not share the dominant black culture - like Black immigrants - usually do quite well - Barak Obama and Collin Powel are merely the most spectacular examples.

I have always believed that the cultural causes for Blacks' lack of progress are a legacy of Slavery, and of the post Slavery discrimination against Blacks. Sowell argues otherwise.

Sowell defines the "Cracker" culture - lazy, intellectual incurious, sexual promiscuous, and machoisitcly aggressive. This culture originated in the periphery of England in the 16th and 17th century - the "Celtic Fringes" near Scotland.

Most settlers to America's North came from the central areas of England but the Crackers settled disproportionately in the South, and they brought their culture with them. Rechristened "Redneck Culture", it passed on to the Black population. Redneck culture has been fighting a slowly losing battle against the more productive culture of Northern Americans. Today, the last Rednecks are inner city Blacks.

Sowell makes a strong case, although I'm not certain he is right. I suspect we just don't know enough about the evolution and transmission of culture to really plot its motions. Right or wrong, this is a fascinating thesis.

Elsewhere, Sowell offers an insightful look into economically powerful minorities (a topic addressed by Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability), a history of Germany and German Culture, and an interesting history of what was, up to the 1950s, America's leading black school, and how it fell victim to the Supreme Court's anti School segregation ruling.

Unfortunately, the essays are considerably weakened by Sowell's intemperate polemics. To illustrate, here's Sowell:

"The burgeoning... American welfare state ... and the declining effectiveness of the American criminal justice system... allowed borrowed and counterproductive cultural traits to continue and flourish among those blacks who had no yet moved beyond [redneck] thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous, and self-destructive subculture in many urban ghettos" (p.33)

"In some white liberal circles--the New York Times, for example--the police are almost automatically at fault in confrontations with black criminals, hoodlums, or rioters" (p. 53).

In neither case does Sowell support these claims with facts or references. Some of the points Sowell the polemicist make are quite reasonable. Some Left Wingers are exceedingly deferential to minorities and overly critical of authority. But I think the worst offences in this regard are behind us. Today's mainstream Liberal view on race is quite nuanced and willing to acknowledge the problems with Black culture (See Richard Ford's brilliant The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse). Does Welfare promote unhealthy habits by encouraging delinquency and apathy? This is an argument Ian Buruma makes in the very different context of Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands (Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerence) - but it is less likely in the US, whose welfare state is far less generous than Europe's. And if Sowell was correct, we would expect a decline in Ghetto Redneckism (is that a word?) with the Reagan Revolution and the cut back of social welfare. Sowell does not offer any evidence to that effect.

The third essay, "The Real History of Slavery" is a useful, "big picture" history of slavery, which is worth reading and which I broadly agree with. But his account is again marred by partisanship. Sowell bemoans that American Black Slavery receives more attention than other instances of slavery, past and present. But obviously, American Black slavery plays a larger part in American life than other kinds of Slavery, so it would receive more attention. For the same reason, Jews discuss the Holocaust more than other genocides, and Americans discuss their war of independence more than those of the Greeks or the Indians.

Similarly, Sowell points out that Slavery as such did not grow out of racism. "For most of its history... slavery was largely *not* the enslavement of racially different people" (p.114). But American slavery did grow out of racism - Black indentured servants were treated quite differently than white indentured servants (See Don Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics).

A main thesis is that Western Civilization is the only Civilization to have opposed Slavery. This is a good point, but Sowell rashes to exonerate Westerners, and to score political points. "Within Western civilization, the principal impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists--people who would today be called "the religious right." (p.116). Calling William Wilberforce and his ilk "The Religious Right" is akin to calling Newton a "Creationist". Sowell is both anachronistic and inaccurate.

Sowell's reading of history is partisan - he repeatedly lets America's white slaveholders off the hook. The record of the Founders on slavery is mixed (see Fehrenbacher's book and Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation) - but Sowell consistently accentuates the positive. America's Founders recognized the immorality of slavery, and realized that posterity would judge their treatment of slaves. Some, like George Washington, went to great lengths to deal with the problem as honorably as they could. Other found ways of subduing their consciousness without getting rid of their slaves, or confronting their society. Thus Sowell points out that many Southerners (e.g. Thomas Jefferson) thought that the alternative to slavery would be a racial war, which they deemed more terrible. Slaveholders feared that releasing the slaves would breed disaster. In Jefferson's words: "we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other" (p. 149). But Sowell only briefly concedes how convenient and self serving this conviction was - a perfect excuse for doing nothing. He also ignores the Southern view that slavery was worse for the slaver than it was for the slave. He emphasizes Southern support of the abolition of the slave trade, but ignores the economic benefit of abolition to the upper South, a net exporter of slaves to the lower South. In short, Sowell consistently offers the most charitable reading possible of the Slaveholders.

Stylistically, Sowell's somewhat heavy handed, piling example after example in support of his various theses. This makes the book duller than it should be, and especially predictable. Read the first example of a section (for example, the part about the education of Middleman minorities, pp. 92-96), and you can often mentally complete it yourself.

Like Jekyll and Hyde, Sowell oscillates between the good scholar and the bad polemicist. If you can learn from the one and overlook the other, you will benefit from "Black Rednecks and White Liberals".

This author is my hero! What a great book.
If the author was running for President of the U.S. I would vote for him!

And, NOOOO..... I'm not saying I would vote for him just because he happens to be black.

Dr. Sowell always has interesting input on a wide variety of subjects, and this book is proof. The book is over 370 pages and only the first 63 are dedicated to the book's namesake; "Black Rednecks and White Liberals". Other essays in the book include the topics of education (mainly in the Black community), German history, the real history of slavery in the world and how it's abolishment is the result of Western civilization, and the Jewish role commerce, and how they're a middleman "minority".

The central theme of the essay "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" is that mainstream "Black culture" is just remnants of white Southern culture - which didn't originate in the South, but in parts of the British Isles, where most Southerners came from; everything from ways of talking, attitudes towards education, violence, sex, etc. It's a transplanted culture that was abandoned by its originators. Most Southern white people came from the northern borderlands of England, Scottish highlands and Ulster County, Ireland - all areas which were poor and nearly lawless. What these people brought to the United States were a whole collection of attitudes, values and behavior patterns that proved to be counterproductive in the U.S. - and prove to be counterproductive to Blacks, who lived in their midst for centuries before they were free and migrated to the North, taking those "values" with them.

Lack of entrepreneurship was also common among "redneck culture". In the book "The Cotton Kingdom", by Fredrick Law Olmsted, he noted that the work found the most efficiently done work, well established businesses in the South were either run by Northerners, foreigners or Jews. Professor Grady McWhiney also noted that in his book "Cracker Culture", as well as the fact that white Southerners always had shortages of butter (in 1860, the South had 40% of all dairy cows in the US et only produced 20% of the butter and 1% of cheese). Compare that to German farmers in Wisconsin at the same time.

Southern inventions were no different. In 1851, for example, only 8% of the patents issued went to residents in the South. Even in agriculture, the prime economic sector of the South, only 9 of the 62 patents (not even 15%) for agricultural equipment went to Southerners. The cotton gin, for example, the most crucial invention for the South, was invented by a Northerner.

The redneck culture is a less achieving culture, and this culture has affected a higher proportion of Blacks than whites, since only 1/3 of whites lived in the antebellum South, whereas 9/10 of all Blacks did.

This book is different from the thesis that there are innate differences in intelligence between the races. It's about culture, not race. West Indians, who are darker and typically have less "white blood" exceeded whites in terms of income - even back in the 1970s. Second generation West Indians in Manhattan, for example, made 58% more money than non-West Indian Black families, an in 2004, the vast majority of the Black alumni at Harvard were either Africans or West Indians - or children of them. Black IQ in the North is consistently higher than it is in the South, and in World War 1 mental tests, Black soldiers from Northern states scored higher than whites from Southern states. Also, in that same era, European immigrants from cultures where education was not highly valued (mostly Eastern and Southern Europe), scored the same as Blacks, and in some tests, lower. Read Intelligence and Immigration by Clifford Kirkpatrick, Intelligence Tests of Foreign Children from the Journal of Educational Psychology, and A Study of Natio-Racial Mental Differences from the Genetic Psychology Monographs.

"White Liberals" and some Blacks make excuses for the destruction of the Black family, and blame it on the "legacy of slavery", which is nonsense. Broken Black homes were far, far more common at the end of the 20th century than the end of the 19th century, even though the Blacks at the end of the 19th century were just a single generation out of slavery. Also, when slavery was abolished, there were desperate efforts for freed Black men find separated family members. The white liberals also just want to throw other people money at non-productiveness as if that will fix anything. In reality, it will just accelerate the problem.