Thomas Achord's Reviews > Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Excellent and eye-opening. Most discussion about race or slavery is too narrow and simplistic. They are much broader than a Eurocentric view would imagine. Sowell's research is wide and deep, his reasoning cool and exacting, his arguments compelling and, largely, unchallenged.

I found this review to curtail some of what Sowell has to say about blacks obtaining their cultural attitudes and actions from whites: http://www.vdare.com/articles/tom-sow...

Some important quotes:

"Discussions of slavery in the West tend to be disastrously narrow." – Thomas Sowell

"The situation in the Islamic world was very different from that in the West. Despite the larger total numbers of slaves sent from Africa to the Islamic world over the centuries, the surviving African population in these countries was much less than the tens of millions in the Western Hemisphere. In addition to higher mortality rates of slaves en route to North African and Middle Eastern countries, the survival and reproduction rates of African slaves there were much less than in the United States. While slaves in the antebellum South lived in families, even though they lacked official legal sanction for their marriages, both marriage and casual sex among slaves were suppressed in the Islamic world and, among the relatively small numbers of children born to African slaves there, the mortality rate was so high that few lived to adulthood. The sex imbalance among African slaves—far more women than men in the Islamic countries—and the fact that eunuchs were common among the relatively few African men likewise precluded a vast African slave population in the Moslem countries..."


"Particularly dangerous to contemporary visions and agendas are the achievements by groups that began in poverty and rose to prosperity, such as emigrants from Japan, Italy, China, or India who settled in various countries around the world. It is not just their achievements, but the very concept of achievement, which is antithetical to the multicultural vision - and which is therefore often evaded or denied.

"Much verbal ingenuity has been used circumventing the concept of achievements by calling them "advantages" or "privileges," even when this does violence to the meaning of the words and the facts of history. Often discussions of the supposedly impenetrable social barriers of poverty and skin-color prejudice pass over in utter silence the history of various emigrants from Asia whose economic levels have in fact often begun in poverty and later surpassed that of the white majorities in countries of the Western Hemisphere.

"When visions and agendas suppress history, that not only distorts the achievements of groups, nations, or civilizations, it forfeits valuable knowledge as to the things that have led to past progress and can lead to progress for others who are still lagging today. In short, it sacrifices the material interest of millions for the ideological or other parochial interests of a few."


"The region of West Africa...was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent-before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere. This pattern was not confined to West Africa, from which most slaves were sent to the Western Hemisphere. In East Africa, the Masai were feared slave raiders and other African tribes- either alone or in conjunction with Arabs-enslaved their more vulnerable neighbors."


"In short, the drastic changes in law enforcement and social morality during the 1960s had a particularly adverse effects on the behavior and actions of blacks and on black victims of the criminals in their midst. Intellectuals have also played a role along with the welfare state in prolonging and legitimizing a counterproductive culture among blacks. Nowhere was the effect of the white liberalism of the 1960s in the social evolution of black culture more devastating than in the disintegration of the black family."


"By projecting a vision of a world in which the problems of blacks are consequences of the actions of whites, either immediately or in times past, white liberals have provided a blanket excuse for shortcomings and even crimes by blacks...

"White liberals long denied that there were higher crime rates among blacks by pointing to the imperfections of crime statistics in general or, more specifically, claiming that blacks are simply arrested more often for things that whites would not be arrested for. But if the imperfections of crime statistics were the real problem, then discussions could be limited to murder statistics, since dead bodies are not ignored, whether they are black or white, and neither are murderers, whatever their race. But murder statistics show the same disproportionate number of crimes by blacks as other statistics do. While murder statistics might provide more accuracy, they would not provide white liberals with a means of evading the obvious.

"Riots by blacks are almost automatically blamed on whites, whether in the Kerner Report on the riots of the 1960s or in the reactions among white liberals to the Los Angeles riots of 1992. 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. When the police arrive on a scene of crime or violence in black communities, whatever they do is likely to be categorized later as either having let the situation get out of hand or as having used excessive force. Any force sufficient to prevent the situation from getting out of hand is almost certain to be called excessive force by white liberals in the media, so that—by definition—the police will have acted badly, no matter what they did or failed to do. Should the police arrive in such overwhelming numbers as to bring the disorder to a quick halt without any need to use force at all, then they will often be said to have “over-reacted” by sending so many cops to deal with unresisting people.

"One of the reactions of the police to such predictable scapegoating in the media has been to “de-police” some of the most violent black neighborhoods, looking the other way rather than risk seeing a whole career ruined by media charges of racism. This gives criminals, hoodlums and rioters a freer hand—at the expense of law-abiding blacks, who may be the great majority, even in a high-crime neighborhood. There is evidence that this is in fact what happens after a barrage of adverse media coverage against the police.”


"The chafing restrictions of civilization, which can at times become irksome to people of any color, may be vicariously thrown off by those white intellectuals who cheer on outlandish and even lawless behavior by black hoodlums or entertainers. Blacks in effect become the mascots of these intellectuals, symbolizing and acting out the latter’s resistance to “society” — or, more accurately, civilization. But while mascots may be indulged, more fundamentally mascots exist for the sake of those who adopt them and the actual well-being of the mascot is seldom a high priority. By cheering on counterproductive attitudes, making excuses for self-defeating behavior, and promoting the belief that “racism” accounts for most of blacks’ problems, white intellectuals serve their own psychic, ideological, and political interests. They are kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.”


Here is a larger collection of salient quotes from his book: https://ronloneysbooks.files.wordpres...