booklady's Reviews > Black Rednecks & White Liberals

Thank you to those unknown souls who have gone before and added so many of Thomas Sowell’s quotes to the Goodreads data base, especially those from this book, many of which are listed below. With respect to Black Rednecks & White Liberals, I highlighted many of the same quotes, but was delighted to become aware of those others. As for the vast reservoir of his other quotes, I could have ‘liked’ 99.9% of them, but there were so many I needed to get on with other things.

Thomas Sowell is a brilliant American economist and social theorist who’s currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution where he’s been since 1980. Sowell, who turned 90 this year, has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell University and University of California, Los Angeles and worked for think tanks such as the Urban Institute. He has written over 30 books and he writes from a conservative libertarian perspective; everything he writes is extensively footnoted.

I wanted to read this book because of the recent outbreak of apparent racial tension in our country most of which is based on half-truths, falsehoods, misreading of our country’s history and/or a failure to know/understand slavery and racism/persecution in the wider context of world history. I deliberately write ‘apparent’ racial tension because while no country is perfect and although there is—and always will be—racial prejudice here also, in America, people of all races have a better opportunity to live lives free from racial tyranny than anywhere else on the planet. Most of the unrest and violence which is being perpetrated today is manufactured by outsiders wishing to bring down this great republic and change it into a socialistic regime which would deny all freedoms to all citizens.

In the first chapter we read that many of the behavior patterns learned and practiced by blacks, are nearly identical to and originate from the antebellum Southern whites who migrated from the North of England and brought those same values, lifestyle and culture with them to America.

Sowell painstakingly traces these ‘redneck’ tendencies (lack of ambition, low moral standards and general disregard for the law) as they were carried from place to place and how they adversely affected those who lived by them. He also shows how Southern blacks differed from their Northern brothers, who grew up not only free, but also in an entirely different culture, putting them way ahead. This accounts for the progress made by these African Americans immediately following the American Civil War up until the beginning of the twentieth century when Southern Blacks began to migrate North in large numbers and their lack of advantage showed the contest between the two groups. The earliest prejudice, however, was not from whites but from their own, who were shocked and appalled by the lack of motivation, virtue or sense of responsibility the newcomers possessed. It was only when they began to spread out to the larger community whites became aware of the problem and discrimination laws began to be passed. Until that time, the Northern blacks had been making slow but real progress toward equality in America through hard work, education and persistence, as have other successful minorities (Irish, Chinese, Jews, etc.) Sowell relating brief histories.

In the second chapter, Sowell explores a concept he describes as the ‘middleman minority’ and how such people—throughout history they have often been the Jews—are hated for their hard work and success. (This chapter resonated so much with me as it reminded me of my school days where you see ambition and good grades punished by peers who don’t want to work. This has nothing to do with color!) This is how other minorities who migrated to America, though despised and discriminated against, were able to bring themselves and their children out of poverty level within at least two generations, if not one.

I wish the third chapter was mandatory reading for every American citizen, black, white, red and every shade in between. The point of the chapter is that slavery is as old as human history; it was not invented by white Americans to punish black Africans. In fact, there have been plenty of instances of blacks owning white slaves and certainly African blacks owning their fellow Africans. In fact, slavery was considered normative social behavior throughout most of human history, as conquerors took the conquered as slaves. Freedom, as a virtue, is a relative latecomer on the world stage, human beings desiring many other things far more than freedom.

The real irony in the whole slavery situation is that it was the conscience of Western civilization which pushed the rest of the world through economic sanctions to: first, put an end to slave trading and eventually, end slavery altogether. Although, in our present age we have a far more hideous hidden and unacknowledged slavery of children and youth to the sex-trafficking industry which no one is seriously talking about. Instead we are being called radically-racist while our children (of ALL colors!) are being victimized, abused and destroyed. I digress.

The fourth chapter is a mini-case study of the German people. Sowell asks how could twelve fateful years of Nazi rule wipe out the long, noble and ancient traditions and history of the Germanic people? It is an interesting read, and yet he only shows that there was nothing hidden there which was bound to produce what eventually happened. There were a number of contributing circumstances, but it was not a function of the German character as some have alleged.

The fifth chapter is an examination of black education in America with its successes and failures. One bittersweet example concerns a school in Washington D.C. which from the 1890’s until integration in the 1950’s graduated black students who averaged as high or higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools in the area. Sowell looked at the demographics of the students, their parents, the teachers, the surrounding local area from every possible angle to see if Dunbar School as it was known had some economic, racial (children were more white than black) or other advantage which explained away the success. The children were not middle class, their parents working at low paying/status jobs and photographs in old yearbooks from the era of Dunbar’s academic success show no preponderance of light-skinned blacks. However, it was staffed with excellent teachers who apparently refused to tolerate absenteeism and tardiness as a spot check of attendance records and tardiness records showed less absenteeism and less tardiness than the white high schools in the District of Columbia at those times.

‘Three of the school’s first ten principals had graduated from Oberlin, two from Harvard, and one each from Amherst and Dartmouth. Because of restricted academic opportunities for blacks, Dunbar could get teachers with very high qualifications, and even had Ph.D.’s among its teachers in the 1920s. Mary Gibson Hundley pointed out, in her history of Dunbar High School: “Federal standards providing equal salaries for all teachers, regardless of sex or race, attracted to Washington the best trained colored college graduates from Northern and Western colleges in the early days, and later from local colleges as well.”’

‘Over the entire 85-year history of academic success in this school, from 1870 to 1955, most of its graduates went on to higher education. This was very unusual for either black or white high-school graduates during that era. Because these were usually low-income students, most went to a local free teachers’ college or to relatively inexpensive Howard University, but significant numbers won scholarships to leading colleges and universities elsewhere.’

I could go on and would love to but then I would be quoting the entire book. Sowell’s point was, there were successful black schools, one in particular, where the students were held to tight standards, taught how to learn, given excellent instruction and the opportunity to do their best—and they did! It is possible!

I have just skimmed the surface of this marvelous book. There is so much more, much of which cannot be summarized in brief paragraphs, hence – the book! The quotes below shed further light.

Read it! I know I will read others by this amazing author!