Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell

This new unpredictable book by Thomas Sowell confronts many of the long- existing assumptions about blacks, Jews, Germans, slavery, and education. The book has been openly written, strongly reasoned and supported with an amazing collection of documented facts. It took on not only the popular intellectuals of our times but also highlighted historic interpreters of American life such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted.

The book is a series of long essays, presenting an in-depth glance at main beliefs behind many missteps and dangerous actions, policies, and trends (Dutch, 2005). It gives the reader an eye-opening insight into the historical progress of the ghetto culture that is incorrectly seen today as a sole black identity -- a culture which is cheered on toward self-destruction by those white liberals who regard themselves as "friends" of blacks. Thus, the book is one of America's leading black conservative intellectuals' returns with this challenging collection of contrarian essays (Dutch, 2005).

Analysis of the book

Most of the Sowell's arguments presented that the 20th-century resegregation of Northern cities was a reaction to the crudeness of black rednecks that migrated from the South. However, these vigorously argued essays presents a rousing challenge to the conventional wisdom (Dutch, 2005).

The author pointed out that even though over the generations most of the Southern blacks and whites moved away from the redneck culture that gave its destructive counterproductive effects has only survived today among poorest and least educated ghetto blacks and, since the 1960s, it has been respected by today's white liberal leaders (Dutch, 2005). However, many liberal intellectuals celebrate black ghetto culture as "authentically" black and condemn any criticism of it as "blaming the victim." As Sowell puts it magnificently:

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 the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies."

The book is a great thesis, documented with thousands of references, signifying the fact that 'racism' alone is not responsible for the ghetto culture, but also 'culture' itself in the South is also responsible. The reason is as to how the Britain lived in the suburbs of England before moving into the antebellum South, carrying their lawless disordered culture with them (Dutch, 2005).

Thomas also detailed as to how slaves lived under the rule of their masters, and how the black culture in reality had their own privileged / light skinned class that constantly categorized against the dark and uneducated blacks that were woven into the cracker culture from the beginning (Dutch, 2005). Furthermore, he gave a comparison of the northern blacks and southern blacks, demonstrating as to how the northern blacks were more educated, gained higher on tests, and had a higher graduation rate. The reason was because 'north' had 4x more schools than the south (Dutch, 2005).

He commented that racism in the north began when ghetto blacks moved to north, being that both whites and blacks were not much comfortable with the redneck culture within their own community. Also, it was due to the migration of the blacks from the South to North after the liberation of the slaves that racism became common in the north as well as there were many black slave holders, particularly in the southern regions of Louisiana (Dutch, 2005).

He further noted on the history of slavery, which according to him was the Western civilization itself that took a stand against slavery around the world, and spent enormous amount of time and effort in order to impel this ideology to free slaves from South America into Africa and throughout the world. In his book he specifically noted that the Britain was the primary force behind this movement.

Furthermore, he highlighted the fact that America was the only country that used the issue of black/white-slavery as a political based on race. However, slavery was never controlled to one race in other countries as well (Amazaon). For example, the Arabs incarcerated Europeans, while Asians imprisoned other Asians. All this is still happening in some parts of Africa.