Author build a compelling web of arguments. While initially some ideas seem to go against my own values, the book forces you to challenge some of your preconceptions. It touches on tabu subjects but avoid hyper politicizing these. Worth a read if you have an open mind and don’t mind being challenged.

Did you ever have a teacher or professor who could talk for an hour, only it felt like five minutes and you remembered every word said? Dr. Sowell is like that. The book was fascinating overall. The language is very clear and accessible. It’s included in Audible Plus; the downside is that it is hard to take notes with an audiobook.

It’s basically an anthropological examination of 1) “cracker” culture, 2) the causes of racism, and 3) how various immigrant groups have been treated in history. It’s mostly apolitical, only criticizing those who advocate lowering academic/hiring standards for blacks because they’re supposedly incapable of competing with nonblacks, and criticizing revisionist history that insists the U.S. is the ONLY place slavery every existed and the ONLY place racism has existed.

Highlights/Summary:
Cracker culture started in the Scottish highlands. These people became the majority of U.S. slaveholders. It’s a culture that eschews hard work (but not hard play), education and innovation. It is easily offended, often retaliating with violence (hence multi-generational family feuds). Some freed slaves adopted this culture, which now has a home in black ghetto culture. This is where you see black-on-black violence and where black kids are scorned if they do well in school. Ironically, this culture is seen as “authentically black,” and criticizing it is racist. There was a time when it was illegal to educate blacks and teach them to read. Now many reject education and literacy on their own.

Slavery has existed in every culture, every society as far back as history goes. Only with the Enlightenment did people begin to question its morality. To this day, Western civilization is the only one to eliminate it. Racism/anti-immigrant sentiment is usually a result of culture clashes, especially when the immigrant group becomes successful.

When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.

What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.

Language: Clean
Sexual Content: None
Violence/Gore: Mild
Harm to Animals: None
Harm to Children: Brief but brutal descriptions of infanticide
Other (Triggers): Slavery and discrimination discussed

Wow, what an achievement. Though a more accurate title might have been "Essays in Ethnology", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" consists of six amazing essays, which collectively constitute the best book I've ever read. Every page presents startling, important, and little known facts that are apparently little known because they contradict the prevailing narrative about race and ethnicity. Did you know, for example, that:

* "...labor force participation rates were higher among non-whites than among whites in 1920 and 1930"?

* Hatred of the Jews is but one example of almost universal hatred of "middleman minorities", other examples of which include the Ibos in Nigeria, the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Africa, the Japanese in Peru, and the Indians in Burma?

* "At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some European slaves were still being sold on the auction block in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States"?

* Slavery has been universal in human history, such that we are all almost inescapably the descendants of slaves and slave-owners alike?

* "While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history — Western civilization"?

* "Europeans became the destroyers of slavery around the world, over the bitter opposition of Africans, Arabs, Asians, and others"?

* Slavery was destroyed as an institution only because "Western civilization had the power to prevail against all other civilizations" at that point in time?

I could give literally hundreds more examples. And Dr. Sowell marshals all his facts (supported by more than 60 pages of notes) into thoroughly compelling arguments rendered in exceptionally clean prose. This book should be required reading in every high school in America. Superb.

This book discusses, among other things, aspects of race and culture that I have long noticed for myself, and it does so from the point of view of culture being far more decisive than race.  For a long time [1], I have noticed the strong similarities between the quick resort to violence on the part of many young (and not-so-young) black men and the similarly hot-blooded culture of the Southern white male of the antebellum period and beyond.  Other writers have taken that particular culture and shown that it was a part of the Celtic fringe of the British isles long before it was transmitted to the United States.  It is also true that such a hot-blooded culture of honor is present to a high degree in the Middle East and Afghanistan and many other countries where poverty and ignorance reign to a high degree but where one had better not embarrass someone else or bring dishonor upon them.  The author notes that the state of blacks in the contemporary United States has more to do with culture, namely a less than ideal culture that blacks have picked up from white neighbors and former masters, than it has to do with racism and discrimination.  I for, one, agree with him.

This book is divided into a series of a few fairly large essays.  After a preface, the first of the essays marks Sowell's thoughtful discussion of the relationship between black rednecks, who adopted the prickly sense of honor of the white males around them, including a certain hostility to education, and the white liberals who see them as useful mascots and as ways to sublimate their own hostility to American culture but who do not necessarily wish to see improvement in the state of blacks, which often requires cultural change as well as a focus on education and self-discipline.  After that the author turns to the fate of the Jews as reflecting a common fate among middlemen who are simultaneously necessary and resented by the societies around them.  This leads to a discussion of the real history of slavery that does not only blame the west, and an essay about Germans and history and the way in which Germans do not deserve to be blamed for the sins of Hitler.  The author turns his attention to black education and how early achievements were ruined by political behaviors starting in the 1960's.  Then the author closes this 300 or so page book with a discussion of history as opposed to visions and then the book ends with notes and an index.

There are a lot of things to appreciate about this book.  Sowell writes with a firm awareness of historical context as well as considerable nuance, especially when it comes to his discussion of race and education and politics.  He demonstrates that DeBois and Booker T. Washington were far more alike than they are often viewed to be, each focusing on part of a shared whole that involved academic education for black elites as well as vocational education for the illiterate black masses as the time that would help build an economic base for further education efforts.  The author's awareness of history and context allows him to paint a picture of the distortion that so much of identity politics has when it comes to practical benefit.  The author shows himself very interested in serving the practical benefit of his people and reminding them (and us) that genuine success requires hard work, discipline, and a mastery of the facts that are present in given fields.  There are no shortcuts to success that do not involve these critical elements, and in his devotion to hard work and factual detail as well as strong logic and firm rhetoric, he finds himself implacably opposed to mainstream leftist culture.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

I don't know enough about these areas to be overly confident about the empirical studies and claims, but it strikes me as troublesome that I hadn't come across such discussion before, particularly the aspects about urban education. While there are a few claims in the book that seem an overstep, at least on first glance, I'd be very keen to read more into the matters and also hear critiques of his analysis.

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.

n  ‘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.’n

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!

I tend to follow experts in their fields... which often doesn't translate to other fields, as many people successful in one field turn out to be not that knowledgeable or skilled in another. Thomas Sowell is, for me, one of the few exceptions i know of. I Started reading his books because of his economics knowledge but i can so relate to his way of viewing the world that I can't stop following his books even when they're not directly in the field. Why? Because unlike many others he doesn't take things for granted, and instead applies solid research to presuppositions which many others take for granted.
This book hasn't only opened my eyes to many historical truths, facts about about the actions and structures of whole societies but even more valuably about the HUGE impacts that certain ways of thinking have across humanity, often regardless of place, time, biological or social backgrounds.
The book feels huge as it goes through several apparently independent sections jumping across fields like cultural European very white roots of some ghetto behaviors, the historic costs of violent machismo, the universal hate towards middleman minorities, analysis weather or not stigmas associated with certain peoples like the Germans are in fact reasonable and so on, the biggest and most costly totally surprising shift in thinking of humanity that i never knew of in terms of slaves...
More than once i've wondered what the unifying theme of the book might be... hard to say, but for me, personally, it is being blown away by just how huge an impact ways of thinking/behavior (with an accent on the latter, not very into intellectuals) cross any and all borders of space and time, for bad and for good.

Kartais reikia paskaityti ir kam ne visiškai pritari. "Far right" arba griežtai dešinysis požiūris į rasizmą ir neapykantą JAV ir kitose pasaulio vietose - parašyta dar 2005 m., dešimtmečiu anksčiau prieš Trump'o erą ir radikalėjimo tendencijas.

I read Black Rednecks and White Liberals because it is recommended by the Goodreads reviewer Jamie in his article  “The Liberal Arts Crash Course”. Jamie writes that the book challenges “conventional readings of history, culture, and modern society,” particularly compared to what is taught at most American universities. Black Rednecks and White Liberals contains a great deal of information that will be new and surprising to most readers. The author, African-American economist Thomas Sowell, is socially conservative and economically libertarian, and the material challenges my more progressive biases. I disagree with most of Sowell’s policy suggestions found in this book, but I can’t deny the author’s scholarship. I also can’t deny that I feel that I have a “a more complete picture of society and history” after reading Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The chapters on the white British "redneck" origins of modern African-American "ghetto" culture are particularly interesting, as are the chapters that provide a global perspective on slavery.

Title: Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Author: Thomas Sowell
Year 2005
Genre: Nonfiction - Historical sociology, economics, & politics
Page count: 372 pages
Date(s) read: 1/7/23 - 1/10/23
Reading journal entry #14 in 2023


Some quotes that stood out to me:

“No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.”

“Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.”

"The racial fanaticism of Hitler and the Nazi movement … were not historically distinct characteristics of Germans as a people. On the contrary, the rise of such a man as the leader of such a people should serve as a permanent warning to all people everywhere who are charmed by charisma or aroused by rhetoric."

“Often it is those who are most critical of a Eurocentric view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and shortcomings of the human race.”

“It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.”

“What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.”

“Lack of awareness or concern for the context and constraints of the times is only part of the problem of those today assessing such historic figures as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln - or the American nation as a whole.”

“Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very different circumstances, including serious dangers.”

“...middleman activities have usually not been seen as producing wealth, but only as appropriating preexisting wealth, since the middleman does not visibly create a material thing. Neither does anyone else create or destroy matter, except for a few nuclear physicists. Turning iron ore into steel products is not creating a material thing but only changing its form to something that people want more. That is precisely what middlemen do when they make goods or money available earlier than otherwise through retailing, credit, or loans. They change the time when things become available.”

“...that does not distinguish Germans from Europeans in general—or from human beings in general, when it comes to vile or vicious things being said or done to any number of ethnic or other minorities in countries around the world.”

“Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly. Where the quest for injustice is overriding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence.”

“With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.”

“White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.”

Title: Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Author: Thomas Sowell
Year 2005
Genre: Nonfiction - Historical sociology, economics, & politics
Page count: 372 pages
Date(s) read: 1/7/23 - 1/10/23
Reading journal entry #14 in 2023

If you are a white person looking for a black friend to tell you, “No, you aren’t imagining it. Whites really are better than Blacks.” This is the book for you.
He provides plenty of numbers to back up his take, but those who have done any real research in this area will see that he ignores critical caveats to his statistics, sets up straw men, and in the end is just not convincing beyond the surface level of confirming your biases.

Thomas Sowell is a brilliant and important thinker. As a collection of essays, it's hard to rate this book as a whole, so I rated each chapter and took the average. The last two essays are fantastic.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals *** (I think Sowell's thesis is mostly correct here, but his reasoning is too broad to make his case well.)
Are Jews Generic? ****
The Real History of Slavery ****
Germans and History ****
Black Education: Achievements, Myths, and Tragedies *****
History versus Visions *****

This is a collection of six long essays written by Sowell to “expose some of the more blatant misconceptions poisoning race relations in our time”. These misconceptions are not explicitly stated in a unified way. I wish he had. In any case, his arguments are cogent and compelling. And he knows what the frequently used attacks would be and pre-empted to some extent: the point was not to deny the existence of racism or offer “solutions”, but to clarify the facts and causal relationships.

In the first essay, the main point (it’s always dangerous to oversimplify) is that a lot of discrimination we see in society is in fact against a cracker/redneck *culture*, rather than racially based. This culture is brought to the antebellum south by those immigrated from northern England (where it was the cracker culture). This culture impact a large portion of southern population. It happens that while 1/3 of whites live in the south, 90% of the blacks did. The misdiagnosis the issue (by white liberals) didn’t help address the root cause, but could make things worse. For instance, scapegoating the police can hurt law-abiding blacks while perpetuating cracker culture. (Scapegoating police probably exists, but racism in the police force is there too.)

In “Are Jews generic?”, he showed that some cultures have a commonality that lead to better economic results. He mentioned Jews, Chinese minority in S. E. Asia, and Armenians in Ottoman Empire. These minorities often worked much harder and started in industries that do not require large capital (because they had none). Yet their later success is often portrayed by demagogues as some unfair advantage and that the majority was somehow being denied access. The hatred towards these minority middleman groups is not about their economic success but how the success was obtained — because it raises painful questions why the rest can not.

Lest we think such demagogues are not dangerous, Sowell explained in “Germans and History” that Nazism is not some historically distinct characteristics of the German people. If anything, the Germans are probably above average if not model citizens. If Hitler can happen to them, why are we safe.