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May 17, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: 'Black Rednecks and White Liberals' Tells Real Story of Racial
History, Black Education, Slavery, 'Generic Jews', 'Visions' vs. History
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Hinton News Network Book Critic
Hinton (HNN) —With a title like "Black Rednecks and White Liberals,"
(Encounter Books, 383 pages, $25.95) there was no way I would pass up
reviewing a new book by one of my favorite academics, Thomas Sowell.
He's also a syndicated newspaper columnist; one of my pleasures as an op-ed
editor was placing a Tom Sowell column on the op-ed page of the Beckley
Register-Herald. He's often called a black conservative, but I think he's
actually a writer and scholar who tells the truth in the face of
anti-Western Culture bashing – Political Correctness, if you will.
The provocative title derives from the lead essay in this collection of six
lengthy essays on ethnicity and history as opposed to what Sowell calls
"visions": preconceived ideas of what history should be. The mantra of those
infatuated with "visions" is "don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's
made up." Practitioners selectively choose facts to back up their
preconceived ideas of what history should be. Unfortunately for students in
high school and college these days, it is almost impossible to find a
teacher who isn't on a "visions" quest.
In addition to the title essay, the collection includes: "Are Jews Generic?"
"The Real History of Slavery;" "Germans and History;" "Black Education:
Achievements, Myths and Tragedies;" and "History versus Visions." What some blacks and fellow-traveling white liberals believe is "authentic"
black culture – including speaking with an exaggerated Southern accent – is
actually "acting white," Sowell writes. Blacks who use "ax" for "ask" or put
on the kind of minstrel act I saw Whoopi Goldberg display on cable the
other night are really continuing the kind of "cracker" or "redneck"
behavior that originated by whites in the British Isles centuries before
their descendants came to the new world.
Sowell writes that "this way of talking was common centuries ago in those
regions of Britain from which white Southerners came. They brought with them
more than their own dialect. They brought a whole way of life that made
antebellum white Southerners very different from white Northerners."
This "way of life" was characterized by sexual promiscuity, illegitimacy,
loud talking, fighting – the same kind of gangsta behavior that some blacks
consider "authentic" culture. Certainly not Dr. Sowell (University of
Chicago, 1968) nor Dr. Bill Cosby, both of whom have spoken out against a
culture that puts down blacks who study diligently, use grammatical English
– like West Virginia native Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard – or
believe in speaking out against a culture of victimization without an end in
sight.
While New England and New York and Pennsylvania were settled by people from
southern England, a much more restrained part of the country – or in the
case of New York, by people from Holland – the "borderers" -- from the
north of England and Scotland -- who brought their rambunctious,
anti-intellectual culture to the South influenced the entire region. My own
native Midwest was settled by New Englanders and Europeans such as
Scandinavians and Germans who valued rigorous education. To this day,
Midwesterners have some of the highest test scores and best schools in the
nation.
Southerners were much more apt to engage in dueling and feuding – he
mentions the Hatfield-McCoy fracas -- than New Englanders, Sowell says. He
adds that there is a division between blacks who were "free persons of
color" before the Civil War – many of whom were slave owners themselves –
and those who were liberated – something that's probably not Politically
Correct to say, even though W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier, among
other historians, have described this "talented tenth." Blacks of West
Indian background, like Colin Powell, also came from a culture devoid of
"rednecks" and "crackers." In addition, many free blacks and recently freed
slaves were educated at schools and colleges run by New Englanders, a good
number of them abolitionists who instilled in their students a love of
learning and correct grammar. Howard University derived from this experience
and era.
Sowell, a North Carolina native who grew up in Harlem and served as a
photographer in the Marine Corps during the Korean War (check out the
wonderful photographs on his Web site), recounts how he hated a teacher who
constantly corrected his speech patterns, only to thank this teacher
afterward when he attended Harvard, where he earned his bachelor's;
Columbia, where he earned a master's and Chicago for his doctorate.
In a newspaper column describing the issue of "black rednecks and white
liberals," Sowell wrote that "White liberals come into this story because,
since the 1960s, they have been aiding and abetting a counterproductive
ghetto lifestyle that is essentially a remnant of the redneck culture which
handicapped Southern whites and blacks alike for generations." He added in the column: "Teachers are not supposed to correct black youngsters who speak 'black English' and no one is supposed to be judgmental
about the whole lifestyle of black rednecks. In that culture, belligerence
is considered being manly and crudity is considered cool, while being
civilized is regarded as 'acting white.'"
While the title essay will undoubted garner the most publicity and attention
for Sowell's outstanding collection, the other five essays are no less
important. The one on Germans and history is particularly appropriate as we
mark the 60th anniversary of V-E Day and the defeat of the Germans. Sowell
says Germans were not unique in their anti-Semitism, but were particularly
influenced by the racial policies of the Nazi movement and were restrained
from opposing these policies by the totalitarian nature of Nazism and by
peer pressure.
I'm more of the Daniel J. Goldhagen school of interpretation which suggests
that "ordinary" Germans went along with the persecution of Jews and other
minorities like gays and gypsies because Germans are good at following
orders and don't wish to stand out as different. Too, their law-abiding
qualities – a little rambunctious, Southern culture would have been good in
Germany around 1933 – tilted "ordinary Germans" – to use Goldhagen's wording
-- toward obeying horrendous acts because they were "legal." Also, I don't
think Sowell devotes enough space to the present-day rising tide of
anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere, including college campuses like his
own Columbia University. But this is probably a topic for yet another essay.
The essay on black education will be controversial in many ways, including
the suggestion that white New England culture was a good influence on newly
freed blacks and free blacks. This flies in the face of today's popular
multicultural ethos, which says that no culture is superior to any other
one. Tell that to people named Latisha or Jamaal trying to get a job in
corporate America!
Sowell also devotes much of the essay to praising pre-integration Dunbar
High School in Washington, D.C. It was scholastically rigorous, as demanded
by parents who wanted their children to get the best education possible. For
much of its history, Dunbar students outperformed white students in
segregated D.C., he says.
To those who say predominantly black schools need more money, Sowell points
to today's D.C., which has perhaps the nation's highest per capita
expenditure for education and which produces miserable results, at the very
bottom of the heap with once great public schools like those of urban
California. He contrasts this with pre-integration Dunbar, which was
constantly starved for monetary resources but which produced outstanding
students. Rigor in education, as in other spheres, pays off, he indicates.
The essay on Jews also includes other ethnic/religious groups including
Lebanese, Nigerian Ibos, overseas Chinese, and ethnic Indians from the
Subcontinent who function as economic middlemen in countries in which they
are a tiny minority. The Chinese of Indonesia or Malaysia don't consider
themselves the "Jews of Asia," as they are sometimes dubbed. Those who think
racism is limited to whites vs. people of color should consider the
expulsion and/or persecution of the ethnic Indians in Uganda and Kenya and
Fiji, Sowell says. Jews and other middlemen performed a necessary function
in countries and the countries that treated them fairly – including, say,
the United States and Brazil – prospered accordingly.
That pairing of the U.S. and Brazil comes up in the essay on slavery.
Slavery ended in Brazil a generation later than in the U.S., without a civil
war. In fact, the U.S. was the only country that fought a war over the
issue. In much of the world, enslaving the weak by the strong – regardless
of race – was an accepted fact of life, not worthy of questioning. This was
particularly true in the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Muslims who enslaved
Circassian whites from the Caucasus region, as well as blacks from Africa.
Many of the Circassians were female sex slaves, while many blacks ended up
as court eunuchs. Sowell argues in this essay that historians in the U.S.
and elsewhere concentrate on American slavery – the "Roots" version of
history – to the almost complete exclusion of Islamic slavery, which is
still practiced today. This is undoubtedly because in the writings of
today's "visions" historians, Muslims get a free pass on all their vices –
something those in the West or Eurocentric cultures don't get.
To those seeking a straightforward, backed by facts and documentation view
of ethnicity, I recommend "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." I also
recommend the dozen or so other books by Tom Sowell, 74, currently the Rose
and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. He is the classic breath of fresh air from the miasma of today's
Academe.
Publisher's Web site: www.encounterbooks.com
Sowell's Web site: www.tsowell.com
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