Calling a black redneck a black redneck

"The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it," writes Thomas Sowell in Opinion Journal, drawing on a professional lifetime of fearless research to demolish CW arguments that would blame behavioral differences between our black and white populations on either race or racism:

The people who settled in the South came from different regions of Britain than the people who settled in the North -- and they differed as radically on the other side of the Atlantic as they did here -- that is, before they had ever seen a black slave . . . American writers from both the antebellum South and the North commented on the great differences between the white people in the two regions. So did famed French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville.

Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?

Culture is left.

Sowell's new book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals -- wherein he develops the thesis outlined in his Opinion Journal piece --goes on sale today. He continues:

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.

Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks -- not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.

Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture -- and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with.

Do any of you history buffs out there know exactly which part of Britain gave rise to this "authentic" black culture? 'Guess we'll have to buy the book to find out. Goomp introduced us to Dr. Sowell way back when. It will make a perfect round-robin Father's Day gift.

Comments

[goomp]

Thanks in advance. Just because human nature must be understood doesn't mean that culture has no effect.

[Teresa]

I love Thomas Sowell. The best part about Walter Williams doing a sub for Rush Limbaugh on the radio is that he will nearly always squeeze in a half hour chat with Thomas Sowell. It's always a pleasure listening to him as well as reading.

Last time he was on the radio with Walter, he was talking about some fascinating history - since I missed the beginning I didn't realize that it very likely comes from this new book. I'm going to have to go out and buy it now. Thanks for the heads up Sissy!

[Donna B.]

My guess is it's Scots-Irish culture he's talking about. Perhaps mainly Irish since the potato famine sent nearly 500,000 Irish immigrants to the U.S. in the 1840s (though how many of those made it to the South, I'm not sure).

I'll have to read the book now.

Though it's been maligned as racist, Cracker Culture, by Grady McWhiney (a TCU prof, if I remember correctly) outlines many of the good-bad traits we Southerners got from the Celt descendants (including many Englishmen) that settled in the South.

The influence of the native tribes who were pushed into Oklahoma shouldn't be overlooked either. I guess I'll have to read the book to find out if Sowell takes that into consideration.

[The Prop]

See "Born Fighting : How the Scots-Irish Shaped America" by James Webb. Webb has a much more positive spin on that culture, which originated in the Borders, the region where Scotland and England come together. It was transferred to Northern Ireland/Ulster after Cromwell, and from there to the American colonies in the early 1700s.

With the good coastal and Piedmont land already taken, they made their way inland up into the mountains and formed the Appalachian subculture.

That is, of course, a gross over-simplification.

[Sissy Willis]

Then there's Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World, whose thesis is quite the opposite. Hmmm.

[Lydia]

Well, I would say that it's important to note that racism did create the conditions that allowed "black rednecks" to become isolated in ghettoes and from mainstream culture. I find myself wondering if whites with Confederate-flag bumper stickers and blacks with ultra-nationalist tendencies aren't, indeed, two sides of the same coin.

[Sissy Willis]

Interesting question. Maybe there will be some answers in Sowell's book.

[Leo Hodges]

See the Scots-Irish portion of historian David Hackett Fischer's monumental Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which supports Dr. Sowell's thesis. My own heritage is Southern white redneck, but today I can proudly say, "I'm a Sowell man."

[Sissy Willis]

Thanks so much, Leo.

[Andy Greene]

The similarities in music are certainly striking. Listen to an "old time" fiddle tune from Appalachia and then listen to Irish or Scottish fiddle music.

The new phenomenon, though is Green Rednecks. We are black and white and are paying a little more attention to the land before it vanishes.

Andy Greene
Green Living Tips for Rednecks