thomas sowell black rednecks white liberals

He tackles a broad spectrum of issues, sweeping aside entrenched liberal clich?s and dogmas. These essays bring you the most enlightening results of Sowell’s over twenty-five years of fearless and groundbreaking research on racial and cultural issues.

The Left, says Sowell, has turned dysfunctional “black redneck” culture into “a sacrosanct symbol of racial identity.” Why not? Their attempt to escape, as Sowell demonstrates in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” has been consistently and repeatedly hampered by white liberals. But while both white and black Southerners have moved up in class and affluence, Sowell notes that ghettos are still filled with “black rednecks” who have never escaped these self-destructive patterns. Many Southern blacks, Thomas Sowell explains, picked up the same habits. Many of Sowell's arguments-that the 20th-century resegregation of Northern cities was a response to the uncouthness of black rednecks migrating from the South, or that segregated black schools often succeeded by suppressing redneckism with civilized New England puritanism-will arouse controversy, but these vigorously argued essays present a stimulating challenge to the conventional wisdom.Lazy, lawless, and sexually immoral – that’s how Northern employers and cops regarded poor Southern “rednecks” as late as the 1940s and 1950s. And he defends Western culture itself against charges that it was uniquely culpable for slavery in fact, he contends, it was uniquely responsible for eradicating slavery.

Sowell also examines the cultural achievements of such ''middleman minorities'' as Jews and expatriate Chinese whose frequent persecution, he feels, represents an animus against capitalism. White liberals, gangsta-rap aficionados and others who lionize its ghetto remnants as an authentic black identity, Sowell contends, have their history wrong and help perpetuate cultural pathologies that hold blacks back. The title essay posits a ''black redneck'' culture inherited from the white redneck culture of the South and characterized by violent machismo, shiftlessness and disdain for schooling. Hoover Institution Fellow Sowell, author of Ethnic America, argues that ''internal'' cultural habits of industriousness, thriftiness, family solidarity and reverence for education often play a greater role in the success of ethnic minorities than do civil-rights laws or majority prejudices.

One of America's foremost black conservative intellectuals returns with this provocative collection of contrarian essays.

Thomas sowell black rednecks white liberals