Black Rednecks & White Liberals Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Black Rednecks and White Liberals

  REDNECK CULTURE

  BLACK REDNECKS

  WHITE LIBERALS

  SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

  Are Jews Generic?

  THE ECONOMIC ROLE

  SOCIAL PATTERNS

  SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

  The Real History of Slavery

  RACE AND SLAVERY

  WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES

  THE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF SLAVERY

  THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY

  SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

  Germans and History

  GERMANS BEFORE GERMANY

  GERMAN CULTURE

  THE GERMAN NATION

  SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

  Black Education - Achievements, Myths and Tragedies

  SCHOOLS: PAST ACHIEVEMENTS

  SCHOOLS: CONTEMPORARY ACHIEVEMENTS

  MYTHS AND TRAGEDIES

  HIGHER EDUCATION

  SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

  History versus Visions

  HISTORY AND CAUSATION

  COSMIC JUSTICE AND INJUSTICE

  THE WEST IN HISTORY

  SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright Page

  We do not live in the past, but the past in us.

  —U. B. Phillips

  Preface

  RACE AND RHETORIC HAVE GONE TOGETHER for so long that it is easy to forget that facts also matter—and these facts often contradict many widely held beliefs. Fantasies and fallacies about racial and ethnic issues have had a particularly painful and deadly history, so exposing some of them is more than an academic exercise.The history of intergroup strife has been written in blood in many countries around the world and across centuries of human history.

  The purpose of this book is to expose some of the more blatant misconceptions poisoning race relations in our time. The reasons for these misconceptions range from simple, innocent ignorance to reasons that are far from simple and far from innocent. Many of the facts cited here may be surprising or even startling to some readers, but they are not literally unknown to scholars; they have simply not been widely discussed in the media or even in academia. Too much has been assumed for too long and too little has been scrutinized.

  It may be optimistic merely to suggest that racial or ethnic issues can be discussed rationally. Evidence to the contrary is all too abundant in the strident and sweeping condemnations directed against many who have tried to do so.Yet there is also evidence in recent years of a growing willingness to consider views that differ from the racial orthodoxy that has prevailed largely unchallenged from the 1960s onward in intellectual circles and in the popular media. In any event, these essays summarize the conclusions of more than a quarter of a century of my research on racial and cultural issues, as well as drawing on the work of innumerable other scholars around the world.

  These writings do not pretend to be definitive. If they provoke thoughts on a subject where clichés and dogmas too often prevail, then this book will have achieved one of its major goals.

  However, even a work seeking primarily to untangle a complex set of historic social issues can provoke the fashionable question:“But what is your solution?”Yet there is not the slightest danger that there will be a shortage of solutions. On the contrary, an abundance of uninformed solutions has been one of our biggest social problems.

  Any serious consideration of social problems is likely to involve trade-offs rather than neat “solutions,” and trade-offs depend on values which can vary from one individual to the next. What trade-offs others might make after considering what these essays have to offer is not something that can be predicted, nor is such a prediction necessary.There is still much to be said for the ancient adage:“With all your getting, get understanding.” If this book can contribute to understanding on a subject where misunderstandings abound, then it will have done its work.

  Because this book is written for the general public, it does not feature long, convoluted sentences with escape clauses designed to prevent words from being twisted to mean something that they were never intended to mean. Common sense can be more readily expected when writing for the general public than when writing for the intelligentsia.To prevent the words in the essays that follow from being stretched, twisted, or given clever meanings, let me state here and now that these essays do not mean that (1) all Southern whites were or are rednecks, that (2) all black Americans today or in the past were or are black rednecks, that (3) Jews are exactly the same as the other groups with whom they are compared, or that (4) slavery is somehow morally acceptable because everyone was guilty of it. One cannot predict, much less forestall, all the clever misinterpretations that others might put on one’s words.The most that can be done is to alert honest people to the problem.

  While this book is not particularly large in bulk, its scope is worldwide and it goes back through centuries. No one can write a book of such scope without incurring many debts to others.These include scholars who devoted much of their careers to the study of some particular specialty, such as the history of agriculture in the Southern United States or the origins in Britain of various social groups in America. Such debts are too numerous to list here, quite aside from the danger of implicating other writers in conclusions which are my own.What must be acknowledged is my debt to the Hoover Institution, which has provided the conditions and the support which have facilitated my research and writing for more than two decades. For much of that time, my research assistant Na Liu has been an indispensable part of my work and, for this particular book, she has been very ably assisted by the dedicated work of Elizabeth Costa. In the end, however, I must and will take full responsibility for the conclusions reached in the essays that follow.

  THOMAS SOWELL

  Hoover Institution

  Stanford University

  Black Rednecks and White Liberals

  These people are creating a terrible problem in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or other, they absolutely refuse to accommodate themselves to any kind of decent, civilized life.

  THIS WAS SAID IN 1956 IN INDIANAPOLIS, not about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South. Nor was Indianapolis unique in this respect.A 1951 survey in Detroit found that white Southerners living there were considered “undesirable” by 21 percent of those surveyed, compared to 13 percent who ranked blacks the same way. In the late 1940s, a Chicago employer said frankly,“I told the guard at the plant gate to tell the hillbillies that there were no openings.”When poor whites from the South moved into Northern cities to work in war plants during the Second World War,“occasionally a white southerner would find that a flat or furnished room had ‘just been rented’ when the landlord heard his southern accent.”1

  More is involved here than a mere parallel between blacks and Southern whites. What is involved is a common subculture that goes back for centuries, which has encompassed everything from ways of talking to attitudes toward education, violence, and sex—and which originated not in the South, but in those parts of the British Isles from which white Southerners came.That culture long ago died out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American South. Then it largely died out among both white and black Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettos.

  It is not uncommon for a culture to survive longer where it is transplanted and to retain character
istics lost in its place of origin. The French spoken in Quebec and the Spanish spoken in Mexico contain words and phrases that have long since become archaic in France and Spain.2 Regional German dialects persisted among Germans living in the United States after those dialects had begun to die out in Germany itself.3 A scholar specializing in the history of the South has likewise noted among white Southerners “archaic word forms,”4 while another scholar has pointed out the continued use in that region of “terms that were familiar at the time of the first Queen Elizabeth.”5 The card game whist is today played almost exclusively by blacks, especially low-income blacks, though in the eighteenth century it was played by the British upper classes, and has since then evolved into bridge.The history of the evolution of this game is indicative of a much broader pattern of cultural evolution in much more weighty things.

  Southern whites not only spoke the English language in very different ways from whites in other regions, their churches, their roads, their homes, their music, their education, their food, and their sex lives were all sharply different from those of other whites.The history of this redneck or cracker culture is more than a curiosity. It has contemporary significance because of its influence on the economic and social evolution of vast numbers of people—millions of blacks and whites—and its continuing influence on the lives and deaths of a residual population in America’s black ghettos which has still not completely escaped from that culture.

  From early in American history, foreign visitors and domestic travelers alike were struck by cultural contrasts between the white population of the South and that of the rest of the country in general—and of New England in particular. In the early nineteenth century,Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted white Southerners with white Northerners in his classic Democracy in America and Frederick Law Olmsted did the same later in his books about his travels through the antebellum South, notably Cotton Kingdom. De Tocqueville set a pattern when he concluded that “almost all the differences which may be noticed between the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern states have originated in slavery.”6 Olmsted likewise attributed the differences between white Southerners and white Northerners to the existence of slavery in the South.7 So did widely read antebellum Southern writer Hinton Helper, who declared that “slavery, and nothing but slavery, has retarded the progress and prosperity of our portion of the Union.”8

  Just as they explained regional differences between whites by slavery, so many others in a later era would explain differences between blacks and whites nationwide by slavery. Plausible as these explanations might seem in both cases, they will not stand up under a closer scrutiny of history.

  It is perhaps understandable that the great, overwhelming moral curse of slavery has presented a tempting causal explanation of the peculiar subculture of Southern whites, as well as that of blacks.Yet this same subculture had existed among Southern whites and their ancestors in those parts of the British Isles from which they came, long before they had ever seen a black slave.The nature of this subculture, among people who were called “rednecks” and “crackers” in Britain before they ever saw America, needs to be explored before turning to the question of its current status among ghetto blacks and how developments in the larger society have affected its evolution.

  REDNECK CULTURE

  Emigration from Britain, like other migrations around the world, was not random in either its origins or its destinations. Most of the Britons who migrated to colonial Massachusetts, for example, came from within a 60-mile radius of the town of Haverhill in East Anglia. The Virginia aristocracy came from different localities in southern and western England. Most of the common white people of the South came from the northern borderlands of England—for centuries a no-man’s land between Scotland and England—as well as from the Scottish highlands and from Ulster County, Ireland. All these fringe areas were turbulent, if not lawless, regions, where none of the contending forces was able to establish full control and create a stable order. Whether called a “Celtic fringe” or “north Britons,” these were people from outside the cultural heartland of England, as their behavior on both sides of the Atlantic showed. Before the era of modern transportation and communication, sharp regional differences were both common and persistent.

  In some of the counties of colonial Virginia, from nearly three-quarters to four-fifths of the people came from northern Britain and similar proportions were found in some of the counties of Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as in parts of both the Carolinas.9 Although they predominated in many parts of the South, such people also had some Northern enclaves in colonial America, notably western Pennsylvania, where Ulster Scots settled. What is at least equally important as where particular peoples settled is when they emigrated from the borderlands, Ulster, and the Scottish highlands.

  Scotland in particular progressed enormously in the eighteenth century.The level from which it began may be indicated by the fact that a visitor to late eighteenth-century Edinburgh found it noteworthy that its residents no longer threw sewage from their chamber pots out their windows into the street—something that passersby had long had to be alert for, to avoid being splattered.10 Such crude and unsanitary living had long been characteristic of earlier times, when rural Scots lived in the same primitive shelters with their animals, and vermin abounded.11 A similar lack of concern with cleanliness was found among others in the borderlands of Britain—and among their descendants on the other side of the Atlantic in the antebellum South.12 For example, a nineteenth-century politician “built up a political machine in the poor white districts of Mississippi” by such practices as this:He did not resort to any conventional tactics of kissing dirty babies, but he pleased mothers and fathers in log cabins by taking their children upon his lap and searching for red bugs, lice, and other vermin.13

  Back in the British Isles, the life of the Scottish people was transformed dramatically, from the masses to the elites, as they advanced from being one of the least educated to one of the most educated peoples in Europe. However, what is significant here is that much of the migration to the American South occurred before these sweeping social transformations. This timing was crucial, as Professor Grady McWhiney has pointed out in his book Cracker Culture: …had the South been peopled by nineteenth-century Scots, Welshmen, and Ulstermen, the course of Southern history would doubtless have been radically different. Nineteenth-century Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants did in fact fit quite comfortably into northern American society. (Significantly the Irish, who retained their Celtic ways, did not.) But only a trickle of the flood of nineteenth-century immigrants came into the South; the ancestors of the vast majority of Southerners arrived in America before the Anglicization of Scotland, Wales, and Ulster had advanced very far.14

  In earlier centuries, Scotland was a poor and backward country, like Wales and Ireland—and like the turbulent northern borderlands of England, where the Scots and the English fought wars and committed atrocities against each other for centuries. Local feuding clans and freebooting marauders kept this region in an uproar, even when there were no military hostilities between the English and Scottish kingdoms. Ulster County had a different kind of turbulence, as the English and Scottish settlers there encountered the hostility and terrorist activities of the conquered, dispossessed, and embittered indigenous Irish population.

  These were the parts of Britain from which most people migrated to the American South, before the political and cultural unification of the British Isles or the standardization of the English language.The rednecks of these regions were what one social historian has called “some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.”15

  In this world of impotent laws, daily dangers, and lives that could be snuffed out at any moment, the snatching at whatever fleeting pleasures presented themselves was at least understandable. Certainly prudence and long-range planning of one’s life had no such pay-off in this chaotic world as in more settled and orderly societies under the protection of effective laws
. Books, businesses, technology, and science were not the kinds of things likely to be promoted or admired in the world of the rednecks and crackers. Manliness and the forceful projection of that manliness to others—an advertising of one’s willingness to fight and even to put one’s life on the line—were at least plausible means of gaining whatever measure of security was possible in a lawless region and a violent time.The kinds of attitudes and cultural values produced by centuries of living under such conditions did not disappear very quickly, even when social evolution in North America slowly and almost imperceptibly created a new and different world with different objective prospects.

  What the rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going—and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values.