thailandnsa.blogg.se - Black rednecks and white liberals essay

How racial barriers erected by “black rednecks” prevented black cultural elites from separating themselves as much as they would have liked from lower-class blacks.

Evidence that black pioneers and leaders of the early twentieth century were not just “the cream of the crop” but emerged from a culture very different from that in which most blacks were raised and educated.

How elements of transplanted Southern culture came to be seen as immutable features of a distinctive “black identity” - despite their mirroring very similar cultural patterns among Southern whites in times past.

Why the low test scores of some European immigrant children cannot be automatically attributed to their being new to the United States - and hard facts about how some kinds of cultures tend to produce lower mental test scores, whether the people in those cultures are black or white, American or European.

Proof that the peculiar subculture of Southern whites and that of blacks did not result from slavery.

Elsewhere he draws striking parallels between the tragedy of Jewish history and the bloody fate of Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and other “middleman minorities.” He even dares to explore the real history of slavery, asking why historians have produced volume after volume about Africans enslaved by white Americans - and all of American slavery’s historical and sociological fallout, real and imagined - while virtually ignoring the fact that slavery has been ubiquitous throughout history and is still practiced by Africans in Mauritania, the Sudan and parts of Nigeria. In numerous ways Sowell boldly challenges the racial orthodoxy that has prevailed largely unchallenged since the 1960s among leftist academics and the media elite. He ably supports his profoundly original and arresting vision with data that liberal analysts would prefer to ignore or have failed to grasp.

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. Lazy, lawless, and sexually immoral – that’s how Northern employers and cops regarded poor Southern “rednecks” as late as the 1940s and 1950s.