Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Over the last thirty years, Thomas Sowell has established himself as one of our most candid and insightful commentators on race and ethnicity. Black Rednecks and White Liberals is his masterwork. The title piece demonstrates the breadth of Sowell's learning and the audacity of his argumentation. As late as the 1940s and 1950s, he shows, poor Southern 'rednecks' were regarded by Northern employers and law enforcement officials as lazy, lawless, and sexually immoral. This pattern, part of their Scotch-Irish heritage, was repeated by blacks with whom they shared a subculture in the South. Over the last half century poor whites and most blacks have moved up in class and affluence, but the ghetto remains filled with 'black rednecks'. Their attempt to escape, Sowell shows, is hampered by white liberals who turn dysfunctional 'black redneck' culture into 'a sacrosanct symbol of racial identity'. Sowell also tackles questions such as whether Jews are 'generic' in a piece that shows that the tragedy of Jewish history is different in scale but not in kind from the bloody fate of Ibos in Nigeria, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and other 'middleman minorities'. have obsessed over Africans enslaved by white Americans but virtually ignored the fact slavery has been ubiquitous throughout history and is still practiced in countries such as Mauritania, the Sudan and parts of Nigeria. Black Rednecks and White Liberals dispels cliches and questions dogma. It shows why critics have routinely used the word 'masterpiece' to describe Thomas Sowell's works.