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Black Rednecks and White Liberals | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Encounter Books
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 25104
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 360
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.4
ISBN: 1594030863
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.800973
EAN: 9781594030864
ASIN: 1594030863
Publication Date: June 25, 2005
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Product Description
Challenges dogma and dispels cliches that have long clung to topics involving race, ethnicity and culture.
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In a series of long essays, Black Rednecks and White Liberals presents an in-depth look at many of the long-prevailing assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans, about slavery, and about education. Plainly written, powerfully reasoned, and backed with a startling array of documented facts, Black Rednecks and White Liberals takes on not only the trendy intellectuals of our times but also such historic interpreters of American life as Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted. Black Rednecks and White Liberals deftly challenges dogma and dispels cliches that have long clung to topics involving race, ethnicity and culture.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
 The Smartest Man in America August 1, 2008
The more Thomas Sowell I read, the more I want. Few writers are capable of conveying so much information in so few words. Dr. Sowell concisely relates each fact while composing a greater message, which ultimately stimulates the reader to explore new avenues and ask more questions. The "black redneck" concept debunks the myth of inner city ghetto "culture," which is nothing more than a relocation of white southern redneck "culture." In Black Rednecks, the section on slavery is particularly compelling due to the radical departure from the standard of "the white man's history of its treatment of sub-Saharan Africans." Sowell's topic actually is the whole of slavery. Dr. Sowell's examination of German cultural evolution toward WWII and since is novel and insightful. It is tremendously gratifying to sit down with the work of an author who never disappoints.
 Rednecks, the new alternative scapegoat for black social pathologies... July 30, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
~Black Rednecks and White Liberals~ is sociologist Thomas Sowell's attempt to rationalize an explanation of the roots of the prevalent social pathologies afflicting black communities. Thomas Sowell has more or less argued that the dire state of American blacks should be blamed on the southern redneck contagion instead of old standbys the legacy of slavery and institutional racism. I find these "root causes" argument to be trite, and, it implicitly suggests that the majority of black Americans improving their lot is self-evidently beyond their capacity now.
Historian Clyde Wilson found it insulting: "[Sowell's] idea is so ludicrously false in a hundred different ways that it could never have been put forth except in a society that was pre-conditioned not only to believe the worst about us rednecks, but actually to blame us for everything that goes wrong in America." Wilson didn't care to define what redneck is not, but it's loosely cognate with Scots-Irish or Celtic, the old Appalachian stock settlers in the south. Like many polemical terms, "redneck" owes its power to having no real definition. It merely raises negative connotations in the minds of "respectable" northern people in the wine-and-cheese set who are disparaging of Southerners and working-class Americans in general, as they like to think of themselves (inaccurately) as cultured and superior.
I have to admit as a conservative I find the Sowell's thesis to be quaint and trifling. It is ostensibly supposed to be appeal to those on the political Right. Sowell consciously stirs around the conventional Left-Wing potholes for explaining widespread black social failure, such as 'the slavery legacy' or 'institutionalized racism.' Yet on the same token, Sowell seems to be doing exactly what the Left is doing: FINDING A SCAPEGOAT. In this case, the modern 'black rednecks' supposedly emulating the mannerisms of southern rednecks become the new excuse for explaining black social pathologies (i.e., welfarism, laziness, crime, illegitimacy.) It is even granted that in early American history, that these crackers or rednecks as they were called were a rambunctious lot... wild, indolent, and arguably possessed of loose morals. But that was one-to-two-to-three centuries ago. And then again, the West Africans that sold one another into slavery were arguably rambunctious too. John Graham notes, "In Africa, nations of the black race engaged in brutal welfare. It was not seldom in these conflicts for whole populations to be slaughtered or sold into slavery. Black merchants in Africa sold their black prisoners to white merchants... It is important to spread blame fairly. It is true that white traders transported [slaves]... even so, if [they had not indulged] in such traffic, many if not most of these black prisoners would have been slaughtered by their black captors in Africa, and their descendents would not be with us today." So, did it really take contact with rednecks to corrupt African-Americans--and sap their morals and work ethic? Anyway, what about now? That's the past. What about personal responsibility? Or does the imputation of 'redneck sin' to the 'black rednecks' really still haunt us? This is just like the scapegoating post hoc fallacy of causation utilized by the political Left; but we've just found a new socially-acceptable scapegoat to the gods of political correctness: REDNECKS.
One of the bitter ironies of our social policy is as John Dale Davidson of the National Taxpayer Union proclaimed, "When you subsidize poverty and failure, you tend to get more of both." As the contagion of welfare dependency spirals out of control, so to do the costs born to sustaining this system, and with it comes diminished economic opportunity, as the costs are spread detrimentally to civic, productive society. But at some basic level, recognizing the ills of the system that perpetuates and subsidizes social failure--black or white--is no excuse for negating the fundamental need for itinerating personal responsibility and civic virtue.
Maybe, I could find a scapegoat for the political correctness afflicting so called political thinkers on the Right: the dominant influence of liberalism. Apparently, reality itself has a well-known liberal bias, and ostensible conservatives are influenced by it.
"A Liberal needs to say kind things about poor people to gratify himself. It simply violates a liberal's sense of decency to say something critically true about such people. Instead he searches for comfortable neutral criticisms such as `lack of education, overpopulation, lack of industry, etc.' To say these things is to say nothing. These conditions are co-indications of poverty, they are not the causes of it. People are poor because they behave in ways that result in poverty. They breed excessively. They spend all their money on immediate desires rather than saving and investing. They party every night rather than study and plan. They drink. They are lazy. All these actions result in poverty."
--West, Jonathan, Tragedy of Freedom, p. 121
AWESOME READ July 12, 2008
Great Book and great Author. It is good to see a brother break this down and tell the truth. We need more thinkers like Thomas.
accurate to the extreme October 22, 2007
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Though the left will always look for gray areas, when you spend years accumulating historical FACTS like Sowell and his staff did here, it paints an accurate picture that's hardly debatable. Again, those who loathe this book did not read it. It's not an editorial but a true NEWS/history book, and not in the "news" or "history" sense you'd find in the NY Times or your local university indoctrination chamber. Too bad collegians are instead spoonfed books and films from Mikey Moore, al-Gore, John "the moron" Stewart and Cornell West, rather than one of America's most brilliant minds like Dr. Sowell.
The first chapter, which holds the book's title, is especially great and explains why and where our current societal issues come from. The "Real History of Slavery" is too real for America haters to read. As a Jew, the chapter on Jews is concise and true. Like most of the book, it's worth your time and will benefit your mindset.
 Strong! Well written. September 11, 2007
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Dr. Sowell has an uncanny ability to get to the heart of a complex subject. If he teaches like he writes, his classes must be a joy to attend.
You get the impression that he reserves his greatest passion when he talks about the "soft bigotry" of low expectations perpetrated against black kids in America.
In short, Dr. Sowell is a powerful, intelligent voice on the scene today. We are lucky to have him!
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