Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell

Looking at relationships between peoples in terms of color, and more specifically in terms of white racism and oppression of blacks, is the prevailing view among many secular and religious groups in America today. Thomas Sowell’s provides a historical perspective that suggest this view is not accurate in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Thomas Sowell closely examines historical relationships between those of various racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds with the intent of applying it to race relations in the U.S. today. He begins with this quote:

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 (p. 1).

Sowell observes that this is not a quote “about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South” made in Indianapolis in 1956. He continues:

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 (1).

Many people attempt to trace the culture of poverty, violence, and single mothers in black ghettos today all the way back to slavery and blame its continued existence on racism. But Sowell says these explanations “will not stand up under a closer scrutiny of history” (3). He points to the “cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites” (6) that had their roots in Northern England and Scotland. These “included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery” (6). It is these cultural characteristics rather than the color of anyone’s skin that led to much of the alienation of and discrimination against both Southern whites and blacks.

For instance, 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).

The situation for many blacks in the north in earlier years was quite different, however.  “In Detroit, blacks who had been denied the vote in 1850 were voting in the 1880s, and in the 1890s blacks were being elected to public office by a predominantly white electorate in Michigan. The black upper class in Detroit at that time had regular social interactions with whites and their children attended high schools and colleges with whites. In Illinois during this same era, legal restrictions on access to public accommodations for blacks were removed from the law, even though there were not enough black voters at the time to influence public policy, so that this represented changes in white public opinion” (46).

However, this began to change around 1900 with the influx of Southern blacks who brought their southern culture with them. Their “very different behavior patterns shocked both blacks and whites at the time, as witnessed by adverse comments from earlier black settlers and the black press, denouncing the new arrivals from the South as vulgar, rowdy, unwashed, and criminal. Nor were these conclusions without foundation. For example, a study in early twentieth century Pennsylvania found that the rate of violent crimes by blacks who had migrated there was nearly five times the rate of such crimes by blacks born in Pennsylvania. In Washington, the rate of births out of wedlock more than doubled with a large influx of Southern blacks during the late nineteenth century” (47).

None of this is to deny the real and significant harm caused by slavery and later by racism in both the North and the South. If these past sins still need to be identified, acknowledged, and repented of by those who committed them, then by all means this should occur. The same is true of any more recent or ongoing racial sin. Nor can we deny the perception by many—black and white—that racism is widespread and pervasive in society today. However, the introduction of the role of cultural differences and the resentment of those differences across racial lines through an examination of society suggests that over the last sixty years that other factors might be in play that shape relationships between people of different races and cultures. It might also be something other than racism that is responsible for the poor economic and social circumstances of many blacks today.