Posted by
Pearl on Saturday, January 24, 2009 3:21:31 PM
I just finished reading Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Dr. Thomas Sowell. I cannot recommend it enough. From the first paragraph, I kept asking, "why don't we know this?" Thanks to Sowell, here is a book that challenges the fashionable view of racism as causal to the circumstances black Americans find themselves. He covers "mddleman minorities", the real history of slavery, Germans and history, the achievements, myths and tragedies of black education and most important, history versus visions. It is this last subject that I find very timely, with a Democrat President and majority who are most inclined to twist history to fit current vision. Dr. Sowell discusses throughout the book the failure of this practice. As a tease, following are a few things from the book that surprised me.
Much of the cultural habits of today's blacks, thought to be unique to them, are similar to the cultural habits of Southern whites, and Northern blacks and whites shared similar cultures.
At various times, Southern whites scored lower on mental and IQ tests than Northern blacks.
There were free blacks in America before there were slaves.
Free blacks lived in white neighborhoods, socialized with whites, and their children attended high school and college with whites in Detroit in the 1890s, and similar trends happened in Philadelphia, New York, and Illinois. The massive migration of Southern black "rednecks" is what changed this trend; not due to skin color, but to their culture, intolerable to Northern whites
and blacks
.
The advancement of blacks in education and income was far more dramatic in the years preceding the 1960s civil rights laws. Sowell points out the successful black (and other ethnic) schools in America and the reason for their success and later failure.
Washington, Jefferson and other founders repeatedly acted to end slavery within the political and legal constraints of their times, and the "three-fifths" counting of the slave population was to avoid giving white Southerners a stronger pro-slavery contingent in Congress.
Dr. Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has authored several books and is a frequent columnist at Townhall.com.