I just finished Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.(Actually I listened to the audio book, anyway) It is a brilliant treatise on the current status of out society. I highly recommend it to any one who would like to gain a better understanding of current race relations in American society. The basic treatise of the book is that many of the more unsavory features within the black ghetto culture is not unique to black culture at all but is inherited from lower class southern whites hailing from the more remote and backward sections of Britain. Sowell argues that there are traits within specific cultures such as thrift and a pension for hard work that allow them to rise above other groups with in the culture. He goes on to document examples of these groups all over the world from Koreans in America to Armenians in the Middle East. As there are cultural traits that allow certain groups of people to succeed there are also cultural practices that at the very least inhibit individuals within other groups. Traits such as hostility to formal education Sowell argues are particularly damaging to a sub-culture when surround by the larger western culture that values it very highly. Because an individual cannot control what culture they are born into there is no blame per say to be assigned, however Sowell argues that the insistence of certain segments within Black culture to blame their circumstance on external factors is both not productive and misses one of the major causes for their plight.

Additionally Sowell argues that slavery is not an institution peculiar to western civilizations but has existed on all continents and thought most races up and down the historical continuum. So those seeking to portray slavery as a strictly western evil are either ill informed or purposefully dishonest. This does not mitigate the evil that is or was slavery but it does miss the broad stroke of history wherein this “peculiar institution” is a common failing of the entire human race and not just of western civilization or America in particular. This unfortunately is something that is not taught in many schools in modern America thus depriving future generations of valuable knowledge as they try wrestle with issues of values, race, and culture.

I highly recommend this book as a valuable resource in understanding race relations in modern day America.