Black Rednecks and White Liberals

What It Is

Six long essays, published by Encounter Books in 2005, connected by a single question: what does culture do, how long does it last, and how much of what we attribute to race or to oppression is really the persistence of habits formed somewhere else entirely?

The title essay asks where the behaviour and speech associated with the black urban ghetto actually came from, and follows the trail a long way from where anyone expects it to lead. The others take up middleman minorities and why they are so widely hated, the global history of slavery, the uses and misuses of German history, black American schools before integration, and how visions of the past shape policy in the present.

Sowell is drawing on real scholarship, principally Grady McWhiney's Cracker Culture and David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed. He acknowledges that they disagree with each other, and builds on the pattern they share.

Why It Matters

The book's power is that it makes the reader defend an assumption they did not know they held. The prevailing account of black American culture treats it as either an African inheritance or a product of American oppression. Sowell proposes a third possibility that flatters nobody, and he presses it hard.

The essay on slavery is the one his opponents praise. It sets American slavery inside the global history of the institution, which ran for millennia across every continent, and then asks a question the usual arguments never get round to.

Now the case against. The central thesis is a hypothesis about cultural transmission, not a demonstrated one. Sowell shows resemblance between two cultures separated by a century; he does not prove descent, and the mechanism by which the habits crossed is asserted rather than traced. He gives little weight to the scholarship on African cultural survivals, and less to what segregation, redlining and the labour market did in the twentieth century. Historians of the South have contested the scholarship he leans on for decades.

What is not in doubt is that the essays are argued, sourced and serious, and that the questions they raise are still open. That is why the book has not gone away.

Before You Read

Eight to ten hours. The prose is clear and the pace is quick.

Read all six essays, in order. They answer one another, and the title essay alone, which is the part that circulates online, is the most easily misread thing Sowell ever wrote. Most of the noise around this book comes from people who have read only that.

Read the endnotes. The book stands or falls on its sources, and a claim you find outrageous will often turn out to rest on a nineteenth-century traveller's account you can go and read yourself. It is at its most convincing exactly where it is least quotable.

Which Edition to Read

• The Encounter Books paperback — recommended. All six essays, complete, with the full apparatus of notes. Cheap, durable, and the version to argue with in the margins. The cost: Encounter is a movement publisher, and the presentation makes no attempt to disarm a hostile reader. No introduction, no editorial framing, nothing to place a fiercely contested set of claims in the debate they belong to. You supply that or nobody does. View on Amazon →
• The ebook. The best version for checking Sowell's work: the notes are linked and the text is searchable. If you intend to test the argument rather than absorb it, this is the practical choice. The cost: a book this dense in quotation is unpleasant to read on a screen for long stretches.
• The Blackstone audiobook, read by Hugh Mann. A clean, unhurried reading, and the narrative essays carry well aloud. The cost: several hundred endnotes vanish. On a book whose entire authority is its citations, that is not a small loss.

Buy the paperback. Keep the ebook if you plan to fight with it. Do not let the audiobook be your only exposure to a book this contested.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the essay that annoys you twice. Sowell wrote this to be resisted, and the resistance is where the reading actually happens.

Separate the two things he is doing. One is a historical claim about where certain habits came from. The other is a moral claim about who is to blame for their persistence. The first can be tested against evidence. The second cannot, and Sowell slides between them more often than he admits.

Then go and read the other side properly. This is a book that becomes either sharper or hollower depending on what you set beside it, and finding out which is worth the effort.