Nashville college freshman Jillian Ludwig dies after being hit by a stray bullet at a local park

I don’t think that he is self-hating. He is a doctorate and senior fellow at Stanford, having taught Econ at my alma mater among many others. I think that he is attempting to address and recommend fixes for the problem. He is not far right and has indicated he is not affiliated with a political party. It’s a short book, I can allude to the evidence, but he does a great job of describing it succinctly.

Sowell’s main thesis in this essay is that what we know today as “black culture” is actually “white redneck culture” or “cracker culture” 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.” (p. 1-2)

To build his case, Sowell marshals a number of observations about language, work habits, pride, violence, and economic activity. He argues that these characteristics are common to “black culture” in urban ghettoes, “cracker culture” in the South, and the culture of the “northern borderlands of England” from which “most of the common white people of the South came” (p. 3). Thus, the culture of 21st century ghettos did not originate with Blacks but with 17th-century whites in England.

For example, he cites multiple contemporary sources who noticed Southerners’ lax work ethic,

“‘No southern man,’ South Carolina’s famed Senator John C. Calhoun said, ‘not even the poorest or the lowest, will, under any circumstances… perform menial labor… He has too much pride for that.‘ General Robert E. Lee likewise declared: ‘Our people are opposed to work. Our troops officers community & press. All ridicule & resist it.’ ‘Many whites,’ according to a leading Southern historian, ‘were disposed to leave good enough alone and put off changes till the morrow'” (p. 18).

In terms of education, he notes that: “As late as the census of 1850, more than one-fifth of Southern whites were still illiterate, compared to less than one percent of New Englanders” (p. 22) and “As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania” (p. 23).

What’s clever about Sowell’s argument here is that progressives tend to attribute poverty to injustice, minimizing the effects of culture and personal choice. Yet it seems difficult to characterize white antebellum Southerners as “oppressed.” Consequently, progressives have to remain open to the possibility that the disparities noted by Sowell are a product of cultural differences between the North and the South. Once this connection is made between culture and disparities, why rule out such a connection when it comes to modern racial disparities?

This question becomes particularly important when we notice similar disparities within racial groups. For instance, “[t]he 1970 census showed that black West Indian families in the New York metropolitan area had 28 percent higher incomes than the families of American blacks. The incomes of second-generation West Indian families living in the same area exceeded that of black families by 58 percent. Neither race or racism can explain such differences. Nor can slavery, since native-born blacks and West Indian blacks both had a history of slavery. Studies published in 2004 indicated that an absolute majority of the black alumni of Harvard were either West Indian or African immigrants, or the children of these immigrants. Somewhat similar findings have emerged in studies of some other elite colleges. With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture” (p. 32-33).