Don't Call Me Redneck

Economist and writer
Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime trying to understand
the culture and history of the black people. So have
many others. Since Sowell is a black
conservative he has preferred not to look for explanation in all the usual places: racism, sexism,
imperialism, and classism. Instead he has developed intriging theories
about the different races and cultures of the immigrants that came to the
United States. Above all he wanted to know why his own people, brought in
chains to the Americas from West Africa, had fared so poorly.

One of his most trenchant findings is that the immigrants that did
best were the peoples that were literate and lived under law before
they came to the United States. The Jews are the prime example. They
vaulted in a single generation from being dumb immigrant Yids to pushy upstarts knocking
on the doors of WASPy Harvard.

But at the other extreme is the redneck culture of the American South, brought to America by immigrants
from the border regions of Scotland and Ireland peoples, who were raised
to a culture of force and feud, perpetually warring Hatfields and McCoys.
Sowell believes that Southern blacks have inherited this culture, even including
its characteristic English dialect—saying “ax” for “ask.”
This Southern culture that we call “redneck” was significantly different from the culture of the Northern whites.
The differences included “rates of violence, rates of sexual promiscuity, and — most explosive of
all — differences in intellectual development.”
As legatees of this cultural bequest twenty-first century blacks present a lower level
of intellectual development, just as Southern whites did in the nineteenth.

But lots of people are ashamed of their redneck roots and, writes Sowell, even
object to the title of his new book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Some whites in the South have reacted with resentment at
the thought that they are being stereotyped as rednecks while some blacks
resent anything
that suggests anything negative about themselves.

Good point. We wouldn’t want damage anyone’s positive self-esteem by suggesting that some people are descended from rural
lowlifes.