Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Sowell’

Book Review – Black Rednecks and White Liberals – by Thomas Sowell

Posted: July 7, 2022 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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I have been a huge fan of Thomas Sowell for more than a decade.  I consider him to be a teacher and a mentor, even though I have never met him.  No author was more responsible for my philosophical awakening, which transformed me from a radical leftists to a hardcore Libertarian.

My expectations were tremendously high before I opened the cover of this book, which is a collection of essays.  This great work greatly exceeded my expectations because all of the essays, particularly the title essay, were full of knowledge that completely redefined how I saw the world.  I am an extremely well read history fanatic.  This book contained a wealth of knowledge that was new to me.

For this review I will concentrate on two of the six essays and let quotes from these two essays form the bulk of this article.

Thomas Sowell’s explanation for the cause of the economic, academic, and social disparities between blacks and whites was something most of us, including me, never considered.

The following quotes are from the article Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.  In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag—and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily

With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.”

The burgeoning of the American welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century and the declining effectiveness of the American criminal justice system at the same time allowed borrowed and counterproductive cultural traits to continue and flourish among those blacks who had not yet moved beyond that culture, thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous, and self-destructive subculture in many urban ghettos.

White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.

These lengthy quotes are just a tiny fraction of this well documented article.  Sowell traces the history of the Redneck culture from the wild areas of Northern England and Scotland, which was transported by white immigrants to the Southern United States.  He documents the extreme negative effects this culture had on whites and blacks.  Also documented in great detail are the drastic improvements blacks experienced when escaping this destructive culture and how white liberals have made it difficult for blacks to escape.

The next series of quotes are from the article The Real History of Slavery.

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.

From a narrow perspective, the lesson that some draw from the history of slavery, automatically conceived of as the enslavement of blacks by whites, is that white people were or are uniquely evil. Against the broader background of world history, however, a very different lesson might be that no people of any color can be trusted with unbridled power over any other people, for such power has been grossly abused by whatever race, class, or political authority has held that power, whether under ancient despotism or modern totalitarianism, as well as under serfdom, slavery, or other forms of oppression

What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time

For most of human history, and for nearly all of the non-Western world prior to Western contact, freedom was, and for many still remains, anything but an obvious or desirable goal. Other values and ideals were, or are, of far greater importance to them—values such as the pursuit of glory, honor, and power for oneself or one’s family and clan, nationalism and imperial grandeur, militarism and valor in warfare, filial piety, the harmony of heaven and earth, the spreading of the “true faith,” nirvana, hedonism, altruism, justice, equality, material progress—the list is endless. But almost never, outside the context of Western culture and its influence, has it included freedom. Indeed, non-Western peoples have thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even possess a word for the concept before contact with the West

I most highly recommend this book to everyone.  It is extremely informative and also a very entertaining read. All quotes are copied directly from this webpage: Black Rednecks and White Liberals Quotes by Thomas Sowell (goodreads.com)

A tribute to Thomas Sowell

Posted: July 16, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Last week marked the 90th birthday of Thomas Sowell, who is my favorite economic and political author.  He is way more than an author to me, he is a mentor and favorite professor.  No author is more responsible for my transition from a progressive-socialist to a Libertarian free market warrior.  I owe Thomas Sowell a great deal of gratitude. He has not only informed and inspired me, he has entertained me a great deal because he is an exceptional writer who makes even the dry subject of economics fun

Thomas Sowell has written around a dozen books and countless articles.  Because of the volume of his works it would not have been possible for me to read through all of it to find quotes for this article so I cheated by using his Wikiquote page.

The welfare state is often a main target of criticism by Thomas Sowell because of the disastrous effects it has had on the African American community.  Here is a quote from a discussion in Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” television series in 1980.

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

Thomas Sowell is a very harsh critic of the political left.  Here is one of his more colorful quotes on that subject. It is from the Forbes article “The Survival of the Left” which ran Sep 8, 1997.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Is Reality Optional?: And Other Essays is one of his best books.  Here is a quote from the essay Social Deterioration.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

Here is a quote from an article that appeared in the South Florida Sun Sentinel on December 26, 2003.

To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have cost without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more to produce if they were produced by enterprises operating without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.

Random Thoughts was a running article he wrote.   Here is a quote from Sep 03, 2007

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans– anything except reason.

When Thomas was young he was a Marxist.  The book Thomas Sowell, A Personal Odyssey (2000) chronicles his transition to a Libertarian philosophical giant.  Here is a quote from Chapter 5 : Halls of Ivy.  Emphasis is from the Wikiqoute page.

In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse’s room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.

Race is very frequent topic of Thomas Sowell’s.  The National Review article The Scapegoat for Strife in the Black Community is a perfect example of his genius on this subject.  This quote proves that the Founding Fathers of the US were well ahead of the rest of the world when it came to the condemnation and abolition of slavery.

What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the 18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view in non-Western societies at that time.

Then how did slavery end? We know how it ended in the United States — at a cost of one life lost in the Civil War for every six slaves freed.

The welfare state was more responsible for the destruction of the African American family than even slavery. 

Were children raised with only one parent as common at any time during the first 100 years after slavery as in the first 30 years after the great expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s?

As of 1960, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent, usually the mother. Thirty years later, two-thirds of black children were being raised without a father present.

What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s. 

The Website American Thinker wrote this tribute article Sowell At 90. Isn’t It High Time More of Us Listened to This Man? and I could not agree more