Black Rednecks & White Liberals
Culture transcends race and class
Description
In the 1940s and 1950s, employers and police in the industrial cities of the North had a fixed opinion about the poor white Southerners arriving on their factory floors. They were said to be loud, lawless, quick to violence, indifferent to schooling, casual about work, and loose about sex. Northern newspapers ran disapproving features. Landlords turned them away. The complaints were aimed at people from the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Mississippi — white people, sometimes called hillbillies, sometimes called rednecks, and rarely with affection.
Thomas Sowell, the economist at the Hoover Institution who spent decades writing on race and culture, opens his 2005 collection of essays by asking us to look hard at that description. Because, he argues, the very same complaints — the same words, almost — were soon being made about poor Southern blacks who moved to the same cities. And that, for Sowell, is not a coincidence. Black and white Southerners had shared one regional subculture for centuries, a culture that long predated either group's arrival in America, and they carried it north together. The word redneck, he insists, names a way of life before it names a skin color.
That premise sets up an uncomfortable claim. If the dysfunctions long blamed on slavery and racism were in fact features of a regional culture that white Southerners shared and largely shed, then the explanation usually offered is incomplete — and so is the cure. Sowell goes further, naming a second character in the story: the people he calls white liberals, who in his telling did not help poor blacks escape that culture but helped enshrine it.
The question we’re asking : If poor Southern whites and poor Southern blacks were once described in identical terms, what does that say about where their shared culture came from and why one group escaped it while many in the other did not?What we’ll see : How a single regional way of life crossed the color line, traveled north, hardened into something defended as identity, and what Sowell's wider survey of human history makes of it all.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A culture that crossed the color line
The argument starts with a vocabulary problem. The traits we now associate, in the popular imagination, with the inner-city ghetto — touchiness about disrespect leading to violence, a swaggering style, suspicion of book learning, a present-oriented attitude toward work and money, sexual permissiveness — were, Sowell shows, described in nearly identical language a century earlier, and the people being described were white. Travelers, census-takers, and Northern observers wrote of Southern whites in terms that read, line for line, like later complaints about Southern blacks. The traits were regional before they were racial.
Where did the culture come from? Sowell traces it to particular parts of Britain — the borderlands of England and Scotland, and northern Ireland — from which a large share of white Southerners descended. These were violent, clannish, honor-bound regions where central authority was weak and feuding was a way of life. The people who emigrated from them brought a whole package across the Atlantic: a quick recourse to violence over insults, a disdain for steady industriousness, a flair for oratory and music, and an attitude toward sex and family that scandalized more settled observers. They settled the Southern backcountry and stamped their style on the region.
02Chapter 2 — The South the migrants carried north
When millions of Southerners moved to Northern and Western cities across the twentieth century, they did not leave the culture behind in the cotton fields. They carried it onto the assembly line and into the tenement. And the reception was the same regardless of color. Sowell assembles the contemporary commentary: Northern whites complained that white hillbillies fought, drank, skipped work, and let their children run wild — and complained in the same breath, and almost the same words, about the blacks arriving on the same trains.
The crucial move in Sowell's account is what happened next. Over the following half-century, most poor Southern whites and a large majority of Southern blacks moved up. They got steadier work, more schooling, more orderly households; the redneck culture, for most of them, faded into memory or into a few harmless habits. The pattern was shed because it could be shed — it was a culture, not a fate. Class mobility did what it usually does, and the descendants of the hillbillies and the descendants of the sharecroppers alike joined a broad American middle.
03Chapter 3 — The friends who froze it in place
Enter the white liberals of the title. Sowell's charge is provocative and he means it to be: that well-meaning white intellectuals, activists, educators, and writers took the most dysfunctional features of black redneck culture and reclassified them as sacrosanct expressions of racial identity, thereby insulating them from the criticism that might have prompted change. What earlier generations of black leaders had treated as backwardness to be overcome was rebranded as authenticity to be celebrated.
The examples he reaches for are concrete. Black English, in his account, is not an African inheritance but a set of features traceable to the same British regional dialects the white Southerners brought; treating it as a proud racial possession, he argues, does a disservice to children who will be judged in a wider world. Hostility to academic achievement — the idea that doing well in school is somehow a betrayal of one's group — he regards as a transplanted redneck disdain for book learning, now defended in the name of pride. In each case, a habit that holds people back gets a protective coating of identity.
04Chapter 4 — Patterns travel, race does not
The black-redneck thesis is only the opening essay. What gives the book its force is that Sowell runs the same method across human history, and the recurring finding is that behavior travels with culture, almost never with race. Once that lens is in place, examples that look unrelated start to rhyme.
Consider the essay he provocatively titles "Are Jews Generic?" Across centuries and continents, certain groups have played the role of the resented middleman minority — traders, moneylenders, shopkeepers, conspicuously successful and conspicuously disliked. The Jews of medieval and modern Europe are the famous case, but Sowell sets them beside the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Indians in East Africa, the Armenians in the Ottoman world. The hostility these groups attracted — the accusations, the expulsions, sometimes the massacres — followed a pattern so consistent that it cannot be about any one people. It is about the economic role and the cultural traits that go with it.
05Conclusion
Return to the factory floors of the 1940s, where the white hillbilly and the black sharecropper were greeted with the same suspicion. For Sowell, that shared reception is the whole book in miniature. The two groups carried one Southern culture north; one largely set it down and climbed, and a portion of the other had that culture preserved for them as a badge of who they were supposed to be. The tragedy, in his account, is not that the culture existed but that it was made unchangeable by people who called the change a betrayal.