Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Blackstone Audiobooks presents Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell Preface Race and rhetoric have gone together for so long that it is easy to forget that facts also matter and These facts often contradict many widely held beliefs Fantasies and fallacies about racial and ethnic issues have had a particularly painful and deadly history So exposing some of them is more than an academic exercise The history of intergroup strife has been written in blood in many countries around the world and across centuries of human history The purpose of this book is to expose some of the more blatant misconceptions poisoning race relations in our time The reasons for these misconceptions range from simple innocent ignorance to reasons that are far from simple and far from innocent Many of the facts cited here may be surprising or even startling to some readers, but they are not literally unknown to scholars They have simply not been widely discussed in the media or even in academia Too much has been assumed for too long and too little has been scrutinized It may be optimistic merely to suggest that racial or ethnic issues can be discussed rationally Evidence to the contrary is all too abundant in the strident and sweeping condemnations directed against many who have tried to do so Yet there is also evidence in recent years of a growing willingness to consider views that differ from the racial orthodoxy That has prevailed largely unchallenged from the 1960s onward in intellectual circles and in the popular media In any event these essays summarize the conclusions of more than a quarter of a century of my research on Racial and cultural issues as well as drawing on the work of innumerable other scholars around the world These writings do not pretend to be definitive If they provoke thoughts on a subject where cliches and dogmas too often prevail, then this book will have achieved one of its major goals However, even a work seeking primarily to untangle a complex set of historic social issues can provoke the fashionable question But what is your solution? Yet there is not the slightest danger that there will be a shortage of solutions. On the contrary, an Abundance of uninformed solutions has been one of our biggest social problems Any serious consideration of social problems is likely to involve trade-offs rather than neat Solutions and trade-offs depend on values which can vary from one individual to the next What trade-offs others might make after considering what these essays have to offer is not something that can be predicted nor is such a prediction Necessary there is still much to be said for the ancient adage With all you're getting, get understanding. If this book can contribute to understanding on a subject where misunderstandings abound Then it will have done its work Because this book is written for the general public It does not feature long convoluted sentences with escape clauses designed to prevent words from being twisted to mean something that they were never intended to mean Common sense can be more readily expected when writing for the general public than when writing for the intelligentsia To prevent the words in the essays that follow from being stretched, twisted, or given clever meanings Let me state here and now that these essays do not mean that 1. All Southern whites were or are rednecks That 2. All black Americans today or in the past were or are black rednecks That 3. Jews are exactly the same as the other groups with whom they are compared or that 4. Slavery is somehow morally acceptable because everyone was guilty of it One cannot predict much less forestall all the clever misinterpretations that others might put on one's words The most that can be done is to alert honest people to the problem While this book is not particularly large in bulk its scope is worldwide and it goes back through centuries No one can write a book of such scope without incurring many debts to others These include scholars who devoted much of their careers to the study of some particular specialty Such as the history of agriculture in the southern United States or the origins in Britain of various social groups in America Such debts are too numerous to list here quite aside from the danger of implicating other writers and conclusions, which are my own What must be acknowledged is my debt to the Hoover Institution Which has provided the conditions and the support which have facilitated my research and writing for more than two decades For much of that time my research assistant Na Leo has been an indispensable part of my work and for this particular book She has been very ably assisted by the dedicated work of Elizabeth Costa In the end, however, I must and will take full responsibility for the conclusions reached in the essays that follow Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution, Stanford University