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18ck 's review for:
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
by Thomas Sowell
This is pretty interesting. It's a collection of essays about racism in its various forms: the origin of inequality in the US, the role of educational policy in economic outcomes and the position of jews and other "middleman minorities" in societies where they ahve been scapegoated due to their position economic niche.
He uses a really wide lens, comparing different societies in different times and places, putting the standard, american-centric pieties into better context. There's some overlap between the essays but it doesn't feel repetitive or anything. There are a few odd blind-spots though; I wasn't fully convinced by his explanation of how southern, redneck culture grew up and affected modern, black culture, especially where he talks about "redneck" and "cracker" having been common epithets in britain before the founding of America (they weren't: or at least not in the way he's describing) and starting with that seems like it leads him into a slightly simplistic description of why the south developed differently, putting more emphasis in variations between different types of white people rather than different economic conditions.
That's not to say the rest of the analysis is invalid though. He lands some really strong punches against lazy, self-servicing explanations and it's a really good way of shaking up your comfortable notions.
He uses a really wide lens, comparing different societies in different times and places, putting the standard, american-centric pieties into better context. There's some overlap between the essays but it doesn't feel repetitive or anything. There are a few odd blind-spots though; I wasn't fully convinced by his explanation of how southern, redneck culture grew up and affected modern, black culture, especially where he talks about "redneck" and "cracker" having been common epithets in britain before the founding of America (they weren't: or at least not in the way he's describing) and starting with that seems like it leads him into a slightly simplistic description of why the south developed differently, putting more emphasis in variations between different types of white people rather than different economic conditions.
That's not to say the rest of the analysis is invalid though. He lands some really strong punches against lazy, self-servicing explanations and it's a really good way of shaking up your comfortable notions.