The Rednecks Did It!
By Daniel Harden
Alas! it is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
—Lord Byron
The neocon celebrity economist Thomas Sowell has attracted a good deal of attention with his "redneck thesis," expounded in his most recent book and in a Wall Street Journal piece. The thesis is one more in the endless chain of fanciful explanations for the well-known pathologies statistically prominent in the lives of African Americans. According to Sowell, the disdain for employment and education and proneness to violence evident in of much of the black non-community is behavior that black people unfortunately picked up from Southern "rednecks."
This idea is so ludicrously false in a hundred different ways that it could never have been put forth except in a society that was pre-conditioned not only to believe the worst about us rednecks, but actually to blame us for everything that goes wrong in America. I am reminded of the pundit who ascribed the crimes of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber to "the evil Southern gun culture," though neither was Southern or used guns.
This is an old, old trick in American life, going back to 17th-century Massachusetts. It involves a falsification of history and an evasion of responsibility and honest analysis by projecting guilt onto the eternal American "Other"—Southerners. It shows something seriously defective, even dangerously delusional, in what passes for the mainstream American public mind.
The able columnist Steve Sailer
[Ed. specific link not in original] exposes some of the many defects of Sowell's thesis, but his treatment exhibits the same tendency to dismiss us rednecks as the "Other." As Sailer recounts, he mentioned to his wife that the thesis was false. She replied that such was OK as long as it worked (to improve attitudes among African Americans). Translation: It is perfectly alright to bear false witness against us rednecks and libel us on the outside chance that it might help a misbehaving but more favored group to behave better.
"Redneck" is, of course, an elastic term but seems to describe a category of Americans, centered in the South, who have done and continue to do more than their fair share of the working and fighting (and, yes, the thinking) that has created and sustained the American commonwealth and its freedom. (Never mind that the understanding of these Americans has been lately befuddled by a lot of careless theorizing about "Celtic" race and culture.)
If the thesis is true, we are left to the mystery of why African Americans picked such a bad example to follow when they had the spectacle of industrious, public-spirited, clean-living Northerners before them. One dare not raise the question in polite company, but might it be because those Northerners, in general, kept themselves and their example as far away from black Americans as they could? To Mr. Sailer's credit, he boldly points out that this thesis (and all the others) leaves out the single most important explanatory factor: the African in African American.
More to the point, why are the pathologies greater in the North than in the South? The official American explanation ascribes all problems to the heritage of slavery. Curiously, the problems grow worse the farther you are away from the time and place of slavery. And why have social pathologies among whites increased dramatically since the coerced integration of schooling and employment? Why did super-rich Northerners of the late 19th and early 20th century show such a preference for servants trained in Virginia and Alabama households?
Mr. Sowell's thesis, allow me to suggest, fits a familiar pattern of evasion. Let me propose a radical counterargument. Could the true understanding of the causes of the familiar pathologies lie in what happened to black Americans after they left the South? Great as the sins of the South were, black people did belong, although in a humble and often oppressive way, to a real civilization. Could the origins of their sad condition be found in their encounter with the alienation, rejection, inhumanity, and cold-hearted Puritan utilitarianism and hypocrisy of the Northern cities?
Don't expect to hear my suggestion anywhere else. Meanwhile, it is good for us rednecks to be reminded where we really stand in "America, the Beautiful."
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