Sowell's Latest
Been reading Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks with the proverbial mixed emotions. My sepia-tinged sainted Irish forbears, or at least the Scot-Irish (which is presumably close enough for guvmint work), don't come off too good. Lazy, ill-educated, mean-spirited, and prideful. Not exactly paragons of virtue. His thesis is that the reason blacks have had trouble assimilating is because they were influenced by southern whites who were influenced in turn by their Ulster & Scottish forbears. Which is to say, very sensitive to insult, very concerned about their reputation and thinking little of education.
The persistence of culture is something often underrated; David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed" was a real eye-opener for me. New England was founded by East Anglians while the South was founded by the Scots, the Welsh, the Scot-Irish, and they were as different as night is to day, perhaps because the former didn’t have to fight the British for eight centuries, which might make you much more of a fighting, take-no-crap fatalistic culture. Sowell, who is black, points out the similarities between Southerns of the 19th century for whom honor meant everything and urban blacks who now will also kill over an insult. So I guess Clinton was closer to being the first black president than we thought.
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