> Wall Street Journal - April 26, 2005
>
> Crippled by Their Culture
>
> By THOMAS SOWELL
> The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and
> blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can
> still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the
> North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by
> blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive
> culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as
> the only "authentic" black culture -- and, for that reason, something
> not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their
> behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.
I think he has a point here, but he seems to prematurely dismiss the effects of slavery. The factor that differentiates between Blacks who were sons of immigrants and Blacks who were descendants of US slavery is precisely their exposure to slavery. So slavery can be an explanatory factor here.
The lasting effect of slavery seems to be linked to the fact that unlike European immigrants, Black slaves were totally stripped of their "old world" culture and imbued with the bastard new world "culture" which was a noxious mix of evangelical religiosity, anti-intellectualism, materialism and self-righteousness. While the European immigrants had something to fall back on to counterbalance the effects of this new world creed, black slaves had little or none at all. They have been robbed not only of their freedom but also of their social and cultural defense mechanisms, and the effects of that deprivation work long after their personal freedom was formally restored.
I would go as far as saying that the ghetto is the product of the American culture in its purest form - as it embraces the full gamut of all-American traits, from rabid individualism, to ant-intellectualism, to get rich and high quickly morality, to live-for-the-day-and forget-your-past-and-future attitudes, to fascination with sex and violence, and disregard of anything but me. This comes to the full circle when the supposedly "Black" culture embraces and reiterates the slogans and imagery of white racists, supposedly tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless broadcasted all over the country.
Wojtek