Black Rednecks and White Liberals

28 april 2005    Lees de reacties   

De afgelopen dertig jaar sloopte de conservatieve auteur Thomas Sowell
menig heilig etnisch-raciaal huisje in de Verenigde Staten. Met hun orthodoxe raciale aannames blokkeren volgens Sowell linkse academici en media sinds de jaren zestig een effectieve emancipatie van zwarte minderheden.

In zijn jongste werk Black Rednecks and White Liberals betoogt Sowell dat volgens de gangbare opvattingen asociaal gedrag onder blanken bestreden moest worden, maar hetzelfde gedrag onder zwarten beschouwd werd als een te respecteren wezenskenmerk van een gefingeerde ‘zwarte identiteit’. Met als gevolg dat veel zwarten, die feitelijk het gedrag van de minderontwikkelde Angelsaksische ex-immigranten (‘rednecks’) copieerden, dit voor henzelf en hun omgeving onvoordelige patroon van generatie op generatie reproduceerden. Raciale afzondering in zelfverkozen stadsgettho’s heeft de kansen van de zwarte elite verder beperkt.

Ook op andere vlakken gooit Sowell de knuppel in het hoenderhok. Zo trekt hij een parallel tussen de joodse tragedie en het bloedige lot van de Ibos in Nigeria en de Armeniërs in het Ottomaanse Keizerrijk. Het verbaast hem dat historici boek na boek produceren over de zwarte Afrikaanse slavernij door witte Amerikanen, terwijl het feit dat slavernij dwars door de hele geschiedenis is voorgekomen nagenoeg geheel genegeerd wordt en…

”...is still practiced by Africans in Mauritania, the Sudan and parts of Nigeria.”

Nog enkele kanttekeningen van Thomas Sowell bij gangbare integratie-opvattingen:

• Why the low test scores of some European immigrant children cannot be automatically attributed to their being new to the United States—and hard facts about how some kinds of cultures tend to produce lower mental test scores, whether the people in those cultures are black or white, American or European

• Evidence that black pioneers and leaders of the early twentieth century were not just “the cream of the crop” but emerged from a culture very different from that in which most blacks were raised and educated

• How white liberals have promoted a conformity of beliefs and affirmations among blacks, with those who hold different viewpoints banished from consideration intellectually and ostracized socially

• “Middleman minorities”: how certain kinds of economic activity engaged in by minority groups increases resentment against them more than their ethnicity

• How the widespread belief that Jews and other middleman minorities have made no productive contribution to the economies in which they lived has often been belied by the decline or collapse of those economies after their departure

• Proof: contrary to liberal myth, for most of history, slavery was not based on racism—and most slaves did not differ racially from their masters

• What the Western world—and the United States in particular—had that made the abolition of slavery possible, while slavery was still taken for granted in the Islamic world and other non-Western societies

• Why modern-day liberal critics are wrong, and Abraham Lincoln was wise not to have made the moral case for the abolition of slavery in the Emancipation Proclamation

• How Leftists scream for slavery reparations from the American government while saying nothing at all about non-Western slaveholding countries past and present, from which no reparations or other concessions can remotely be expected

• Bias: how scholars have long known that slavery was a worldwide institution, going back thousands of years, but this has not led them to provide adequate coverage of slavery outside of Western civilization

• How putting unqualified people in charge of black colleges and universities for the sake of racial proprieties was a serious setback for the schools, and for the young people who were educated in them

• How the desire of predominantly white colleges to secure a demographically representative student body made lower standards of admissions for blacks virtually inevitable

• Why the magnitude of employment discrimination cannot be reliably measured by the relative numbers of blacks in particular occupations

• Prominent educational “experts” who ignore or dismiss examples of black educational success because they don’t fit in with their ideological agenda