Hey all! Just one long-ish review, related to what I’ve been thinking about lately. Enjoy!
Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals was a book I had intended to read as part of my project of reading intellectual productions from the right, but it turned out to have some relevance to the big project, too. The height of Sowell’s career as a public intellectual roughly corresponds with the childhood and young adulthood of Generation X. Part of me wants to say that this back when the conservative movement thought that it was helpful to have public intellectuals who at least pretended to have some standards. This was George Will’s role at around the same time, roughly, and Milton Friedman served much the same purpose in his columns and documentaries. I think there’s some truth to that, but the more I think on it, it’s not just movement conservatism that has changed- so, too, has how the broader culture makes use of ideas, and the affects it associates with intelligence. As far as a critical mass – probably nothing like a majority, but a minority that can make its presence felt – is concerned, Chris Rufo, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, are every bit as dignified, in the quality of their work and style of presentation, as public intellectuals of the past. Better, even- what’s more dignified than “owning” the other side?
In any event… Sowell’s book of essays was indeed an interesting read. He clearly has more in the tank than most contemporary(-ish… Sowell is still alive but is quite old) conservative writers in terms of erudition, and writes pretty well. It’s enough to conjure an experience I’m familiar with, by now: you go along, enjoying the ride, “hey, this guy’s not a complete cretin, and look, there’s a historical reference that isn’t reflective of empty pedantry,” etc etc, and then you get the turn. It’s happened often enough that I more or less know when I’m being carried along, and can usually guess what sort of turn it is. In Sowell’s case, it was clear from the beginning “the turn” was going to derive from an overreliance on cultural explanations for social issues, served to the readership via glib dismissals of material factors.
That’s what I got, particularly in the title essay. But it came in some unexpected packaging, namely… the Celtic Thesis!
This is one of my favorite weird intellectual history tidbits (hmm, maybe that’s what I should call what I do- “weird intellectual history”) from the late twentieth century. To make a long and strange story short, the Celtic Thesis advanced the idea that the history of the American South, and its differences from the rest of the country, are almost solely explicable to the Celtic – primarily Scottish and Irish or that funny amalgam, the Scots-Irish – origin of many of the settlers of the Southern US. More than the basic idea, what made the Celtic Thesis bizarre was the way its promulgators and defenders insisted that it explained more or less everything about the South, from its relative economic underdevelopment to its cuisine to the battle tactics of Robert E. Lee (he authorized Pickett’s charge, you see, because the Celts just love charging defended positions). That the two originators of the thesis as an explanatory tool, Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, also went on to help found the League of the South, a white southern nationalist organization that gained national attention for taking part in the street violence in Charlottesville in 2017 (well after, it must be said, both McWhiney and McDonald quit the organization they helped found), just adds to the sort of lurid quality you don’t often see in historiography.
Sowell borrows the Celtic thesis to explain black history in America. Whatever else this is, this is super funny. To the best of my knowledge, McWhiney and McDonald neither denied, nor particularly emphasized, a strong connection between Celtic “blood” and the Celtic culture they conjure. “Nothing in the rules say that Dirty South rappers can’t be Celts!” But it was always an essentially white nationalist concept, and I’m pretty sure if you fed McWhiney (McDonald seems like the real brains of the pair) a few juleps he’d tell you that mastery over “those people” is part of the Celtic heritage, etc. So it’s funny that Sowell tries to depict southern black people, and their post-great-migration descendants in the urban North and West, as being part of the cultural unit that the League of the South thought needed its own nation-state to preserve itself…
But, of course, it doesn’t stay funny for long, as Sowell uses the supposedly-redneck ways of southern black people as an explanation, and excuse, for discrimination. McWhiney might find the supposed cultural expressions of Celt-ness in the American South noble- Sowell sees them as detrimental to black progress. In Sowell’s version, white people aren’t racist, oh no. They just didn’t and don’t appreciate being confronted with “redneck” behavior: disdain for steady work and formal education, loose morals surrounding partying, and easy resort to violence via “honor culture” that the Great Migration brought to the cities. Any socioeconomic statistics showing inequitable socioeconomic outcomes for black people come down to the “redneck” culture, too- which white liberals, because they blame racism and tell black people their culture is fine, contribute to. Among other things, Sowell brings out the old canard, so popular from roughly the eighties to the tens, that black culture punishes academic achievement- that black schoolkids mock their academically-inclined peers for “acting white” by getting good grades. I used to hear that a lot… in person, solely, solely, from white people. Presumably, there’s anecdotes to back it up. Are we sure those anecdotes aren’t actually about black kids calling other kids “white-acting” for being insufferable simpering nerds? Just blue-skying, here.
Still and all though… how many dads and uncles and/or just hopeless fucking conservative nerds had Black Rednecks and White Liberals cheek by jowl on their shelf circa 2005 with Jim Goad’s Redneck Manifesto, where racist domestic abuser/zine guy Goad insisted that poor whites are the most oppressed group in America, largely on the strength of mean condemnations of their culture ala Sowell? And/or, for that matter, one of the Jeff Foxworthy “You Might Be A Redneck If…” books? I’m not even talking about Foxworthy’s politics, here. I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. But I do remember redneck chic/schtick from that period. It was stupid! Not because rural American culture is stupid- nope, I think it’s no stupider than any other, likely less stupid than some. But… and here, I’m kind of at the end of my interpretive tether here… I see one aspect of the American reaction to the changes and challenges of the sixties and seventies was to turn ideas into stupid jokes. The playful (to say nothing of bullshit) quality of some of these changes and challenges opened them up, not just to neutralizing the ideas – turning the idea that the rural South had been badly exploited, in many ways colonized, as part of the rise of American capitalism into “rednecks support the police” culture – but to helping develop a cultural mode where the content of ideas mattered less than the performance of promulgating them, or signaling allegiance to them, or whatever.
I also remember the yen for many – not just screaming reactionaries by any means – for conservatives of color, especially ones who could wax dignified (Colin Powell comes to mind). Arguably, Powell, Sowell, and others are some of the only “small-c conservatives” of that “End of History” period, roughly between 1989 and 2001. Some of them actually believed in “conserving” something, that the version of the American project they had taught to them was real, and that they could play a role in strengthening it… poor suckers. This tragicomic – but I guess I’m enough of a softie to see it as more tragic – situation could produce some interesting results. Where else, in the conservative intellectual firmament – and, whatever else he is, Sowell is a fixture there, frequently name-checked – would you find redneck culture contrasted to the Yankee culture that white schoolteachers and their students tried to inculcate in the Reconstruction period… in the negative? Sowell praises the efforts of those reform-mad (in the best way), mostly women, members of denominations (ones mostly coded liberal these days) to make real one of the most radical aspects of Reconstruction- the establishment of free education to all, freedman, poor white, and former plantation owner’s kids alike. It’s an admirable take for a conservative of Sowell’s period, of any period.
That Sowell never stopped to consider why that educational project didn’t expand beyond a few college towns gets to the deeply frustrating aspects of this work that inevitably follow on the admirable parts. If the failure of Reconstruction was due to redneck culture, dear reader, it was not, in any way, down to black redneck culture. Truth be told, I think saying it was down to redneck culture at all is rather insulting. It was fascist culture, before the name: the ex-slaveholders, the gentry, rising capitalists, and resentful “petit-blancs” that destroyed Reconstruction with violence and the assistance of Northern capitalist indifference. That is the turning point of southern and, arguably, American history- the successful white revanchist counterrevolution against Reconstruction.
On some level, Sowell had to have known this. Much like how he had to have known that “black rednecks” weren’t the only southerners moving to northern cities en masse in the first half of the twentieth century, that millions of southern whites, many of them poor rural southern whites, also moved to places like Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles in large numbers. In fact, many of these southern whites also faced discrimination and ghettoization! There were – still are, in some places – Appalachian neighborhoods like Uptown, in Chicago, “Appalachian” in the same sense South Boston was/is “Irish,” and like South Boston, these neighborhoods were often poor, violent, “underserviced.”
But a white person from Appalachia could move from Uptown to another white neighborhood and the worst they were likely to put up with would be rude jokes. Black people trying to do that in Chicago, or Boston, or numerous other cities, produced outcomes that deserve to be seen as existing on the spectrum of war- collective violence, sometimes murderous. I’m old enough where I remember debating people who had absorbed “being a poor white is worse than being a black person” stuff, Jim Goad type stuff, in college. They knew, too- they knew that black people faced actual physical violence and deprivation that, if white people face (and some do!) they do not face, usually, as a consequence of being white. If they were smart, they didn’t argue the point, though there was always chaff to throw up. I remember “white kid getting sent to black high school and getting beaten up,” being up there with the “black kids getting called white for being smart” on the list of set pieces these boys (always boys) would trot out sometimes- John Dolan even had his alter ego mouth the line!
But they — the college boys, who have almost surely moved on, but plenty of others too who worked to throw up chaff about the realities of racism in American life — also knew that the reality of the situation did not press itself, in that time and place, on those to whom they spoke. They knew there was, as the naval types say, “sea room” for their particular kind of maneuver. They knew that very real injuries of class and cultural prejudice, towards “rednecks,” “white trash” etc., were unfairly ignored. They knew that a sanitized, self-satisfied version of the black freedom struggle sat, risible, a fat target, in the liberal historical memory of the time. And they knew that the history that would disrupt both that version of liberal history, and their damned foolish troll “makes ya think!” narrative fragments that could sit where a history might be, had not been built into the formation that would press itself in front of all of us, to take on board or to fly further into fantasy in our efforts to refuse. Ultimately, they knew people, white people in particular, didn’t care enough to make their position unsustainable.
They made hay while the sun shone, while the shape of culture favored their lines. You could see, sometimes, how affronted those who trafficked in racism-denial became when it occurred to them that a critical mass of people actually did care, and would say so. This is around when “virtue signaling” became a heinous accusation, and when “woke” became a terrible insult. It doesn’t do to be too sanguine about it — they might kill us all, yet, over woke, and get the last laugh by default — but it’s something. All of the little tropes and memes still exist, and hell, most antiracist talking points and tropes and topoi and whatever are actually pretty old too, were around back in whichever pre-woke salad days you care to name.
Ideas do die. But not often. I think historiographers like Reinhart Koselleck are right, that these concepts hang around well past their notional sell-by date (there’s a metaphor the old German would love, I’m sure!). They get taken out of context, put into new contexts, gain and lose points of emphasis, find and ditch strange bedfellows, in the course of time. This complicates any intellectual history approach that attempts to define given periods as belonging to given ideas- a liberal age, romantic decades, etc. I’m not opposed to the argument that a given idea might be so predominant in a given that it deserves special attention, even naming rights- our age as one of neoliberalism, for instance…
But I’m more interested in getting at the dynamics of how ideas interact and change, which I think also usually tells us something about the “results” — which idea, if any, gets to be king of the hill in any given period — in the bargain. One issue is, there are many such dynamics and they intertwine with each other in many complex ways. That most of Sowell’s career took place during the golden age of the sound bite undoubtedly helped him get over. Having a dozen different ways to deflect from slavery and racism, from “well, it’s culture” to “did you know the Arab slave trade was also bad,” which you can rattle off in the time it takes for someone with an actual good faith approach to finish clearing their throat… this was useful, I’m sure, to many.
But I also think glibness, superficial cleverness, the proximate utility of short term solutions, don’t act like functions here- they’re not adaptive, propelling those that master them forward, because they’re useful or necessary to some people, or not just because of that. That’s not enough to explain the almost elaborate, studied glibness on display in this book, in the Celtic Thesis it borrows from, from other popular works on important topics (including a lot of material by liberals and leftists, in case you’re wondering). People had to make a sustained mental effort to be this intellectual lazy. I think there was a value proposition, there, and not one reducible to political convenience (though there’s definitely politics there, too).
Anyway! Getting a bit far afield, here, into the historiographical weeds. Honestly, the spectacle of the turnabout Sowell made with the Celtic Thesis and the uses he put it to kind of did delight me. The shitty turn, the way he uses it to explain away racism and argue against basic welfare provision, all that stuff would have happened with our without him. That’s another reason I like to get at the dynamics of elaborately bad thought- where else do you see such ingenious maneuvers? Actually coherent thought doesn’t need to do all that. I’ve found you need to get into the muck of bad thought, incidental thought, silly thought, to really get at what makes thought, as believed and lived, work.
Mithra wants treats (don’t worry, she got one).
I was bewildered by the logic of this book -- you have made sense of it for me and I owe you a debt for that. "Weird intellectual history" or more specifically "a collection of incoherent thinkers" would be a great concept for a book. One thing I did enjoy in this book is that he compares Jews to Overseas Chinese, not in the service of historical analysis, but to use the success of both groups in overcoming discrimination to demean Black Americans by comparison, and bemoan foolish liberal tolerance for redneck culture. The idea that you could build a Singapore in Mississippi if it were not for some mysterious dark matter called "culture" is such a bold thought as to be amusing.