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I think it is important to make a distinction (as Thomas Sowell does in his book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”.

When referring to “Black Culture” we should explicitly refer to “Black Redneck Culture” since that accurately describes what we are usually referring to in a negative way.

I think it is important to do for two reasons:

First, it is more focused and specific referring to the negative and undesirable behavior by a portion (not all) of the black population. Specificity is a good thing in this case.

Secondly, doing so makes it clear that one is not attacking “Black Culture”, because that encompasses a wider range of beliefs and behaviors, and thus brings a wider range of undeserving people into a circle of criticism.

I say this because I have been sourcing and quoting Thomas Sowell’s excellent work, but failed to make the important distinction that he so obviously took the care to do by incorporating it into the title of his book. As a result, I have had both veiled and overt charges of racism leveled at me, and even had a FR thread pulled that I worked several hours to construct.

When asked, the moderator politely replied that they didn’t have the resources to monitor “threads like mine” to keep undesirables from posting racists comments, of which there were indeed a few that I asked them to pull. Instead, they pulled the entire thread with that excuse. Let me tell you, I worked hard on that thread to be factual, informative and timely, and not a speck of it was racist, but the way a few freepers interpreted it (including the moderator) it was, or at least invited racism. It was bitterly disappointing to me, since my FR stats show 45K+ posts and a small number of threads started. I thought it was an important subject for discussion.

I believe now that I could have avoided that (As Dr. Sowell did) by explicitly referring to “Black Redneck” behavior, and defining it so that readers would understand the distinction.