Sub-Sahara Africa has no “crackers” or any “redneck” Scots-Irish culture aka “poor Southern Whites” to blame. Sowell’s theory is quite a stretch.
Sowell’s theory is quite a stretch.I've listened to Dr. Sowell's essays about this on YouTube.
He makes a logical, compelling case.
Sub-Sahara Africa has no “crackers” or any “redneck” Scots-Irish culture aka “poor Southern Whites” to blame. Sowell’s theory is quite a stretch.It's precisely Sowell's point that African slaves did not bring but adopted here the marginal white redneck culture that black ghetto culture yet embraces.
I was going to reply to you, TTFlyer, not because I think your response was unreasonable, but because I suspected you might have reached that conclusion without all the information from the book.
It is one of the flaws of AI-I last read that book about probably about six years ago, which is why I asked Grok to summarize it.
That book was written in 2005, more than 20 years ago, approximately 7% of the Black population at that time (about 12% of the total US population) was foreign-born in 2000 (around 2.4 million people out of ~36 million Black Americans). This figure comes from later analyses (e.g., Pew Research summaries of Census and related data).
Of that 7% foreign born just over a million blacks were NOT either natively born American citizens or from the Caribbean. This million out of a total population of around 37 million at that time in the US (2.7% of all blacks in the USA) was composed of blacks from either anywhere in Africa, or elsewhere in the world besides America or the Caribbean.
So, at no time back when Thomas Sowell was writing or researching his book was the population in question from anywhere in Africa, sub-Saharan or otherwise.
So Thomas Sowell was discussing the behavior of black Americans descended from slave populations, which was the overwhelming majority of blacks.
And, as Thomas Sowell pointed out in his book, there are distinct differences in culture and outlook between blacks in the USA descended from slaves and blacks from other areas of the world, such as the Caribbean and even Africa.
As Freeper Vaduz inferred, it is not about race, which was Sowell’s fundamental point-it wasn’t about race, a la a “Bell Curve” distribution when it comes to violence.
It is about culture.
And that was Thomas Sowell’s point-descendants of black slaves in America got their “culture” from the antebellum South, not from Africa. Modern African and Caribbean blacks do not appreciate being lumped in with American blacks. We can empirically confirm this (and have) by the weird phenomenon of blacks who think they will be fully appreciated and accepted in any African country simply on a racial basis, only to discover their skin color is too light or dark, or the structure of their facial bones reveals to an African that the American is probably descended from some other tribe.
Of course, we see that attitude here in America between American blacks descended from slaves. Oddly, but it is there.