Excerpt from Thomas Sowell's newest book

The Libertarian Enterprise has a lengthy excerpt from Thomas Sowell's newest book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The book is available (on a link from that page) from Laissez Faire Books for $16.95 US.

What the rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going — and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values.

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless search fro excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from regions of Britain "where the civilization was the least developed." They boast and lack self-restraint," Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South.

I haven't read the book myself, so this is more in the way of a heads-up than a recommendation.