Coming Around on Wikipedia

At one time I was skeptical of the information on Wikipedia. The very concept of anyone being able to edit entries and the bogus information I used to find on it would annoy me. But now, I find it pretty useful for finding casual information. For instance:

What some portray as authentic black culture is actually a carryover from a highly dysfunctional white southern redneck culture.
Main article: Black Rednecks and White Liberals

According to Sowell, in his 2005 Black Rednecks and White Liberals, what many see as pathologies of contemporary black culture actually derive from a dysfunctional historical white-southern “cracker” culture.

What the [white] 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 searches for excitement, a 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 on 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.[25]

Several scholars support Sowell’s observations. Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture (1988) is a thorough historical study of the values and behavioral patterns of white Southerners, and is backed by many other scholarly studies which have turned up very similar patterns even when they differed in some ways as to the causes. Scholar Hackett Fischer’s Albions Seed,(1989) for example, eschews the Celtic theory advanced by McWhiney, but shows many of the same cultural patterns for the whites, both in Britain and the American South.[26]

What is different about the current era, Sowell claims, is that better educated, more productive whites are no longer as willing to challenge or condemn the counterproductive behaviors deriving from the holdovers of white cracker culture among blacks. This stands in sharp contrast to the white northern educators that went to educate ex-slaves in the post-Civil War South, who insisted on strong discipline and work, and helped lay the foundations for black education.[27] Instead, Sowell contends, today’s white liberals too often justify, glorify, and subsidize these negatives as the “authentic expression” and behavior of the black masses. Sowell holds that the backward behavior pattern of southern whites has carried over to a generation of negative “blacknecks” who are in no way representative of the authenticity of the black community over its long, difficult climb from slavery and discrimination to freedom and equality in the United States.[28]

Interesting.