Handing Down Misery

...But leave that aside...

...Not only that: For decades, the Royal Navy spent thousands of pounds and lost hundreds of sailors in efforts to suppress the slave trade in the Atlantic— successfully—and less successfully in Africa and the Indian Ocean...

...And they were its only abolitionists...

...This is not the only place where Sowell challenges the currently received version of the history of blacks in America and presents his own alternative...

...Americans joined in...

...The latter see Western society in the same terms Susan Sontag once used to describe the white race, as "the cancer of human history...

...It is a collection united around some fundamental Michael Barone is a senior writer at U.S...

...Only in the West, Sowell writes, did the movement to end slavery win support...

...These are some of the questions Sowell addresses in this provocatively titled collection of essays...

...But he concentrates less on what he calls white treatment of blacks and more on the actions of blacks themselves...

...Among American academic and media elites it is taken as given that American slavery was motivated by anti-black racism, and was a peculiarly and uniquely vicious institution...

...Following David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, he notes that these immigrants brought with them folkways, patterns of belief, and behavior, which were distinctive from those of immigrants from other portions of the British Isles who settled in other parts of the colonies and were particularly different from the East Anglians who peopled New England...

...Human slavery was tolerated, taken for granted, not seen as even something to argue about, in all cultures for centuries and millennia— until, in the 18th century, certain Britons and Americans began to question its morality...

...cultivation of a sense of grievance encouraged "redneck" patterns of behavior, "the counterproductive attitudes toward education found even in middle-class black communities...

...All cultures are not equal, and Western culture is far better than others...

...He argues that there was less difference between W.E.B...

...News and World Report...

...They have a desperate psychological stake in proclaiming that all cultures are morally equal—and to regard Western culture as morally inferior...

...The real disaster came, in Sowell's view, in the 1960s...

...I confess I am uncomfortable with the word...

...In the "redneck" direction, as he puts it...

...DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and more mutual respect, than is generally thought...

...Even so, blacks made steady and impressive gains in education and income in the 1940s and 1950s...

...Sadly, slavery still continues, in Sudan, in some other African countries, in parts of Asia, in places where the West has not yet summoned up the determination to end it...

...The bad news is that for many, and notably for most black Americans, culture seems to be leading the young in the wrong direction...

...The United States, as a result of its bloodiest war, abolished slavery...

...The end of slavery in Brazil a quarter-century later was met with general rejoicing...

...In 1808, the first date allowed under the Constitution, Congress banned the importation of slaves and the U.S...

...Sowell uses it to refer to immigrants to the American colonies from the north of England, Scotland, and the province (he unfortunately calls it a county) of Ulster and their progeny, most of whom settled in much of the South...

...But Westerners were not its only perpetrators...

...Whites were indentured servants in colonial America...

...Sowell is of another view: The West is best...

...Why do some black children succeed admirably in some schools while most black children perform poorly, even in such a favorable environment as Shaker Heights, Ohio...

...They are committed to an adversarial stance against their own society, the society that has produced the greatest freedom and prosperity human beings have enjoyed in history...

...Sowell writes at some length of the practical difficulties faced by southern slaveholders—especially George Washington and John Randolph of Roanoke—who wanted to free their slaves...

...Why have the Jews and the overseas Chinese succeeded at commerce, and why do so many people in the countries where they have succeeded hate these "middleman minorities...

...Slavery existed everywhere in the world up through the 19th century, and peoples of all kinds—Europeans as well as Africans, Asians as well as Slavs (who gave their name to slavery), white Americans captured by the Barbary pirates—were enslaved at one time or another...

...In England, the evangelical Anglican William Wilberforce led a move to ban the slave trade, and in 1807, Parliament did so...

...They insist that students can meet the standards of the larger society...

...Against this, Thomas Sowell brings to bear his wide learning and fierce powers of argumentation...

...That, of course, is something you will never hear from the offspring of the 1960s radicals who dominate our campuses and hold sway over most of our media...

...And here we come to a major difference between Sowell and the academic and media elites...

...weak law enforcement resulted in high crime that destroyed housing values in black neighborhoods...

...And despite that racism, American blacks moved forward after Emancipation...

...Why do American academic and media elites treat slavery as a predominantly American phenomenon when it was a feature of most societies everywhere until well into the 19th century...

...Sowell makes a convincing case that the folkways described by Grady McWhiney in Cracker Culture are similar to those of ghetto blacks today: "What is painfully ironic is that such attitudes and behaviors are projected today as aspects of a distinctive 'black identity,'" he writes, "when in fact they are part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South...

...Slavery in America produced racism, he argues, not the other way around...

...Some day their distorted view of history may be forgotten, just as some of their disastrous public policies— overgenerous welfare, toleration of crime—have been discarded...

...Navy aided the Royal Navy in suppressing the slave trade abroad...

...Slavery was largely eradicated thanks to the superior military power of British, American, and other imperialist powers...

...George Washington, troubled by slavery, refused to sell any of his slaves after 1775 and, in his will, freed his slaves and provided support for them after his death in 1799...

...What do they have in common...

...The expansion of welfare encouraged single parenthood...

...In contrast, the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, native princes in India, and Arab slave traders in East Africa treated demands to end slavery with contempt...

...Different kinds of people behave in different ways, largely because of differences in culture...

...Even so, Sowell points out, there are schools that produce high levels of achievement in black students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds...

...He points out that northern blacks outscored southern whites in armed forces tests in World War I, and that the sharp differences in black and white test scores so common today did not exist then, when there were sharper differences between the scores of various groups of whites...

...The good news from Sowell is that people's cultures can be changed...

...These were transmitted, Sowell argues, to southern blacks—although, in fact, most colonial blacks lived in the southern tide-lands, which Fischer says were settled by rather different folk from the West Country of England, people more like Thomas Jefferson than Andrew Jackson...

...But if there was achievement, there was also backsliding...

...The high incidence of unmarried parenthood among blacks was not a legacy of slavery or segregation...

...But the cultural attitudes they have fostered still permeate large segments of our society and hold back those (especially blacks from disadvantaged backgrounds) from the achievements of which they are capable...

...He describes the rapid advances in literacy and learning made by blacks in the "missionary schools" established by New Englanders in the South...

...Slavery is and always was a great evil, Sowell stoutly affirms...

...The first black presidents of historically black colleges, Sowell says, were unqualified and deemphasized academic achievement and overemphasized social activities...

...theses, none of them fashionable today...

...Nonsense, says Sowell...

...They insist on hard work...

...He records the brilliant achievements of Dunbar High School in Washington from 1870 to 1955...

...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 entrepre-neurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery...

...May he prevail...

...When the United States acquired the Philippines in 1898, it suppressed slavery there, over the objections of many locals...