March 30, 2023

America has a problem: a subculture of black crime. Every race has criminals, but when 6% of the population, black males, are responsible for over 50% of the murders and violent crimes, one must ask why. The answer lies in the irony that blacks inherited the worst of old-time, white Scots-Irish culture, over which leftists placed racial grievance politics. The former created bad behavior; the latter leaves blacks unprepared or unwilling to address that behavior.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); }

Thomas Sowell’s fascinating Conquests and Cultures discusses how different societies evolved. The primary takeaway is that, in the last 500 years, the Europeans have far surpassed the rest of the planet while Africans have lagged farthest behind. This isn’t race-based. It’s because of water and geography.

Europe has numerous easily navigable rivers and deep-water harbors. Additionally, almost every spot on the continent is within 500 miles of the sea, allowing most Europeans to trade within Europe and around the world. That ability to easily trade foods, manufactured goods, people and, most of all, ideas with one another allowed Europeans to incorporate everything from gunpowder from China to numbers from India, crafting a civilization that far surpassed anything found anywhere else. The inventiveness, efficiencies, freedoms, and prosperity Europeans developed allowed them to dominate the world for centuries.

Image: 19th-century drawing showing an Appalachian couple (i.e., Scots-Irish), entitled “The trial’s next Wednesday,” by E.W. Kemble (1861-1933). Public domain

Africa, however, has few deep-water harbors and few functionally navigable rivers, and its rugged topography make the exchange of goods, people, and ideas over large areas difficult at best and almost impossible at worst. In pre-modern times, those barriers saw most civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa remain relatively insular and isolated.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); }

Africans couldn’t benefit from the exchange of ideas and goods, which would have allowed them to coalesce into powerful, advanced societies. This reality has nothing to do with race. Sowell points out that similar geographic hurdles impeded the development of robust trading mechanisms in a number of places in Europe, including the Scottish Highlands, Russia, and much of the Balkans, with similarly retarded cultural development.

Sowell is clear: It’s geography that shapes a society’s culture, not race. The same is true in America. As Sowell shows in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, southern blacks adopted the self-destructive culture of the early Scots-Irish settlers. To this non-African heritage, the left has added a sense of chronic victimhood. The result? Violence and a lack of respect for people and property that so many predominantly black communities display.

What Sowell calls “Cultural capital” must be developed. It involves an ability and willingness to work to achieve desired goals. He contrasts the success of the Germans and Japanese after WWII with that of many of the newly independent states in Africa in the second half of the 20th century. All received massive amounts of money from outside, but the outcomes were far different.

While Germany and Japan became economic juggernauts, most newly independent African nations became economic basket cases where poverty and corruption reigned while freedom and security were almost nonexistent. He points out that while it was engineers and business leaders who took the lead in Germany and Japan after the war, in Africa it was usually members of the western educated intelligentsia, steeped in “social sciences” and largely lacking in knowledge or experience in demonstrably productive endeavors who took the lead.

In the United States, the same leftist intelligentsia (read Democrats…) have led much of black America into similarly dire straits. Democrats have convinced a significant portion of black Americans that they are victims of systemic racism that cannot be overcome.

The catalyst was, of course, slavery. While slavery did exist, as did its Jim Crow progeny, the problems that bedevil many black Americans today have little to do with these racist systems. Slavery has been gone for 170 years, and Jim Crow for more than half a century. Since then, the country has seen government-mandated school integration, decades of affirmative action and government welfare programs and, perhaps most harmfully, programs that made it economically viable for women to have children without the father present, resulting in 70% of black babies being born out of wedlock and raised by single mothers.