Origins of Ghetto Culture

Interesting excerpt from a gushing review of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals (link):

Sowell begins by tracing the origins of black ghetto culture all the way back to the British Isles from which white American Southerners immigrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These particular immigrants, from the socially turbulent regions of the northern borderlands of England and the highlands of Scotland, brought with them a set of pre-existing attitudes, values and behavioral patterns which, as Sowell points out, had nothing to do with the already existing American institution of slavery.

These pre-existing attitudes formed the basis of a “redneck” or “cracker” culture, a culture consisting of “an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship,”¦ and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.” This was passed down to the white Southern descendants of these northern English and Scottish immigrants, and would soon become the cultural heritage of many Southern blacks.