Summary
Book review
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Extract
On Thomas Sowell and African American life and culture.
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005. Pp. 372. Cloth, $25.95; Paper, $17.95.
Any reader who is slightly familiar with African American history will very likely take pause at a book opening with an epigraph from Ulrich B. Phillips. But that is precisely how Thomas Sowell begins this collection of new and recycled essays--with a quote from Phillips: "We do not live in the past, but the past in us." Given Phillips's interpretation of the past, especially the history of slavery in the United States, that epigraph could be very troubling. Phillips, a professor of American history at the University of Michigan, was an apologist for the South's peculiar institution. He concluded that Africans were "better off on American plantations than the captors who remained in the African jungle." (1) Phillips perpetuated the myth that Africa was an undifferentiated jungle, when what might be described as "jungle" comprised only five percent of the continent. (2) Phillips offered a benign d...See the full content of this document
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