Unexpected facts.

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 13.

Any broad-brush discussion of cultural patterns must, of course, not claim that all people - whether white or black - had the same culture, much less to the same degree. There are not only changes over time, there are cross-currents at a given time. Nevertheless, it is useful to see the outlines of a general pattern, even when that pattern erodes over time and at varying rates among different subgroups.

The violence for which white Southerners became most lastingly notorious was lynching. Like other aspects of the redneck and cracker culture, it has often been attributed to race or slavery. In fact, however, most lynching victims in the antebellum South were white. Economic considerations alone would prevent a slave owner from lynching his own slave or tolerating anyone else's doing so. It was only after the Civil War that the emancipated blacks became the principal targets of lynching. But, by then, Southern vigilante violence had been a tradition for more than a century in North America and even longer back in the regions of Britain from which cracker sand rednecks came, where "retributive justice" was often left in private hands. Even the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan has been traced back to "the fiery cross of old Scotland" use by feuding clans.