I’ve been sitting for a few days on a story out of Arkansas, which saw a kindergarten graduation break out in a wild brawl—between the adults, not the children. The moment I saw the headline “brawl,” I figured there was a good chance that the people involved were black, and I was right. Sadly, that’s the best bet whenever you see stories about brawls, deadly or otherwise, at schools, airports, shopping malls, concerts, restaurants, sporting events, etc.
What’s ironic is that American blacks mistakenly believe that this impulsivity is part of their natural, African heritage. It isn’t. It’s borrowed from the worst of pre-modern white southern culture. Blacks were successfully abandoning the effects of this culture during the 20th century, only to have the communists return it to them, effectively keeping blacks from continuing their sharp ascent up the American cultural ladder.
The reason I’m writing about this story today, even though it’s a few days old, is because of a video that a good friend of mine recommended, explaining both the vast divide between America and England, despite America’s roots in England, and the modern political scene. And while the video doesn’t touch on black culture, it reminded me that American blacks are trapped in 18th and 19th century white Appalachian culture which was itself a remnant of 17th and 18th century Scots-Irish culture in the old country.
The podcast, called Triggernometry, is hosted by a pair of super-smart libertarian guys from England. (My link is to YouTube, but you can find it on Apple or other podcast sites.) Recently, they had on their show Richard Miniter, an American journalist.
Miniter explains that America’s culture today is still shaped by the four different groups of British people who immigrated to the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries: There were the moralizing Puritans who settled in New England and became today’s moralizing wokesters, the aristocratic “Cavaliers” of the English Civil War who brought their gentry ideology and slavery to the South; the merchants, who settled the mid-Atlantic Coast, and the border people (the Scots-Irish) who settled the Appalachian Ridge, with a heavy concentration in the South. (And I’ve simplified greatly what he says, so I recommend watching/listening to Miniter himself.)
I actually knew about those Scots-Irish settlers because of Thomas Sowell’s revelatory Black Rednecks & White Liberals. What makes the book so interesting is that Sowell explains that modern black culture—the self-destructive ghetto culture of crime, sexual promiscuity, drug & alcohol abuse, and explosive, intemperate violence—has absolutely nothing to do with the culture that the slaves brought with them from Africa. Yes, Africa was a warlike place, but that didn’t exist within tribes; it was, instead, a chronic state of war between hostile tribes.
Once in America, blacks were exposed to that Appalachian, or transplanted Scots-Irish culture, which was the culture of common southerners, as opposed to that of the “elite” land-owning class of slaveholders.
In his inimitable way (complex ideas, simple language) Sowell describes the Scots-Irish culture, aka the Redneck culture, and I bet you’ll find it sounds very familiar. I hasten to add that, while I’ve omitted the footnotes for clarity, Sowell has a footnote for every single statement in this quoted paragraph:
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 entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. ... Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture...
While Southern whites still like to boast of being rednecks, most began to abandon the negative aspects of redneck behavior in the second half of the 20th century. Sowell explains this cultural change as a combination of being exposed to broader American and European cultures during the First and Second World Wars, and the effect of seeing themselves in all their ugliness on television during the Civil Rights Movement.
Meanwhile, late 20th-century blacks were moving in the opposite direction. After slavery ended, blacks began to work hard to integrate into the higher levels of white society through education, hard work, and stable marriages. By the mid-20th century, blacks were one of the fastest upwardly mobile cohorts in America.
And then, it all came to a screeching halt. The problem, writes Sowell, is that in the 1960s, blacks were encouraged to embrace the “hillbilly” culture as “their” culture, which it was not:
From the 1960s onward, much of the transplanted Southern culture would—like “black English”—be seen as sacrosanct features of a distinctive black “identity,” despite their mirroring very similar cultural patterns among Southern whites in times past.
White liberal encouragement for blacks to embrace this non-authentic “black” culture had disastrous consequences, especially as marriage—the single most stabilizing institution in any culture—collapsed in the black community. I urge you to read Sowell’s book to learn more about what white leftists did to blacks, which could be seen as something worse, in its own way, than slavery.
I say this because, while black bodies were enslaved in the antebellum period, their integrity remained. The 1960s leftists, however, destroyed that integrity, shattering generations of lives.
Worse, they’re still doing it. As recently as 2020, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture put out a piece of garbage telling blacks that white culture (read: bad for blacks) imposed on blacks horrible things such as individualism; the nuclear family; rationality and objectivity; ambition and discipline; respect for authority; and delayed gratification as a key to success (yellow highlights on the poster are mine):
Public domain product of the United States government. You can see a larger version of the image here by clicking on the image.
With all that in mind, here’s footage of that latest brawl in Arkansas:
NEW: Wild brawl breaks out between parents at an Arkansas kindergarten graduation
— Unlimited L's (@unlimited_ls) May 30, 2025
Several adults fought in the hallway of West Memphis’ Faulk Elementary
Children nearby screamed in fear as the fight broke out in the crowded corridor
Men and women were involved, with parents… pic.twitter.com/1wcRBCWgjG
I desperately wish that a sizable cohort of blacks would realize that what they’re doing to themselves—the violence, impulsivity, emotional incontinence, irrationality, broken families, etc.—has nothing to do with the authentic black experience. Instead, they are victims of 1960s communism who have achieved every tyrant’s greatest dream: they have internalized the prison bars their tyrant created for them.
Image: Buddy Ebsen and Irene Ryan, 1970. Public domain publicity photo.
