I’m going to focus here on the Great Migration and the cartoonish simplification going on, combined with the most bizarre inability Sowell has to see material causes when it’s more convenient to talk about cultural causes. It is true that the first wave of the Great Migration was smaller. Does this mean that the migrants of the first wave had an easier time assimilating? I’ll go ahead and let you read about the Red Summer of 1919. Migrants faced massive white opposition in the North. There was a good bit of assimilation going on—of recent European immigrants in opposition to the perceived racial threat posed by the new Black migrants.

Was the second wave “less motivated to better themselves?” I think that’s an absolutely bizarre claim to make. Both waves of migration were motivated for their own economic betterment. If anything, the second wave was characterized by far more fundamental economic motivation than the first since sharecropping was collapsing with technological innovations in agriculture. Black people moved north to get jobs.

So what’s the difference then? I think it’s pretty obviously material in origin. The segregated neighborhoods and the labor opportunities new migrants were moving to did not have the capacity to meet the level of need. Neighborhoods became overcrowded, and people could not get jobs. De-industrialization made it worse by taking away many of the jobs that were there in the first place. It after this time that we see the rise in things like crime and single parenthood.

There is an unbelievably massive burden of evidence for anyone who claims that a unilaterally-transferred, unchanged culture and the welfare state caused this level of increased unemployment by constricting labor supply via induced laziness. This is so because we absolutely know without a doubt that labor demand in exactly the places where Black people had migrated to absolutely plummeted in the second half of the 20th century, and the jobs simply have not come back.

It is exactly the fact that there is a far more plausible explanation for the sharp rise in Black unemployment, crime, and single motherhood that makes the “culture” explanation so odious. You quite seriously have to ignore the most basic material factors—that people become desperate when they’re packed into degraded neighborhoods and have their employment opportunities wrenched away—in order to make the culture argument, wherein it is the characteristics of the people that are blamed for what is ultimately more plausibly explicable in other terms.

But again, even if Sowell were right and that all the bad behavior he says Black people have are attributable to this “redneck culture,” his argument will still fall down because the disproportionate rate of Black poverty is not explained by the prevalences of risk factors. You’re free to check my sources from the “Culture, Behavior, and Inequality” section.