I’m not an expert on the black family. I haven’t studied the institution of slavery in any academic sense. I can’t speak authoritatively about what it was like to be a father or a mother and a slave. I don’t know how often fathers and mothers had a marriage ceremony in their church, or how frequently they managed to remain together long enough to raise their children. But I do know that slave states did not recognize any marriage between slaves. Slaves were property and could not legally enter into contracts. Their children did not belong to them in any legal sense. And white slaveowners were under no obligation to keep families together.
Now, it’s true that a troublingly small percentage of black kids growing up today enjoy the security and stability of being raised by both of their biological parents. How does the percentage compare to the black kids of the 1860’s in, say, Virginia? I really don’t know the answer to that question. But, first of all, we need to be careful to remember that we’re comparing apples to oranges here.
Even in 1860 in Virginia, a black father and mother who had been married in their church and we’re living together with their children, were not “raising” their children in the common meaning of that term. Their child answered to different masters. And they, or their child, could be sold to another owner at a moment’s notice.
I think black slaves developed a different sense of family in response to their lack of security and stability. So, once freed from slavery, they didn’t immediately copy white people’s way of doing things.
It’s hard to say how much today’s family situation in the black community owes to the legacy of slavery. I’ll leave that to people with more knowledge on these matters.
I’ll just say that things are not worse today than they were under slavery. It might suck to be raised by a single parent. It might be kind of lame to have your grandmother or your great aunt serve in place of your Mom and Dad, but at least they aren’t under constant threat of rape.
Now, there’s this idea that strong belief in Christianity makes families stronger. And most black slaves were pretty strong Christians. So, you know, they must have had really strong families. But you can’t have a strong family unless the law respects your family and will help you keep it together. If your Dad can be traded away like some common athlete and your mom can become the forced concubine of some bored slaveowner’s son, then there’s not much in the way of family. Hell, no matter how well your parents are raising you, it won’t mean a thing if you get shipped off to some plantation in Georgia and never get to see them again.
So, maybe strong Christian values have helped blacks build and sustain strong families in the time since slavery ended. It’s possible. Maybe it is even likely. And maybe a lack of strong faith has contributed to a weakening of the black family over the last half century. Again, I’ll defer to people who actually study these matters. But, even if this were all to be true, it’s nonsense to suggest that black families were stronger under slavery than they are today.
And, I don’t want to pick on Christianity, but the slaveowners used Scripture to justify the institution of slavery, and slavery made families weak. So, it’s a little simplistic to say that simply believing that Jesus was the Son of God and that divorce is wrong is going to automatically make families stronger. In the context of slavery, this was obviously not the case.
Here is what I’ve seen. Black families are equally as strong as white families in similar economic and social circumstances. All the fixation on black families from the Monyihan Report onward was really motivated by an anxiety about white families in the age of The Pill. And it still is.
The black families in my neighborhood and they are about 40% of families are mostly standard stereotypical Cosby-type families. I live in a working-class, middle-class neighborhood that has 10% or so Hispanic, 15% or so Asian populations. Families here are indistinguishable in stability from affluent middle class neighborhoods several miles away. And the poor neighborhoods, with the most unemployment and drug use and tavern culture have similar family structures and the same determination to hold it together among some families regardless of whether you are talking about a white family or a black family.
There is no better illustration that Republicans are not the party of poor uneducated white folks than these condescending and racist stereotypes. Which reflect a distinct affluent (even if it is nouveau riche) moralism.
It’s amazing to watch the the masks that have disguised rightwing ideology fall so casually and quickly. As if they no longer have to put on a human face. Pat Buchanan said similar crap years ago, but was pretty much distanced for it. Now the GOP’s vaunted leading candidate for president comes out lauding the benefits of slavery and scarcely makes a ripple. Talk about a long, hard fall.
Recently on TV I have seen cop shows about international trafficing in children for sexual abuse as well as intenational trade in kidnapped girls for abuse, torture, and murder.
Nobody has invented any new sins since Cain.
Who or what, back in the day, protected slaves from victimizations of those kinds?
Were the kinds of abuse, and the extent, about the same in the Christian and Muslim worlds?
What about the ancient, pre-Christian world?
What about today?
Just wondering.
FDR’s response to progressive demands: “I agree. Now go out and make me do it.”
That’s a cruel, impudent joke, by the way, when you can’t and everybody knows you can’t.
Including the guy saying it to you.
He’s laughing in your face.
And I am not thinking about FDR.
Why does everyone know you can’t?
I haven’t seen any strong popular movement try to make Obama stick to the vision that progressives have? A lot of bitching and griping on blogs doesn’t count as a movement.
When farmers drive their tractors into DC, truckers shut down the expressways, and IT professionals strike, that would be a movement that a President would have to pay attention to.
But so far, outside of Madison, WI—crickets.
And I don’t think there will be outrage over whatever comes out of the budget deal. A political backlash, maybe, with uncertain targets (one can hope they will blame the right nitwits) but no major movement of pressure.
Unless Van Jones has striking success in what he is doing.
Part of the reason is that those folks who would put on the pressure are geographically concentrated in only a few areas and have not gone out evangelizing the rest of the country, as was done in the labor movement of the 1900s-1930s and the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summers of the civil rights movement.
Bachmann signed this pledge but she, ah, didn’t READ all of it… She just saw “FAMiLY” at the top and endorsed whatever was said underneath without giving it a thought. Is she even capable of a lucid thought?
In some ways, Bachmann is more of a threat than her role model, Sarah Palin, because she can string words together with some resemblance to actual sentences. She appears to be smarter. But then, anyone can clearly understand what she’s saying and that ain’t smart. It eliminates the possibility of doubt. She’s a rabid authoritarian Christianist, a friggin’ Stepford Wife wind-up doll saying vicious, ridiculous shit! The problem is we know there’s about 25% of the citizenry who eat this crap with a spoon.
<sarcasm> Yeah, let’s bring back slavery, that will eliminate the need for a welfare state and put all the lazy people to work, cut out the payroll paperwork and make ’em thank jeebus-gawd and sing hymns. I gotta shed in my back pasture and need some field hands… <end sarcasm>
thank you, BooMan
it’s been insulting and funny to watch all these right-wingers descend upon JJP, thinking that they’re gonna tell a bunch of Black folks that slavery ‘wasn’t that bad’.
and think they should be taken seriously
The trouble with most progressive/liberal understanding of many of the right wing talking points is that they don’t have a clue why these people are making these statements! The liberal hosts on MSNBC daily feature the latest right wing publicity statement and immediately denounce it is “Psycho Talk”.
For example, when Michele Bachmann makes a statement that Negroes were better off under the institution of slavery than today’s African Americans; she is DEFINITELY NOT trying to convinvce African Americans of the veracity of such an absurdity. Rather the statement is exclusively for the enjoyment of the southern white Republicans, who have been working overtime on their local school boards to erase slavery from the public school history books.
These lame Republican candidates like Bachmann are doing their level best to channel Ronald Reagan’s southern strategy for the upcoming Republican presidental primary. Another statement associated with Ms. Bachmann was that “the founding fathers worked tirelessly to eliminate slavery in America”. This like the other outlandish racialist talking point is cast in a simple form expressing the candidate’s opinion about American society. Such a well publicized provocative statement costs the candidate absolutely nothing in the Republican Primary fight, and actually has a great deal of worth in this context.
The Bachmann campaign is not at all concerned with the effect that a statements such as these may have on the general presidental election. Their only concern at the moment is to win the Republican nomination. They figure that the MSM will give them ample leeway to walk back from these outlandish racialist statements in the course of the general election campaign.
If Bachmann were to win the Republican nomination, she would recruit a few black Republicans and put them on her staff to be paraded about as the Bachmann “Token Coloreds”. The not so subtle prominent display of these “Token Coloreds” will most likely serve to provide Bachmann with the “mainstream Mantle” thereby making her a viable candidate from the prospective of the American MSM.