POLITICS JULY 13, 2011
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Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum may have a number of things to be embarrassed about. However, supporting an observation that there were more two-parent black families during slavery than there are today is not one of them.
This observation was found in “The Marriage Vow,” a conservative pledge produced by The Family Leader, a Christian group. It was signed, notably, by Bachmann and Santorum. “Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families,” the pledge said, “yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.” The Family Leader removed the passage after a public outcry. But, while the comparison to slavery might seem crude—and the full pledge, generally speaking, is bigoted and wrongheaded—there was an important truth in the now-erased sentence. It is a truth about the oft-forgotten toughness of black families during slavery and in the difficult decades after emancipation.
IT ONCE WAS fashionable to suppose that slavery had made the conventional family difficult to sustain because of spouses so often being sold away from one another and children being separated from their parents. A natural conclusion was that, after slavery, the old patterns persisted, especially given how difficult conditions continued to be for black people, and that this was an understandable precursor to the fatherless norm in inner-city black communities after the 1960s. There is, indeed, sociological literature showing that it was hardly unknown for black people to be raised by single mothers during slavery and afterward. In fact, over the last 150 years, there have always been proportionately more single-parent black homes than white ones.
However, as classic work by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman has shown, despite the horrors of slavery, overall, during the pre-emancipation era, about two-thirds of enslaved families had two parents—far more than today. More recent revisionist work has stressed that, while forced separations were always an important part of the picture, the two-thirds figure remained dominant (Wilma Dunaway is especially handy on this). And this tendency continued into the Jim Crow era, contrary to a false sense one might have of daily life in a black ghetto of the 1930s and ’40s—think Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices or Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. Namely, it is wrong to suppose that, amid the misery of those neighborhoods, all but a sliver of children grew up without a dad. That is a modern phenomenon, whose current extent—fewer than one in three black children are raised by two parents—would shock even the poorest black folk 100 or even 50 years ago.
A standard reference on the subject by University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles in 1994 is most often taken as evidence of the uninteresting—that, gosh, in the old days poor black people didn’t find single parenthood unusual. What is actually more important in its findings is that, from 1880 to 1960, fewer than one in three black children nationwide didn’t grow up with two parents. Another key statistic, from Barbara Agresti in 1978, is that, just past emancipation, in 1870 in Walton County, Florida, about 57 percent of black children lived with two parents; just 15 years later, 89 percent did. Or, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton told us in Black Metropolis, in Chicago in the 1920s, it was considered a problem that just one in seven black children were born to single mothers. What’s more, that number went down during the Depression, not up.
Data like this are important because they show that the reason so few black children grow up without fathers today is not a mere matter of economics or, more graphically, because black men without college degrees find it so hard to get decent work that they abandon their children. After all, black people living under the vicious racism of 100 years ago nevertheless tended, very strongly, to form two-parent families.
Rather, what happens today is more a matter of what people in inner-city neighborhoods grow up seeing as normal (note my evasion of the loaded word culture, although for those who can stomach it, it is precisely what I mean). Plus, there is the sheer fact that, from the 1960s until 1996, expanded welfare policies made it possible to stay on welfare as a mother indefinitely without job training—impossible before the ’60s, and much less common today in most states than it was before 1996. This is why a man could so easily leave kids he fathered to be raised alone—and unsurprisingly, starting in the 1970s, an unprecedented number did.
While maintaining all openness to nontraditional types of family, and while hardly pretending that being raised by one parent is itself a condemnation to despair, we can all admit that neighborhoods where fatherlessness is a norm will not do. That is, there remain neighborhoods today where, if a naive person said something assuming that a young mother she met had a husband at home helping her raise her children, it would seem almost amusing.
Let’s try this: A neighborhood where every child had two parents would be a little odd and almost ominous. Except if it were a highly traditional religious community, one would suspect strangely stringent notions regarding compatibility and even sexuality. We don’t need to go back to shotgun marriages. But the other extreme, where, in many neighborhoods, often nine in ten children’s fathers have not been at home helping raise them, is just as bad. After all, evidence shows that, in general, a child is better off raised by two people, especially if poor.
AND THAT BRINGS us back to the Family Leader pledge, and the much-maligned passage. (Again, I’m not endorsing the pledge, which, among other things, opposes gay marriage; I’m speaking only of the slavery passage that has caused such a stir.) If the aim of the sentence was to foster more two-parent families in black America, then there is not a single black person who could say this is anything less than a humane goal. Many will be put off by the conservative Christian aspect of Family Leader—but then, we must recall that a great many black people would not be, as black Americans are a deeply Christian people. Others will be put off by the fact that Republicans were the signers—but then, one might ask why Democrats supposedly interested in black concerns would be so much less interested in there being more black kids raised by two parents.
Of course, part of the problem with the slavery passage is its location of the present specifically under President Obama. But, in general, this is just boilerplate anti-Democratic rhetoric. Although one could question how pro-black-family the Obama administration is, with its cavalier attitude toward funding for vocational school and community colleges, despite initial promises to step up the latter in particular, the president certainly has not actively set back the cause of two-parent black families. As president, for instance, he has launched a fatherhood initiative.
One also senses that many see in the passage an implication that slavery was somehow good. This interpretation, however, is hasty and mistaken: The purpose of the passage is to show that, despite slavery being the horror that it was, for those enduring it, the two-parent family was a norm. If one feels that the modern media debate is short on intellectual substance and nuance, then one only becomes part of the problem in reading the passage as simply praising slavery.
The factual essence, then, of the now-infamous line in The Family Leader’s pledge represents a truth that all should take to heart: Black people, like all human beings, are capable of great resilience in the face of difficulty; and culture—there, I said it—is not just a lockstep response to the GDP or racism. This is the lesson we should learn from how uncommon single parenthood was among black people familiar with slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic.
39 comments
At the bottom of the first page of this article are two lists of links. On the left "We Recommend." On the right "From Around The Web." The first link under the later is something called "Critics pile on New York Times' shale stories." It's from - sigh - "ExxonNobil's Perspectives." I apologize for not addressing the McWhorter article, but if Exxon wants to put out a pseudo-news story TNR should not be indulging the pernicious fantasy that it's journalism.
- mtinora@me.com
July 14, 2011 at 10:07am
Wow, what a really stupid article. Yes, black children are better off as slaves. Wonderful. There was no defense of that line, ZERO. The author could have said blacks during the rough times of the Great depression...no, how can there be any doubt how the author really views blacks. And stop with this bullshit that the only acceptable family unit is father and mother. For the vast majority of human existence this was not the case, the nuclear family is a new invention. For millenia free people existed in tribal units because the mortality rate was so high, if both parents succumbed to a disease another relative raised them without much thought. In China there exists a matriarchal society where the father is completely out of the picture, the mother's family raises the children. There is far less violence and rape there. Why is that not a valid social construct? McWhorter himself is repeating this ridiculous lie that slave households were little nuclear family units with daddy going off to toil in the fields and mommy staying home and baking and cleaning. As much as a social society slaves could have, it was communal in nature, not nuclear. If there is an example of resilience, it is in the resilience of that. Black households had many generations living together (those old that survived) and many relatives. Why must McWhorter create this alternative universe?
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 10:56am
Thanks to McWhorter for being a continuing voice of reason. Blackton, you completely misrepresent McWhorter's argument. I notice you did not quote him directly.
- polcereal
July 14, 2011 at 11:12am
polcereal "However, supporting an observation that there were more two-parent black families during slavery than there are today is not one of them." Come on, this is idiotic. During slavery there were no real two parent families. Slaves were property bought and sold, with a pretty damn short life span. That passage in that document was brain dead stupid, no one in their right mind can possibly support such an observation. Here is another quote: After all, black people living under the vicious racism of 100 years ago nevertheless tended, very strongly, to form two-parent families. It is nowhere as simple as this. One, people had far, far less choice of mobility. You live in a dirt poor area there really isn't much choice, it is not like young black men were going off to college or another city, they lived there entire life in a limited area. Two, women themselves had even less choices, they were basically viewed akin to chattel...do you really think a black woman who was beat by her husband had any recourse whatsoever? Three, they weren't nuclear families either, not like we view them. Life was far more communal then than now. I can go on and on, but McWhorter is claiming an idyll that did not exist, of somekind of black leave it to beaver family lifestyle. The men worked long, backbreaking jobs, the women themselves had very hard lives, most of it spent working. As soon as children were able, they themselves were put to work in fields. It is demented to look back at those times with nostalgia. The whole point of the article is to justify, however modestly, that vile section of that pledge. Shall I go on ripping him a new one? Now if you want to talk about how to bring stability to black families today, then lets talk just about the world as it exists today and not re-invent a history that didn't exist.
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 12:00pm
Blackton, McWhorter explicitly notes that neither he nor the authors of the passage are saying slavery was a better condition for black children when he writes: "the purpose of the passage is to show that, despite slavery being the horror that it was, for those enduring it, the two-parent family was a norm" (italics mine). What was said in the article: - two family households were more common during slavery - based on studies, two-parent households are better for children than one-parent households What was not said in the article: - black families or children were better off under slavery - two-parent households are superior to any other form of child rearing I, too, consistently enjoy and agree with McWhorter's writing and hope that he continues to do so.
- tealeaves
July 14, 2011 at 12:07pm
polcereal, by the way I have lived on a South Pacific island in Micronesia, in a village in China, and now live in a remote part of Oaxaca. I am not going to say it is exactly analogous with black life of more than a century ago, but I have to believe it is far closer than the life McWhorter himself has lived and which he seems to be judging this make believe past on. A small town nearby where I live (Santa Maria Xidani) is mostly indigenous, with housing that looks like it has been there for centuries, and if not for the electrical wires you can imagine you can be at any time in history. It has a similar type of poverty, religiousity, family structure I am pretty confident that existed in a similar manner for blacks in rural areas a century of so ago. And Zapotecos themselves face a great deal of discrimination still. Family sizes are larger, many immediate relatives live together or side by side, illiteracy is still high. The notion that somehow we could turn these communities into 50's style suburbs is fanciful to say the least. Beyond that, to state that because in these old line Catholic communities where divorce is very uncommon that some fanciful idyll is met because the mother and father live together glosses over the very real pathologies in these areas, like the illiteracy and endemic poverty. Make no mistake about it, I am not saying it is equal to how bad it was for blacks, it wasn't, which makes McWhorters comparisons even more stupid. So yeah, the article is pretty damn stupid
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 12:19pm
The difficulty with the Family Leader passage is that the implication is that you -- i.e., you blacks -- were better off under slavery. Hard to get around that one. That's the nub of the controversy. Also, if you are a slave, it's hard to desert your family. A rather large point, don't you think. Anyway, next we'll learn that people in prison eat better than people on the outside, therefore . . . .; the Irish were happier as peasants, therefore . . . .; the unemployed have fewer neurosises than the employed, therefore . . . . McWhorter might have expanded his analysis to look at two-parent family trends overall, that is, where are they trending, what might the factors be, class, income, etc? Dan
- dbuck1
July 14, 2011 at 12:34pm
tealeaves - two family (you mean parent) households were more common during slavery But this is not true. To state it is to lie. Blacks did not live in two parent households during slavery. You can not make up history. You are creating a condition that did not exist. Kids were not raised by a slave Ward and June Cleaver. "the purpose of the passage is to show that, despite slavery being the horror that it was, for those enduring it, the two-parent family was a norm" This is a total and completely stupid point, utterly meaningless. Do you really imagine that Daddy came home after a long day out in the fields (that mommy herself had to spend as well), if they were lucky enough to still continue to live together and neither died prematurely from disease, childbirth, etc. to read to the children by candlelight. The evidence strongly suggests that the slave societal life was communal, not nuclear. It had to be. This "norm" you pretend existed did not exist. Disease, poverty, short life span, routine rape of slave women by white masters, illiteracy, children sold,...what effing "norm" do you see there? This is my point, which I repeat again and again. I am not stating that blacks should not have nuclear families now or that black men should abandon their kids. What I am saying is that you can argue these points on their own merits without making up a history that did not exist to justify a passage that was obscene.
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 12:34pm
Look - I appreciate that black families during and immediately after slavery were very constrained in their mobility and options for lifestyles. Obviously. And if you're trying to criticize the argument in the article based on the relative value of the statistics when we consider historical factors, then I can support that. Where I think you're being disingenuous is where you claim that McWhorter argues that "Yes, black children are better off as slaves. Wonderful." This is entirely not what was written or argued by either McWhorter or the (admittedly odious) Family Leader. I often find that conservatives, especially hard-core social conservatives, are unaware of their latent racism and entirely unaware of history but I'm not convinced that even they would stoop to inferring that black families were better under slavery. The comparison was made, in my mind, with the exact opposite sentiment: slavery was terrible and so therefore a modern-day situation like we have is all the more shocking and unacceptable. I, like you, disagree with the premise that two-parent, nuclear households are superior to any other form, but this is how they see the world and we need to interpret their statement's intent based on this worldview.
- tealeaves
July 14, 2011 at 1:09pm
I am no friend of Bachman, Santorum or their agenda. But I do get annoyed when people cannot read sentences - meaning they scan it for key words and form an impression based on those - or when they do not ask themselves if there is another interpretation than the first that leaps to mind. Here's what the sentence is saying: 1) The time during which slavery was generally awful for black people. 2) There was one aspect (not all, not most, but one) of that time (not of slavery) which was positive: children tended to grow up with two parents. If only people would do a minimum of work and reflection before making something like this a news item.
- chicago5
July 14, 2011 at 1:22pm
"Yes, black children are better off as slaves. Wonderful." No, this is the contention of the teabaggers who came up with that ridiculous pledge, to justify it, (as I wrote above) however modestly, only feeds into their pathology. I thought my reference was clear since I followed it with: "There was no defense of that line, ZERO. The author could have said blacks during the rough times of the Great depression...no, how can there be any doubt how the author really views blacks." I was referring to the pledge, not McWhorter, and referring to the author of that pledge. The premise of the article was fundamentally flawed. This so called "Family Leader" organization is on a moral par with the KKK in my view. So yeah, it pisses me off to read anyone say "you know, the KKK does kind of have a point..." when, in fact, that point itself is not valid. I am not saying McWhorter is bad, just that he laid a whopper here. The fact that he buys into the myth that...well, it is hard to express, that slavery had elements that were not all bad? And no, I don't find our modern day situation shocking in the least. And I find no rational reason to compare family life now to what life was like for blacks during slavery, with the implicit idea that hey, at least there were some good elements to it. Again, I wrote above if the pledge writer wrote blacks during the Great Depression were more likely to... then there would not have been so much of an outrage, however I would still find the whole comparison deeply flawed. In the end, so what that profoundly poor, illiterate, lacking of basic civil rights blacks of the 1930's had more intact two parent households? It is meaningless as a comparison because it is not a way forward. Is anyone suggesting that the way to bring back the black family unit is to make them profoundly poor, illiterate, lacking of basic civil rights? Why not try to have modern solutions to fatherlessness in black society instead of mythologizing the past? I have whole bunch of solutions Like, expunging records of nonviolent criminals after 10 years of lawful behavior so that some young black kid who got busted for selling pot doesn't have that conviction be carried for his entire life? I could go on and on.
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 1:43pm
1) The time during which slavery was generally awful for black people. 2) There was one aspect (not all, not most, but one) of that time (not of slavery) which was positive: children tended to grow up with two parents. Chicago5, again, this is absolute horseshit on so many levels. Here is the relevant passage: "Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President." Beyond its bad English, it is nonsense to the point it is insane. I listed the points above, I am not going to rehash them. Suffice it to say, you are not even giving the meaning of it the slightest bit of thought.
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 1:54pm
tealeaves: "the purpose of the passage is to show that, despite slavery being the horror that it was, for those enduring it, the two-parent family was a norm"" This is patently false! Another way of putting this would be to say that in spite of the horrors of the Middle Passage, it is a form of travel that reflected tribal unity amongst Africans since the cargo of black slaves got along rather well, with no intra/inter tribal wars. I'm not so sure I'd want to use that premise in 2011 for selling you on cruise travel or how to promote tribal unity in Africa. I'm sorry to say, but McWhorter sometimes goes out of his way to be a useful idiot to neo-racists.
- wkwami
July 14, 2011 at 2:16pm
tealeaves: "the purpose of the passage is to show that, despite slavery being the horror that it was, for those enduring it, the two-parent family was a norm"" This is patently false! Another way of putting this would be to say that in spite of the horrors of the Middle Passage, it is a form of travel that reflected tribal unity amongst Africans since the cargo of black slaves got along rather well, with no intra/inter tribal wars. I'm not so sure I'd want to use that premise in 2011 for selling you on cruise travel or how to promote tribal unity in Africa. I'm sorry to say, but McWhorter sometimes goes out of his way to be a useful idiot to neo-racists.
- wkwami
July 14, 2011 at 2:16pm
I tend to agree with those who don't see McWhorter making outlandish claims about family values in slavery. Rather, I see him as stating simply that by basic demographic measures--from the sources he cites, which obviously I have not checked--both parents were present during slavery (for whatever reason, such as their participation in an extended family, etc.) and indeed during many other historical periods. What he does not address is how one can accept that statistical claim and still feel uneasy about the passage. I have tried to puzzle out my distaste for it. I don't think it's as simple as reading into it a claim that black children were better off during slavery. I think, finally, that it is a veiled indictment of current black culture: "You blacks today must have a really failed culture if you can't hold your families together now when you could do so under slavery." Many social scientists see one of the features of racism as a tendency to blame intrinsic features of individuals or groups for their social status, rather than attributing this status to larger structural forces. If I read any veiled racist claims into the pledge, I believe it is this one: "It can't have been a structural problem that caused the two-parent black family to dissolve; it it had been, the two-parent arrangement would never have held up under slavery. No, you've just failed as a culture for reasons that we'll leave undiscussed." I agree wholeheartedly with blackton that solutions for social situations we would like to improve must be structural. That assumes, of course, that we agree that children really are "better off" with two parents; I gather we don't, and I find that assumption worth debating on its own merits Talking about these issues always raises the heat in the room.
- vanderso
July 14, 2011 at 2:25pm
During the Penal Law era in Ireland, roughly from the 1690s to the 1800s, the Catholic Irish peasantry was oppressed with a targeted viciousness, downtrodden by any standards, and driven to economic desperation by measures that increased poverty by punishing improvements, forced the destruction of economic smallholdings if owned by Catholics, and extracted a confessional poll tax to fund the Protestant Church of Ireland, while the Catholic Church was banned. At the same time, there was still an active oral and partly literate culture out of which we still have songs, instrumental compositions, and poems by such figures as the blind poet Anthony Raftery and the folk musician Turlogh O'Carolan. To note this complex of facts, as I have just done, is clearly not to suggest that we should go back to the misery of the Penal Laws in order to revitalize the cultural life of rural Ireland. Unless someone deliberately wanted to misunderstand me, of course.
- ironyroad
July 14, 2011 at 2:36pm
Sometimes reading TNR comments makes me a bit said and depressed. Human beings are difficult and dangerous creatures. We mouth inspiring ideals while often behaving like scum. Declaration of Independence while keeping slaves and killing Indians. 50% of marriages, more or less, end in divorce and I would guess that half of the ones that don't dissolve are miserable. Probably half the children brought into the world are not much wanted. We can't go back and "unslave" the people we kept as slaves. All we can do is deal with the present and live as constructively as possible. I am not sure what it helps us to talk about "black" families or "white" families today. All marriages are difficult--white, black, straight, gay. All children are difficult because life is difficult. Please be careful about who you marry. Please be as sure as possible that you want the children you conceive and that you raise them as well as possible. This applies whether you are white or black. Please post comments that help us be better people, without being boring. OK, I failed that last injunction.
- skahn
July 14, 2011 at 2:45pm
Bit SAD and depressed I meant to say.
- skahn
July 14, 2011 at 2:45pm
Chicago5: "Here's what the sentence is saying: 1) The time during which slavery was generally awful for black people. 2) There was one aspect (not all, not most, but one) of that time (not of slavery) which was positive: children tended to grow up with two parents. If only people would do a minimum of work and reflection before making something like this a news item." This is stupidity beyond stupidity! It kinda sounds good therefore it must be given credibility? C'mon! Here's something for you to consider... even in today's post-colonial Africa, despite the history of colonialism, the abject poverty, the poor infrastructure, lousy governance, etc., the two-parent family (coupled with the "it takes a village" concept of the extended family as overseer) is still the norm. Why is that? Very simply, culture! Slavery as an institution robbed slaves of the African cultural template for creating families. It is unfortunate that McWhorter chose to focus on the fact that slavery forcibly held families together, temporarily creating a semblance of traditional two-parent families, to the detriment of the far larger issue of the impact slavery had in stripping Africans of their cultural template for creating sustainable families (in America, two-parent families is supposed to be the norm, in most African cultures, mine included, two-parent plus the extended family is the norm in raising children). Research shows the importance of this cultural anchor even in immigrant American families, regardless of race: Children of immigrants more apt than natives to live with both parents http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-children-immigrants-apt-natives-parents.html "Children of immigrants are more likely to live in households headed by two married parents than children of natives in their respective ethnic groups, according to Penn State sociologists... Approximately 44 percent of non-Hispanic black children of immigrants live with married parents, compared to 24 percent of native non-Hispanic black children of natives. A total of 63 percent of non-Hispanic white children of immigrants live with married parents, while 58 percent of non-Hispanic white children of natives live in households with married parents... "Across generations, the pattern does change," said Landale. "The family structure begins to match that of the native population, in part due to changes in cultural norms."
- wkwami
July 14, 2011 at 2:54pm
ironyroad, wtf? Why in the world are you talking about life in Ireland during the penal law period for? If you have a problem with the cultural life in rural Ireland today, how about addressing it itself without finding the need to plumb through history? If an Englishman said the streets were safer in Ireland when they ruled the country then they are today...and said, hey, this is just an observation...no need to get testy about it...would you accept that "observation" at face value, especially when that Observation was false (and I have to repeat it even for you, Slaves did not live Leave it to Beaver type lives. the comparison is bullocks, slaves were property they had no marriage) Irony, for you that is a pretty massive fail. Your analogy is out of this country, literally. Yeah, Irish folk singers and black women who could be raped at will shared so much in common.
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 3:04pm
I'm pretty much with Blackton on this. Call it like it is. The key passage from the Family Leader that he quotes -- "Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President." -- is such stupid thought chain and an abysmally obvious jab at the president. His election in 2008 has absolutely no connection to, no bearing on two-parent household trends. So why drag his name and ethnicity into the discussion. Because the Family Leader doesn't like him. McWhorter calls the remarks "crude," "bigoted and wrongheaded" and then does a backwards somersault trying to wrest some useful meaning from it. The New Republic specializes in this sort of inside-out sort of essay, why up is down, why bad is good. Sooner or later, the New Republic finds a rhetorical silver lining in even the worst calamity. Divorce rates in the US across the board are high -- though the rates seem finally to have stabilized. Still almost 50% of all marriages end in splitsville. Interestingly, divorce rates declined during the Depression and rose during the post-WWII prosperity. I guess during the 1930s people couldn't afford to get divorced. Will the Family Leader will now call for a permanent economic depression in order to save the American family? Dan
- dbuck1
July 14, 2011 at 3:33pm
Thank you dbuck for being the first one to make the point about the really sneaky bit in that fucking clause: "... after the election of the USA’s first African-American President."
- NR409654
July 14, 2011 at 3:53pm
Hey, not only were 2-parent families more common during slavery, but think of all the fresh air and sunshine they got to have! And don't get me started on the free exercise. Blackton is absolutely correct on this. Slavery was one thing: Bad. It remains an indelible stain on our history, a point of shame no less than the third reich for present day Germans, no less than the inquisition for the church. To pound the square peg of 2-parent familydom during slavery into the round hole of the widespread challenges of single-family dynamics among today's black community is an outrage. I read a comment the other day that among conservatives who, to my shame, call themselves Christians, there exists the belief that keeping slaves rather than freeing them was the moral thing to do, since freeing a slave into a cruel economic climate where they would be unable to find employment would be a de facto death sentence. I can think of no more nauseating statement on the underlying racial issues permeating the conservative right than this. The above discussed statement in the marriage vow is a dog-whistle, a wink and nod to those who share in this thinking. Blackton should be applauded for blasting away at it.
- Tristan
July 14, 2011 at 4:13pm
Dog whistles all the way ... bastards thrive on them.
- NR409654
July 14, 2011 at 4:18pm
So I went ahead and checked the links that McWhorter posted to support the contention that yes, in fact the prevalence of black two-parent households WAS higher under slavery than today. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything in either of those links to support such an assertion -- just a lot of stuff about the labor economics of slavery and some intimations of interesting research about slavery in Appalachia (an area whose overall slave population was always lower than other parts of the South and which generally lacked large-scale plantations, so perhaps generalizing about slave families from statistics in Appalachia might not be such a great idea). The bottom line, as Blackton rightfully points out, is that the Family Leader is peddling the malevalent notion that life in slavery was somehow better for blacks than life under Obama. If McWhorter wants to offer a "semi-defense" of such retrograde views, he better do more than cite in passing a few academics who are unfamiliar to the general public -- he needs to summarize their arguments and then offer a coherent defense. Otherwise, this article is little better than a third-rate college term paper in which the author makes an explosive point of his own opinion and pulls a few autothorities out of a hat to give his arguments some academic sheen in the hope that his professor is too busy to notice that those authorities have nothing to do with his argument.
- wildboy
July 14, 2011 at 4:28pm
Wildboy, good eye. The more we get into what McWhorter wrote, the more baffling it gets. McWhorter links to a critique of Fogel and Engerman by someone named Emily Dixon -- writing on what looks like a Dade County high school study guide, or something -- who takes issue with the duo's work. He cites in support of Fogel and Engelman someone who slams them!! Dixon's conclusion: "In retrospect, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman were defenders of slavery. They believed that they [slaves] were more skilled and determined than free blacks because they were pushed harder. Slaves were, in their eyes, better off. They helped the initialization of an efficient economy, and thus attained pride. Thus these two historians interpreted slavery as an efficient economic system." Gee, that's great thinking Messrs. Fogel and Engerman. Slaves were "more skilled and determined" because they were frigging slaves. They had no choice. The book McWhorter cites as a secondary support, is, as you point out, about slavery in Appalachia, a slave subculture that had really very little to do with slavery in the deep south. (I know a minimal amount about slave history, but even I know that.) Slavery was the plantation south, the cotton south, that's where the millions of slaves were. The rest of McWhorter's citations look like cherry-picking -- a helpful statistic from a county here, from a city there. Fact is, divorce numbers trended up across the board in the 20th century. No need to single out blacks. In other words, the basic premise for McWhorter's "semi-defense" of the Family Leaders "crude," " bigoted and wrongheaded" remark doesn't seem to be really true anyway. Dan
- dbuck1
July 14, 2011 at 5:10pm
thanks to those posters backing me up. "The Third Reich had a disastrous impact on German families, yet sadly a child born into the 3rd Reich in 1933 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was a German baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President." This statement is true as divorce rates in Germany are far higher now than then..
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 5:24pm
blackton, I don't like disingenuous spin and I believe you know perfectly well what I am talking about and the nature of the analogy. But fwiw, the analogy is as follows: 1) Despite the Penal Laws in Ireland, there was an active cultural life even among the downtrodden and oppressed peasantry, and to say that is not to justify or mitigate English/Protestant oppression and prejudice. 2) Despite the conditions of American chattel slavery, black people struggled against great odds to maintain a family life that enabled childraising, community integrity, and other types of resistance to outside violence. To make that point is not to justify or mitigate slavery. Slavery wasn't just an abstract system. People lived in it for a couple of centuries, and it manifested itself in many different forms and intensities -- thus there were also phenomena like humor, music, and human affection, precisely because the conditions demanded that resources be mobilized to carve out a minimal space where one was not a chattel slave but a human being. Whether or not McWhorter's point is valid, he wasn't justifying slavery in making it.
- ironyroad
July 14, 2011 at 5:31pm
Ironyroad, McWhorter is not being called out for "justifying slavery" -- though I can't necessarily say the same about Family Leader -- he's being called out for shoddy thinking supported by shoddy research. (That said, the "semi-defense" term in the essay's headline might lead one to think he was defending slavery.) In other words, nothing he's presented supports your point number 2). As for point number 1), it strikes me as a punchline in a Bill Maher joke. There are hundreds: The Warsaw Ghetto wasn't all bad, you got to hang with your friends. Ethiopia has a civil war, Washington, DC, gets a thousand new cab drivers. Black humor. If you wanted to make a more parallel analogy, it would be an attack on John Kennedy by some group not friendly to Irish Catholics, along the lines of: "The Irish Potato Famine had a disastrous impact on Irish families, yet sadly a child born into famine in 1840s Ireland was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than an Irish-American baby born after the election of the USA's first Irish-Catholic president." Note the cause-effect chain implied in the "born after the election of"? To paraphrase Justice Brennan, I know political pornography when I see it. Dan
- dbuck1
July 14, 2011 at 5:58pm
irony, not much to add to Dan but to point 2: 2) Despite the conditions of American chattel slavery, black people struggled against great odds to maintain a family life that enabled childraising, community integrity, and other types of resistance to outside violence. To make that point is not to justify or mitigate slavery. In other words, blacks continued to behave as humans while being slaves, which speaks to the resilience of the human condition. Ok. So then is your point then the modern day blacks are inferior to slaves? That blacks not having 2 parent households are betraying their ancestors? Why are you making this point at all? What the hell has this got to do with whatever pathologies exist in the present day inner city black community? As Dan says, the pledge is political pornography that goes right to the heart of these teabaggers mythologizing southern history. Noble blacks working hard in the fields all day under benevolent white masters, not like those shiftless welfare receiving n$%ger bastards of today.
- blackton
July 14, 2011 at 6:20pm
Wandering around unescorted on the Internet is always dangerous, but I did stumble upon this: http://www.h-net.org/~south/archives/threads/slmarriage.html The discussion is a tad academic, a tad granular, but worth a read. Short version: slave marriages were by and large not legally recognized; roughly one in three slave unions was broken up by the sale of one of the parents. The unions not broken up were kept intact by the slave owners, that is, the slaves were forced to live together. There was no marriage; no divorce. You did what you were told. Perhaps what the Family Leader might try as a policy recommendation, in the form of pledge to be supported by presidential candidates and semi-defended by New Republic writers, is marital-ankle bracelets that would ensure that two-parent households remain intact. If one or the other parent takes off -- a "runaway parent" -- he/she could be quickly rounded up by a runaway-parent hunter, a latter day Simon Legree, and returned to the household. Dan PS My little ankle-bracelet joke aside, per the above cited discussion, runaway slaves were often running away to join their sold-off mate
- dbuck1
July 14, 2011 at 6:54pm
I've not much to add either as I made the point as clearly as I could. As a last attempt, the principle at issue is as follows: to indicate a facet of X is not to justify X. McWhorter was taking a text that he didn't support (which he shouldn't really have had to make clear, but after this thread I now think he should have used caps and words of one syllable) but which nevertheless contained an observation that -- removed from the polemical/racist/provocative context -- he thought worth some further comment. I'm also reminded of the 'argumentum ad hitlerarium' thing -- when someone casually refers to Hitler (e.g. Hitler was a vegetarian too!) you know the discussion has fallen into the abyss. The same applies to the Warsaw Ghetto comment, which is not worth responding to, as it's obvious that if I did respond to it, I'd be immediately accused of relativizing the Holocaust or some such crap.
- ironyroad
July 14, 2011 at 7:04pm
Ironyroad, There's a Larry David exception to Godwin's Law, that is, jokes are OK, especially if coupled with Ethiopian war jokes. Back to the theme, and then I have some television that needs watching. McWhorter argued that the Family Leader had a point, then he cited what appear to be some bogus or irrelevant studies. The entire essay was a car crash. Let's summarize, backwards: president Obama has nothing to to with two-person household integrity, of whatever race. (If he had been president for the last 100 years, OK, maybe.) Two-person household integrity rates regardless of race have been dropping for a long, long time. (We can have a larger discussion about the effects of upon the family structure of capitalism, industrialization, urbanism, modernity, democracy, broadening voter enfranchisement, but that would be boring.) Finally, under slaver, there was no marriage, no divorce, no desertion,. You belonged top someone. If he sold you & not your partner, you were gone. If you stayed together, he ruled that also. You had little choice. Sorry, Miss Marple beckons. Dan
- dbuck1
July 14, 2011 at 7:58pm
This discussion makes me want to re-watch “The Wire” series, and, again, thank my lucky stars I wasn’t born circa 1992 in East Baltimore as the Randy character. One could make an argument that the oppressive environment that this character faced wasn’t any less hopeless or oppressive than the one faced by folk in the slavery days. Key words being “environment” and “less hopeless or oppressive.” I’m sure Prop Joe would have insightful thoughts on this discussion… BTW, would love to see a piece by McWhorter on this series.
- OkiSaru
July 14, 2011 at 8:49pm
... “Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families,” the pledge said, “yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.... I don't get the point of mentioning slavery here except to be pernicious (and possibly racist.) I don't see the point of an incredibly hedging--ya' think?--"semi defence" of this statement except to be safely provocative for its own sake, an essential McWhorterism. Which isn' to say there isn't a crisis in the social dysfunction evident in the black underclass with its alarming, comparatively preponderant statistics of black on black crime, crime generally, incarceration, family breakdown, school failure, out of wedlock children and absentee fathers, the scourge of "acting white," other things, all inverting the verities evident in bourgeois values. See Amy Wax: Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century. But to attempt to address this crisis as the infamous statement does is a prenicous, tendentious distraction.
- basman
July 14, 2011 at 9:24pm
OkiSaru, I don't know if McWhorter wrote on 'The Wire' but he did have a very good piece on David Simon's 'Treme' a years or so ago in TNR.
- ironyroad
July 15, 2011 at 9:42am
...Which isn' to say there isn't a crisis in the social dysfunction evident in the black underclass with its alarming, comparatively preponderant statistics of black on black crime, crime generally, incarceration, family breakdown, school failure, out of wedlock children and absentee fathers, the scourge of "acting white," other things, all inverting the verities evident in bourgeois values. See Amy Wax: Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.... And see The Wire, the greatest TV serial drama ever, and high art at that.
- basman
July 15, 2011 at 11:06am
p.s. Something here by McWhorter on The Wire http://www.tnr.com/print/blog/open-university/just-the-wire
- basman
July 15, 2011 at 11:09am
and http://www.nysun.com/opinion/wire-war-of-truths/72948/
- basman
July 15, 2011 at 11:12am