Now, there have always been several problems with this assessment. The first is the underlying assumption that the relative economic success of white Americans is primarily due to stable family structures, and not the result of education, economic opportunity, widespread and nearly unlimited access to public goods, as well as full political representation and the protection of the law.
But the most important issue is that, insofar as we can speak of them as singular entities, neither the black family nor black society was any stronger or any less intact under slavery or Jim Crow laws, and, in Donald’s formulation, there were never any more black families.
American chattel slavery was effectively defined by the fundamental precarity of the black family. The system was based on the deprivation of slaves’ reproductive capacity. Men and women were forced to bear children who were then sold for profit. Families were routinely torn apart and alienation by birth was the norm.
The following is an excerpt from “Truth is Stranger than Fiction: A Narrative of the Life of Father Henson,” published in 1858 by abolitionist Josiah Henson.
My siblings were sold one by one first, while my grief-stricken mother held my hand. When it was my mother’s turn, she was purchased by Isaac Riley, of Montgomery County, and then I was sold to the assembled buyers. Half-distracted by the thought of being separated from all her children forever, my mother pushed her way through the crowd to where Riley stood, as the bid for me continued. She fell at his feet, clung to his knees, and, in a voice that only a mother can make, begged him to buy her as well as her baby, and that he would at least let her keep one of the little ones for herself.
Could it be believed that this man thus accused not only would not listen to her pleas, but could also make her crawl out of his reach and leave her with such ferocious blows and kicks that she exchanged groans of physical agony with tearing sobs? As she crawled away from this cruel man, I heard her sob, “Oh Lord Jesus, how long must I suffer like this!” I must have been five or six years old at the time. I can still see and hear the poor weeping mother.
Slaves worked hard to maintain family ties and blood ties. They married outside of legal boundaries and tried to keep their families as long as they could. But they were ultimately at the mercy of their masters, who could and did destroy their families for the sake of profit and their own selfish gain.
Similarly, the black family under Jim Crow cannot be discussed separately from the poverty, exploitation, lawlessness, and primitive violence that characterized the apartheid experience in the South.
