Friday, November 19, 2010

Blacks, Slavery, the 60s and Marriage

In recent posts about religion, race and marriage, there has been discussion in the comments speculating about why American blacks in particular seem to have such a hard time with marriage. Allow me to suggest an explanation.

A while back, while doing some research and reading about the breakdown of the family in the US, I wrote a post about the effects of slavery on black marriage statistics which contained this tidbit.
The muddled notions of modern feminism aside, a man’s primary role in a family is to protect and provide. Because slaves did not own the fruits of their labor and because male slaves could not protect their families from being dispersed, the man’s value in the slave family was minimal. Marriage among slaves was illegal. For these reasons and others, slave families were primarily matriarchal.

After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws as well as other societal norms similarly diluted the man’s value in the black family. Additionally, for a variety of reasons, black women outnumbered black men, which as we have seen before, depresses the number of marriages in a community.
I would argue that, in terms of marriage, blacks in America had appalling luck in the timing of their societal evolution from slaves to equals. The sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s wrecked our concept of family just when the civil rights movement was giving black men the equality they needed to properly fill the roles of father and husband in their families. Had the civil rights movement predated the sexual revolution by a generation or two, there would be no consternation today about why blacks have such a high illegitimacy rate relative to the rest of us. We'd all have been equally screwed by the destruction of societal morals in the 60s and 70s. Whites would no longer be able to draw solace from the fact that black illegitimacy statistics were worse.

It was all bad timing. Race had nothing to do with it at all.

Umm, Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice, could you come back in about 50 years? We're not ready for you just yet.

2 comments:

Kelly the little black dog said...

Didn't you just argue that race, in form of the lingering effects of slavery, had/has a lingering impact on marriage in the black community? What did I miss here.

K T Cat said...

Kelly, I would argue that slavery and its successor racist social structures most certainly had an effect, albeit a declining one, on the black family up to the civil rights movement. I'm suggesting that just as the civil rights movement was bringing the black family into parity with whites, the sexual revolution blew the whole thing apart. Had the sexual revolution occurred two generations after the civil rights movement, I don't think you would have seen a significant difference in the illegitimacy rates.