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.
I don't even know where to begin with the layers of ignorance that this statement represents. This nostalgia for the "olden days" of slavery ignores the reality that enslaved people were chattel, property to be treated as such. African American babies were sold like animals, some torn from their nursing mothers. Some African American babies were the product of rape, and because they retained the slave status of their mother, their white fathers would casually sell their own offspring to the highest bidder.
Enslaved men, women, and children were all subject to torture, separation, branding with the iron, lynching, rape, starvation, and cruelty beyond belief. Enslaved children were particularly vulnerable to cruelty and defenseless against torture because their parents were not allowed to act on their behalf. An enslaved mother or father could offer no complaint about the treatment of their children and watched silently as some were scalded with burning water, broken with the whip, and beaten with switches. And these so-called Christan conservatives need not take my word for it. They can peruse the 10,000 or so accounts of slavery, written, collected, and disseminated by both enslaved persons and slaveholders alike.
There is no redeeming feature of slavery which we should uplift, except the fact that African Americans survived systematic genocide. We certainly cannot uplift a past in which some African American children faced starvation, as their mothers were forced to serve as wet nurses for white families. Nor should we uplift a past in which these children and their parents had no protection under the law, as African Americans had no rights that whites were bound to respect. But, of course, perhaps this group is unfamiliar with the Dred Scott decision and its "disastrous impact" for black families.
To say that "slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families" is to state the obvious. But what of the underlying issues in that statement? Why were African Americans enslaved? Who enslaved them? What were the conditions of their enslavement? Why was it so disastrous for families? What was the cost of chattel bondage? What are the continuing ramifications of slavery? Where are the reparations for this "disastrous" system? And where is the repentance, by the entire nation, for the 300 plus years of immorality and abomination?
A nostalgic longing for family life under slavery and conscription is a curious position from a group that pledges to reject "anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control." Some of us dare to believe that freedom and full humanity under the law is a better environment in which to raise our children, no matter the number of parents in the home.
© Yolanda Pierce
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