So what's the purpose of the piece you posted.
To show how little we actually know about slavery as we try to justify Critical Race Theory with fallacious catch phrases and false assumptions about income, education, home ownership etc.. I don't hate blacks. Never have. Just hate how the Race baiters are making a disgusting living off of manufacturing race based crisis.
The Black Family
Some of the most basic beliefs and assumptions about the black family are demonstrably fallacious. For example, it has been widely believed that black family names were the names of the slave masters who owned particular families. Such beliefs led a number of American blacks, during the 1960s especially, to repudiate those names as a legacy of slavery and give themselves new names— most famously boxing champion Cassius Clay renaming himself Muhammad Ali.
Family names were in fact forbidden to blacks enslaved in the United States, as family names were forbidden to other people in lowly positions in various other times and places— slaves in China and parts of the Middle East, for example, and it was 1870 before common people in Japan were authorized to use surnames. In Western civilization, ordinary people began to have surnames in the Middle Ages. In many places and times, family names were considered necessary and appropriate only for the elite, who moved in wider circles— both geographically and socially— and whose families' prestige was important to take with them. Slaves in the United States secretly gave themselves surnames in order to maintain a sense of family but they did not use those surnames around whites. Years after emancipation, blacks born during the era of slavery remained reluctant to tell white people their full names.
The "slave names" fallacy is false not only because whites did not give slaves surnames but also because the names that blacks gave themselves were not simply the names of whoever owned them. During the era of slavery, it was common to choose other names. Otherwise, if all the families belonging to a given slave owner took his name, that would defeat the purpose of creating separate family identities. Ironically, when some blacks in the twentieth century began repudiating what they called "slave names," they often took Arabic names, even though Arabs over the centuries had enslaved more Africans than Europeans had.
A fallacy with more substantial implications is that the current fatherless families so prevalent among contemporary blacks are a "legacy of slavery," where families were not recognized.
As with other social problems attributed to a "legacy of slavery," this ignores the fact that the problem has become much worse among generations of blacks far removed from slavery than among generations closer to the era of slavery. Most black children were raised in two-parent homes, even under slavery, and for generations thereafter. Freed blacks married, and marriage rates among blacks were slightly higher than among whites in the early twentieth century. Blacks also had slightly higher rates of labor force participation than whites in every census from 1890 to 1950.
While 31 percent of black children were born to unmarried women in the early 1930s, that proportion rose to 77 percent by the early 1990s.
If unwed childbirth was "a legacy of slavery," why was it so much less common among blacks who were two generations closer to the era of slavery? One sign of the breakdown of the nuclear family among blacks was that, by 1993, more than a million black children were being raised by their grandparents, about two-thirds as many as among whites, even though there are several times as many whites as blacks in the population of the United States.
When tragic retrogressions in all these respects became painfully apparent in the second half of the twentieth century, a "legacy of slavery" became a false explanation widely used, thereby avoiding confronting contemporary factors in contemporary problems.
These retrogressions were not only dramatic in themselves, they had major impacts on other important individual and social results. For example, while most black children were still being raised in two-parent families as late as 1970, only one third were by 1995. Moreover, much social pathology is highly correlated with the absence of a father, both among blacks and whites, but the magnitude of the problem is greater among blacks because fathers are missing more often in black families.
While, in the late twentieth century, an absolute majority of those black families with no husband present lived in poverty, more than four-fifths of black husband-wife families did not. From 1994 on into the twenty-first century, the poverty rate among black husband-wife families was below 10 percent.
It is obviously not simply the act of getting married which drastically reduces the poverty rate among blacks, or among other groups, but the values and behavior patterns which lead to marriage and which have a wider impact on many other things.3 6
Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell
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www.esquire.com
