Slavery, Property and the Black Family

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LAST week, the Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37 percent of African-Americans polled felt that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of a widening class divide. From Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most fundamental assumption in the history of the black community has been that Americans of African descent, the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute “a mighty race,” as Marcus Garvey often put it.

“By a ratio of 2 to 1,” the report says, “blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of blacks and whites have grown more alike.”

The message here is that it is time to examine the differences between black families on either side of the divide for clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality. We can’t afford to wait any longer to address the causes of persistent poverty among most black families.

This class divide was predicted long ago, and nobody wanted to listen. At a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report on the problems of the black family, I asked the conservative scholar James Q. Wilson and the liberal scholar William Julius Wilson if ours was the generation presiding over an irreversible, self-perpetuating class divide within the African-American community.

“I have to believe that this is not the case,” the liberal Wilson responded with willed optimism. “Why go on with this work otherwise?” The conservative Wilson nodded. Yet, no one could imagine how to close the gap.

In 1965, when Moynihan published his report, suggesting that the out-of-wedlock birthrate and the number of families headed by single mothers, both about 24 percent, pointed to dissolution of the social fabric of the black community, black scholars and liberals dismissed it. They attacked its author as a right-wing bigot. Now we’d give just about anything to have those statistics back. Today, 69 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, while 45 percent of black households with children are headed by women.

How did this happen? As many theories flourish as pundits — from slavery and segregation to the decline of factory jobs, crack cocaine, draconian drug laws and outsourcing. But nobody knows for sure.

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

Ten years after slavery ended, Constantine Winfrey, Oprah’s great-grandfather, bartered eight bales of cleaned cotton (4,000 pounds) that he picked on his own time for 80 acres of prime bottomland in Mississippi. (He also learned to read and write while picking all that cotton.)

Sometimes the government helped: Whoopi Goldberg’s great-great-grandparents received their land through the Southern Homestead Act. “So my family got its 40 acres and a mule,” she exclaimed when I showed her the deed, referring to the rumor that freed slaves would receive land that had been owned by their masters.

Well, perhaps not the mule, but 104 acres in Florida. If there is a meaningful correlation between the success of accomplished African-Americans today and their ancestors’ property ownership, we can only imagine how different black-white relations would be had “40 acres and a mule” really been official government policy in the Reconstruction South.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

Perhaps Margaret Thatcher, of all people, suggested a program that might help. In the 1980s, she turned 1.5 million residents of public housing projects in Britain into homeowners. It was certainly the most liberal thing Mrs. Thatcher did, and perhaps progressives should borrow a leaf from her playbook.

The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth. According to a study by the economist Edward N. Wolff, the median net worth of non-Hispanic black households in 2004 was only $11,800 — less than 10 percent that of non-Hispanic white households, $118,300. Perhaps a bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty — one floated during the Civil War but never fully put into practice — would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners. Sadly, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle, an enormous number of houses are being repossessed. But for the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society.

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.

Gates, a Harvard professor, explains how blacks who owned property right after slavery, decendants have done better than those who didn't.

 

Well I'm going to bump this thread even though people would rather pile on God's Son. One of the more interesting things in this column is that blacks don't see themselves as one group of people anymore which I find funny because when it comes to debates about race in this forum for instance, you always get people who assume that all black people subscribe to al sharpton's beliefs for example, or all black people are marching in jena, or all black people want to see don imus fired.

Unfortunately I think this kind of thinking among black people will leave poor blacks even further behind in poverty and education.

 

an organization like naacp exists for a historical reason. it isn't going away anytime soon. it seems to me just like in god's son thread, people want to make a straw man out of the naacp or al sharpton because those are easy targets. just like its the only point you found worth while discussing in this thread.

 

no the point was that black people aren't a homogenous group.

edit: also the point of the column

 

i have no idea what you're talking about. if you really read the post as you claimed, the only point I was making is that people refer to black people in generalities on this board as if we all think alike. I don't know how you get I was criticizing your ethinicity out of that. i don't even know what ethincity you belong to. I didn't start this thread to get into a debat about how all black people don't follow al sharpton. it was just an example of misguided thinking about black people as one homogenous group. the fact that you want to continue to argue this point which I think is fairly clear and non debatable is telling about you, not your ethincity, whatever it is.

 

I never said "white people" further proof that your reading is selective at best.

 

I really don't understand what you find unreasonable about the point that all black people don't think alike and blacks have different values just like every other group of people, men, women, whites, hispanics, etc. and that in these threads it probably would be better off if when debating these topics people keep that in mind.

 

seemingly to argue the point that every other group is right in thinking that all black people think alike and following the likes of sharpton.

continuing to justify that line of thinking, like I have to go out and shout from a mountain top that not all black people think alike and follow sharpton

 

I think we can all agree that thinking one group does everything the same especially a race is bad. its the reason why you and others got so upset at the thread started by God's Son. Was it unreasonable for him to make sweeping generalizations. Why's it different for you?

a union and a race are two very different things. the union leader, first of all is elected, secondly is speaking on things related to work, a very narrowly defined subject. race is a lot more complex, and to assume that all of one race subscribe to one line of thinking, is unreasonable and dangerous.

I'm going to tell you like I told pouhe, a black poster, al sharpton is a media creation. the sooner everyone realizes, the better.