The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom
Rosen, Stephen Peter
most of the contributors focus on his broader contributions m social philosophy. One of the things that Hayek has worried about a great deal is why the case for the free society, as advanced by...
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...Such a position, unlike Moynihan's, is compatible with American liberalism and egalitarianism...
...No doubt Gutman believes that he is serving the cause of equality by declining to use his data to judge black families...
...But that is all beside the point for Gutman...
...He cites an 1870 editorial in The Nation and sniffs that "' The Nation identifies sexual restraint, civil marriage and family 'stability' with civilization itself...
...M. Stanton Evans Dr...
...It is explicitly motivated bv the controversy surrounding the Moynihan report...
...Most strikingly, the same census figures showed that among young (20-29) black women in two rural Southern counties, father-absent households were, respectively, two and four times as common as they were among identically aged white women in a poor Southern county chosen by Gutman as a benchmark...
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...Instead, they evoked ferocious attacks for having contradicted the American ideology of equality...
...Therefore I want to bring down this system, and replace it with one responsive to human needs...
...But it is only by denying the validity of applying external tests to black culture that he can claim that the black family was not damaged by slavery...
...Now i t may well be, of course, that Friedman does not attach m either of these tenets the importance that Silk would have it that he does...
...And so poor Charlie is to be entombed in a conspiracy of silence, a quack undone not only by his own quackery but also by the cowardliness of his erstwhile press agents...
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...Through all these years he gained no sympathy at all for the scarcity of economic goods, the fragility of political liberty, or the importance of lives led outside the public sector...
...As a cultural phenomenon Charles Reich has assumed room temperature...
...On what grounds, then, does Gutman base his claim that the black family was not weakened by slaver), ? The most impressive evidence is the documented zeal with which blacks legalized their informal slave marriages after the CMI War...
...Nationally syndicated columnist John Lofton Shows, in great detail, that nuclear energy is significantly safer than any alternative source of energy--including those we are using now...
...This is something which seems never to have fully registered with the Chicago school...
...Such sentiments...
...I am unwilling to overlook injustice, cruelty, and oppression...
...From this he sensibly infers "that all slave marriages were insecure [italics original...
...Silk and other modern liberals see capitalism as ugly and obscene, and therefore calling for forceful and immediate action...
...Gutman / Pantheon / $15.95 Stephen Peter Rosen It has been remarked that the first virtue of the British Empire was the fact that it stood in direct contradiction to the principles of liberalism, and, as such, was a healthy antidote to dogmatism...
...As near as can be told, all slave marriages were legalized by ex-slaves acting on their own initiative as soon as it became possible to do so...
...One way to achieve equality is to discard standards, in the absence of which all men are necessarily equal...
...He goes on to state that the constant threat of separation "probably served as a reason to socialize one's children for sale, a damaging and unenviable task for any parent.'" From anecdotal evidence he concludes that slavery encouraged illegitimacy since slave women whose fertility was established were less likely to be sold away from their communities by masters who valued fecundity...
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...Although one might guess that Moynihan would recommend, on the basis of this analysis, policies specifically designed to affect black family structure, he chose to Stephen Peter Rosen is a graduate student in the Harvard government departmerlt...
...Colorado residents please add tax...
...Rather the reverse...
...It is George McGovern on the floor of the U.S...
...Herbert Gutman's book is the latest of these attacks...
...Nonetheless, I think it is in fact the case that an overemphasis on efficiency and perfect competition has weakened the economist's case for the free market...
...were legitimate than not...
...He wrote Greening, and gained wide fame...
...Ralph de Toledano Technically informed, lively and polemical analysis compares the risks of nuclear power to those of its alternatives, concluding that it is safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented...
...Having done that, he will argue that slave culture and families were not "weaker" than their white counterparts, and that such judgments are the result of the racist application of white standards to black creations...
...Gutman clearly admits that slavery had catastrophic consequences for the black family...
...Never mind that people were criticizing the family lives of English workers and Irish immigrants for exactly the same weaknesses perceived in black families...
...His every word was quoted...
...One day Charlie would harangue on behalf o f " t h e kids," the next day he might air his obsession with Brooks Brothers, whose suits were "scratchy" and "interfered with the free movement of my mind...
...Moynihan's facts and arguments did not encourage Americans to realize that equality was a much more problematic goal than they had believed...
...Beckmann's lucid and readable book should be in the hands of every concerned American...
...I want nothing to do with a country that oppresses the people of any other country...
...This is no mere cultural quack...
...Worse still he had a rhetorical quirk that was especially horrifying...
...Problems like poverty, pollution, ignorance, and militarism rouse indignation and passion, yet, as Hartwell points out, they are treated too lightly or too rationally by men like Hayek and Friedman...
...He does wish to show that slaves had a culture of their own...
...It claims that black families were not weakened by slavery and that they are not now weak...
...The problem is that Gutman simply does not show that the black family was not weakened by slavery...
...By examining 1880 census figures he determines that between one-fourth and one-third of all black children under six lived in households with missing parents...
...Hartwell's worry is that the champions of economic freedom have too little respect for such "powerful and valuable springs of feeling" as moral indignation, aesthetic revulsion, envy, and hatred...
...He became a friend and disciple of William O. Douglas, whom he calls "the Sun God himself...
...According to an observer whom Gutman quotes without contradiction, " I t was held no shame for a girl to bear a child under any circumstances...
...Natl...
...But there it was in all its splendor...
...synd...
...It is Senator Edward Kennedy...
...This is pretty poor stuff...
...Later he practiced with Arnold, Fortas & Porter, the prestigious Washington law bordello...
...Natl...
...synd...
...The fact that slaves knew the names of their parents tells us very little about the virtues and vices of slave family life...
...I do not want to live in a country where there is such pervasive cynicism, corruption, and betrayal of its own dignity...
...It is an editorial writer for The Nation saying his morning prayers...
...A more generous and sensitive approach would be hard to design...
...The last thing the modern American liberal wants is to be cautioned, as Hayek cautions him, that the would-be reformer "will have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, as the gardener does for his plants...
...The general impression created by the Times and other favorable reviewers is that the Moynihan report, and the scholarship on which it was based, have been substantially discredited...
...At least two points emerge which shed additional light on Silk's treatment of Friedman...
...At the same time, it was completely undesirable to give comfort to those who argued that blacks were racially inferior...
...I cannot accept living in a country where people feel powerless to affect their lives...
...Mein Gott...
...But it was not enough to keep him out of trouble...
...Never mind that family stability probably is identical with civilization, as Freud thought...
...Inequalities of condition clearly existed between races, they had to be understood, and it was desirable that something be done about them...
...Such talk was "elitist" and reflected "ideological currents that assigned inferior status to nineteenth century blacks, women and working class men...
...Witty, highly informative, thoroughly documented, caustic...demolishes the myths, distortions and outright falsehoods of the anti-nuclear crowd...
...Moynihan and Gutman do not differ on their facts...
...Senate...
...Utility, free trade, and self-interest rightly under...
...But equal to what...
...However much Moynihan attributed problems in black family structure to slavery and the depradations of whites, it could not be ignored that he was saying that black families were weak and not what they might be...
...In short and in sum, Charlie had access to practically all the benefits chic liberalism could shower on a young man--an elite education, access to elite institutions, power, ease, and the New York Times with breakfast...
...All men are created equal, and would be if given the chance, yet in 1974, fewer black births in Washington, D.C...
...BOOK REVIEW The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925 HerbertG...
...If ever the forces of reaction heard such noble statements issuing from our Charlie they would have ammunition enough to destroy the Army of Decency forever...
...That is why slave marriages, however long they lasted, cannot be characterized as stable...
...Moynihan, drawing upon the conventional academic wisdom, wrote a report which argued that slavery had so weakened the black family that it was less able to support or morally educate blacks...
...stood declared that the Empire ought not exist, that it probably could not exist...
...But by Gutman's statement, the possibility, not the actuality of separation precluded stable family life...
...It is in his conception of equality that Moynihan differs from and is superior to Herbert Gutman...
...His conclusion, drawn from his evidence, is that between one-seventh and one-sixth of all black families in slavery experienced forcible separations...
...In the midst of the most lunatic discourse he would suddenly gain his composure, clear his throat, and launch a pious declaration along the lines of the following from The Sorcerer, (page 244 for the scholarly disposed): "The major goal of my own work is fundamental, political change...
...So it is in America, only we have egalitarianism and obvious cultural differences...
...I cannot in good conscience live in a country that imprisons people, humiliates them, degrades them, or ignores their basic humanity...
...A higher conception of equality requires an understanding of what people ought to be as well as efforts to make them so, even if those efforts mean acknowledging existing differences...
...And those words were not only idiotic, they were pristine ritualistic liberalism...
...A PROPHET IN EXILE (continued from page 4) a hunger for power, Charlie went to study law at Yale and clerked for Hugo Black...
...by the late 1960s it became apparent to all that the experience had idiotized him...
...He acknowledges that "Antislavery critics had many good reasons to complain that as a social system, slavery weakened the slave household...
...Even weaker is Gutman's insistence, based on plantation records, that slave children were often named after their grandparents, and that this phenomenon showed the strength, resilience, and autonomy of slave families and culture...
...Less significant is the fact advanced 32 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 by Gutman that on plantations from which slave family members were not sold away, slave women often had all their children by one man...
...What The Enemy could do to the liberal endeavor if they ever drew this connection...
...In the 1960s he began teaching law at Yale...
...As Hayek wrote, "the argument in favor of competition does not rest on the conditions that would exist if it were perfect...
...Early in the 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the misfortune to become involved in a problem of this sort...
...support programs aimed at reducing black unemployment...
...As Silk understands it, the case for a free economy rests on two pillars: an overriding emphasis on efficiency as the criterion for all economic policy decisions, and a belief in the relevance and validity of the model of perfect competition...
...Ship to: The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 33...
...A less democratic country would blink and ask what of it, but human equality is a serious, if not ideological matter in America, and differences among groups of people must be explained, or better, explained away...
...One of the things that Hayek has worried about a great deal is why the case for the free society, as advanced by people like Milton Friedman, holds so little appeal for modern-day intellectuals like Leonard Silk...
...To: THE GOLEM PRESS Box 1342-T, Boulder, Colo...
...Gutman's argument was printed and tacitly endorsed by the New York Times--recognition which indicated, as does the Church's imprimatur, not that the story was factually correct, but that it was free from errors of faith and morals...
...On a closely related point, even Hayek comes in for gentle criticism, this time from Ronald Hartwell...
...Such midnineteenth century cla.~ and sexual beliefs reinforced racial beliefs about Afro-Americans...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
