Toward a Study of Black America
Patterson, Orlando
Any attempt to study black Americans immediately confronts a number of stubborn theoretical issues, compounded by a great deal of moral and political controversy. The most fundamental of these...
...It did not attack the basic form of the institution...
...These are the true, and still largely unsung, heroes of American history...
...This is ridiculous...
...As in classical Athens, American democracy dialectically emerged in that same process of "double exclusion" recently discussed by Pierre VidalNaquet: "the exclusion of women, which made it a `men's club...
...Here race was really less directly important...
...The black underclass has always been with us...
...The civil rights movement, in succeeding where it did, marked the close of the abolition movement in America...
...The seemingly simple nuclear family has at least fourteen asymmetric roles, each valued, signified and expressed in many different ways: husband, wife, father-son, son-father, fatherdaughter, daughter-father, mother-son, sonmother, brother-sister, and so on...
...The more the white poor declined, the greater their reliance on the powerful psychological and social resource provided by the dominant culture...
...But not among their bourgeois ancestors...
...Yet they are not racist cultures, because this ideology is a minor component in their systems of belief...
...When the poorest, most unqualified, and most FALL • 1989 • 479 alien European peasants arrived on the shores of America, what they received, and quickly learned to value and express, was the collective good of nonblackness, of positively valued, strongly charged whiteness...
...The attack on the obvious flaws of the "culture of poverty" approach went, however, well beyond the specific deficiencies of Oscar Lewis and his school: It became an attack on all cultural explanations...
...Slavery is distinctive in being a relation of personal domination based on direct and indirect violence, in which the dominated is utterly excluded from all independent involvement in the wider community, and is parasitically dishonored, by which I mean that the master gains ego enhancement from his personal debasement of the slave, and all nonslaves gain collective honor from the degradation of the slave group...
...Only with the civil rights movement was the culture of slavery finally demolished...
...It comes as no surprise that just as the black working and middle classes began to make some headway under the impact of affirmative action laws, there was an upsurge of direct racism, reflected most crudely in the upsurge of KKK and other neofascist groups as well as the increased number of overt racist attacks (including one unambiguous old-style lynching of a randomly selected working-class black southern youth) but more subtly, and far more dangerously, in the powerful cultural signals given by the Reagan presidency that racist intolerance is once again acceptable...
...We can trace the underclass, as a persisting social phenomenon, back to this group...
...The view that a person must legally and socially belong to one race or another, with no formally recognized intermediaries, is not only unusual, but had extraordinary consequences for American and black history both during and after the system of slavery, indeed more so after slavery...
...All were men of the utmost integrity...
...The schema above indicates the key points and structural developments of the group...
...7 Ibid., chapter 10, passim...
...Conventional scholarly wisdom is now dominated by what can only be called the simplicities of demographic reification...
...What is more, they persisted after slavery...
...Ironically, this misunderstanding goes back to early classical economists, especially Adam Smith and John Elliott Caimes...
...It did not, however, mark the end of America's culturally entrenched racism...
...More important during the period of slavery were the structural constraints of the plantation...
...This is what I have elsewhere called the catastrophic conception of slavery...
...their exploitation by white and middle-class black men persisted during the postemancipation period because of their poverty and their legal disabilities...
...Black bourgeois historians, anxious to prove that the group has had a past like all other Americans— one that can be shown to go back in an unbroken line to African culture, or out of the mistaken belief that the only dignified history is one that demonstrates near complete control of one's life—have hopelessly obfuscated the fundamental cultural tragedy, the nightmarish social catastrophe, and the sustained economic exploitation that was American slavery...
...What was going on in the making of America...
...Thus it is significant that it was only when the "malignant cancer" of debt peonage began to collapse under the external shock of the boll weevil scourge that Jim Crow laws were introduced...
...These were the people who were not only broken by the system, but who lived either fecklessly or dangerously...
...The web lines to the left of the points in the diagram (these points being critical socioeconomic watersheds) are meant to suggest the constraints and their largely negative effects that had their greatest impact, as always, on the segment of the population least able to cope: hence a reinforcement of their position...
...Their chronic hostility and ambivalence to working-class blacks, and their notorious color prejudices, are well known and have been thoroughly analyzed, perhaps too much so...
...To the degree that they used that resource, to that extent did they share the major burden of the American past...
...And what exactly is meant by the oft-used term "blaming the victim": Do we necessarily "blame" someone when we say that their behavior pattern and attitudes may be part of their problem...
...What was critical was the division of labor, the grinding daily exploitation and the social modes of adjustment to the plantation regime...
...478 • DISSENT The Dominant Culture 4.e...
...Then came a massive swing against such explanations in the late sixties and early seventies, focusing on the "culture of poverty" debate...
...See also, Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia...
...Black historical scholarship cries out for an assault on the simplicities and obfuscations of recent bourgeois and misguided Marxist studies on the subject...
...They were the "incorrigible" blacks of whom the slaveholder class was forever complaining...
...2) Cultural analysis must inform our attempts to understand the external racist environment that constrains all black Americans as well as the internal problems that beset, in different ways, the various classes among them...
...Nearly all of the current vast outpouring of academic works on black Americans rely on quantitative methods, which, by their very nature, lack the instruments to make this vital distinction between problems that are cultural continuities and those that are socioeconomically conditioned persistences...
...A large photograph of her being comforted by the city's conservative Roman Catholic cardinal accompanied its account of the demonstration...
...Revisionist studies during the seventies and eighties have shown persuasively that something very similar to the nuclear family was the norm among them...
...Yale historian Edmund Morgan, in what is surely one of the single greatest studies of the American past, has laid bare the paradoxical truth: Slavery both enabled and defined the very character of Virginian democracy.' More recent studies such as Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, have further shown how by means of the ante bellum propaganda war in which both sides used antiblack racism in defense of freedom, and the war itself that followed, the oppression of blacks became the decisive element in generating and reinforcing the nation's commitment to democracy and the more general ideal of freedom...
...qo e li ‘ nC...
...in medieval Korea, all over the Islamic world...
...First, there was a distinct underclass of slaves...
...Constraining factors, however, do always offer some very tenuous opportunities, and it is these that are seized by the continuing dependent or accommodating class...
...But it was also the most effective cultural resource in the absorption and unification of the many ethnic groups that streamed into America...
...Demographic and econometric data are very nearly useless for this purpose...
...Framework for a Study of Black America All I have to say may be summarized in the model diagramed on page 479...
...Good times help, but bad times may be devastating...
...any "composite biography" of the slave must be seriously called in question...
...9 David T. Ellwood, Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 81...
...FALL • 1989 • 481 There was a fourth distinct group of blacks during the period of slavery: the freed blacks on and off the plantations and the favored mixed group of slaves...
...Then, as now, working- and middle-class blacks were the main victims of underclass criminality...
...Until the black family is fully rehabilitated, American society has a serious debt to repay the black American...
...They also created, in extraordinary abundance, cultural artifacts that the entire nation was quick to share...
...This is in need of serious rethinking and restudy...
...Marxist historians, partly out of a profound misunderstanding of the fundamentally capitalist nature of American slavery,* or partly from a deep sociological misunderstanding of the nature and dynamics of the family as an institution (especially the late Herb Gutman), have collaborated to generate a revisionist view of slavery that has had the effect of completely undercutting the traditional radical view...
...When one states that the family was stable and in good shape among a people, or during a particular period, one is in fact making a very complex claim...
...Wherever we find slavery we find such a group: in ancient Greece and Rome...
...Their effort ended up as an embrace of death for cultural explanations in the wider social science community...
...Judges on the bench have discussed the matter...
...And if they were a nuisance for the slaveholder class, they were then, as now, an even greater problem for other blacks...
...Indeed, the system exploited both the black and the white poor and seriously retarded general southern economic growth: Southerners erected an economic system that failed to reward individual initiative on the part of blacks and was therefore ill-suited to their economic advancement...
...Are cultural explanations of the black American experience in any way incompatible with structural or political ones...
...476 • DISSENT Lower-class black women were sexually exploited during the period of slavery because of conditions peculiar to the system of slavery...
...486 • DISSENT...
...However, this class was then, as now, a small minority of slaves, at the very most five percent or so, if one may hazard a guess...
...The key to any understanding of what S.M...
...The fortunes of these families are closely linked to the performance of the economy...
...Even Malcolm X grasped the catastrophic perspective when he told an audience in the Detroit ghetto in 1953: "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us...
...The threat of using black slaves, and later ex-slaves, as scabs was, I am convinced, a powerful tool in the hands of capital not only in devaluing the labor of the white southern poor, but in allowing the large-scale increase in immigration to the North during periods of high labor supply when it was clear to all that the only purpose more immigrants would serve was to reduce the already dismal bargaining power of the white poor...
...I remain convinced that it is the correct approach to the subject...
...we hear little about the extraordinary acts of personal sacrifice and survival, of resistance against the industrial exploitation of the white ruling class and the pitiless social and economic assaults from the native and immigrant white working classes...
...5 Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 186...
...There is a critical difference between the two...
...PO nr$ , Migr tion- cick 4:, At- Early Urbanizati in/Ghettoization %; % 1916-1940 , - i...
...It is absurd to claim that such continuities do not explain some aspects of black behavior...
...Where once this group depended directly on the white families who retained them, their condition rising and falling with the fortunes of their patron's household, today they lead an equally precarious existence wholly at the mercy of "the public household," that is, the rise and fall of the economy...
...This can only be done by means of the most sensitive, in-depth field studies, of the sort being conducted by scholars such as Elijah Anderson...
...The distinction between a social persistence and a cultural continuity is critical for any understanding of the problems of black America...
...It sustained notions of racial purity, but this was the least of its consequences...
...For not only did they survive the horrors of slavery, but whenever and wherever the system offered the slightest openings one finds clear evidence of social and cultural creativity...
...They then proceed to show how the system of debt peonage, focusing on the critical role of the highly localized, small-scale merchant banker, proved devastating to black economic growth even though this tragic institutional development can be explained without any reference to racism...
...Emancipation and Today's Blacks The abolition of slavery marked only the end of a long beginning for black Americans...
...As Lawrence Levine's illuminating work on the subject demonstrates, both during the period of slavery and the ordeal of southern debt-peonage, the black working class had created an incomparably rich tradition of oral literature in addition to the religion that remained exclusively their own...
...3) All white Americans share the burdens and responsibilities of slavery and its racist heritage...
...As a result, the inequalities originally inherited from slavery persisted...
...Second, it is clear now that from right after slavery blacks always faced two sets of constraints: those of the overarching racist culture and those of the underlying social structure...
...The most dramatic evidence of this, of course, was the obscene appeal to racist bigotry in the last presidential election, something unthinkable a decade ago...
...Unfortunately, these openings were few and far between...
...Throughout the history of the black experience in America, institutional (indirect) racism and direct overarching culturally based racism have reinforced each other...
...The racist culture of slavery not only continued but was compensatorily emphasized as never before...
...One of the callers described himself as a workingclass black man, and he wanted to know why we intellectuals have nothing to say about him and his problems...
...Even when freed they were truly "slaves without masters," as Ira Berlin has ably shown...
...Not the least of the points I wish to emphasize is the fact that people are no more passive creatures of their cultures than they are of their social systems...
...And as scholars it is time we began to recognize their existence...
...But this is something to be proven...
...then, as now, underclass "crime, vice and ignorance led to generalizations about 'the negro.' "7 What was true of the urban South rapidly became true in the urban North...
...I have explored this problem at greater length in my forthcoming work: Out of Evil: Freedom in Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1990...
...What to Do This situation leads to the following conclusions: (1) A return to history and some serious rethinking of recent revisionist historiography on the black past are essential prerequisites for any understanding of the present crisis...
...8 W.E.B...
...For the truth, the depressing, paradoxical truth about American history is that without slavery, and without the chronic, structurally reinforced racism generated by the system of slavery, there would either have been no democracy in America, or, at the very least, its whole character would have been fundamentally different from what we experience today...
...The culture of the South became not simply a culture with a racist ideology, one conveniently justifying the enslavement of people, as was the case all over Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Islamic world, but rather a chronically racist culture...
...In the post-emancipation South, according to Howard Rabinowitz, class "[d]ivisions among urban Negroes were even more significant than those existing among whites...
...The Oxford historian J.C.D...
...not to be taken for granted...
...By some measures, these twoparent families are the least secure members of society, for they get little in the way of income or FALL • 1989 • 483 medical supports despite their vulnerability to swings in the economy...
...Hence the first theoretical task for any historical sociology of black America must be a rehabilitation of the culture concept by clearing up the many messy theoretical problems that surround it...
...6 In all the major Southern cities there existed a "demi-world" of underclass blacks who congregated in notorious areas such as Nashville's "White Castle" and Atlanta's "Ant Hole" as well as the Beaver Slide slum settlement...
...Their most dramatic revolt and triumph is to be found, not in the political arena (where there were never any openings), but in their extraordinary resistance to the perverted Christianity that the planter class tried to impose upon them and their reconstruction of their own version of the creed...
...The worst horror of slavery, its single greatest crime against the slave population, was its systematic ethnocidal assault on the inner workings of the complex rules, roles, meanings, and relations of the black family...
...It makes little sense to discuss this complex population of over thirty million people, spread over a vast continent, in dualistic terms...
...What this all means is that what is today called institutional racism was always with the black population...
...Indeed, in the minds of many, this is the real Negro problem...
...d. 1870 900 a. s) ,.., Collapse of • ural System o C .42 Tran ition C b k ? 0 % 1900-19 ct...
...And the white one too...
...They typically live in two-person households, but their institutions are extremely fragile, and they seem to have no resources on which to fall back during economic downturns...
...I could hear the pain in his voice, sense his isolation, and, above all, detect his complete disappointment with me and the academic community that I stood for...
...Its deleterious impact on the blacks reinforced pre-existing disadvantages, and the incapacity of blacks to move from under its weight reinforced the racist view of the group...
...A demographic unit is no more than a unit of reproduction...
...If the present descendants of postemancipation immigrants wish to be relieved of the moral burden of slavery, they had better stop cheering on the Fourth of July...
...They ran away...
...Nor did they simply survive...
...4 Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975...
...From this essentially demographic finding all sorts of claims have been made, in effect, that the black family in the dominant group of blacks was alive and well during the period of slavery, and that this then formed the basis of stable extended rural families in the postemancipation South...
...Postemancipation immigrants and their descendants fully exploited racism, and even were they model liberals the fact remains that becoming a citizen of another country is like buying into a company: one enjoys the profits of its material and moral economy, but equally, one shares all its liabilities and moral burdens...
...The black working class was never broken, even if for decades all it could do was dig in and hold on to the small gains it had been able to eke out in the rural South and the harsh racist mills of the North...
...Lipset refers to as America's "exceptionalism," especially the fact that it is the only Western industrial society without a strong socialist party and a universal welfare state, is the integral role of slave-bred racism in its culture.* Slavery and Today's Blacks The overarching racist culture was one thing...
...Why...
...Cultural continuities are normatively reinforced self-sustaining attitudes and behavior patterns...
...It is a cardinal error to argue that it has only recently emerged as the critical constraint on the black group as overt racism declined...
...We do not have the space here to explain this paradoxical development, except to point out that black scholars and Marxists have been the most prominent in this subversion of the explanatory potency of slavery...
...Cash insightfully observed in The Mind of the South: "Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro, subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude...
...First, there is abundant evidence of an underclass among the earliest urban black communities...
...Clark is only the latest in a long line of British scholars who have remarked on the fact that America, in contrast even with Britain, is peculiar in "the universally diffused belief " among all classes and groups "that their political system is a democracy, and that it is premised upon democratic values...
...DuBois, writing about the Philadelphia underclass in the 1880s in a major study on the city published in 1899...
...Recently I did a call-in show in Madison...
...experience must do some serious rethinking and revision...
...5) The underclass is not a new phenomenon, having persisted from the days of slavery...
...If we are really serious about reinforcing the values of autonomy, work, family, and community, then we must find a way to improve the economic security of this group without putting them into a welfare system...
...There is also the problem of historical explanations, which should not be confused with those of culture...
...but also offered a free collective cultural resource to all whites, one that was not only psychologically and economically useful, but politically generative...
...It did so not only by the formal legal denial of all marital rights and custodial claims in children and parents, but in the countless open as well as more subtle humiliations of spouses, parents, and children in their relations with each other, and in the delegitimation of all familial authority...
...Nonetheless," they write, "it is more appropriate to think of racism as shaping the context within which the adjustments were 482 • DISSENT worked out than as motivating the changes themselves...
...and today their persisting exploitation comes mainly from lower-class black men for reasons peculiar to the conditions of the urban ghetto...
...But if the culture of racism was used to unify all who, by landing on these shores, found themselves miraculously within the Caucasian chalk circle, it was also used to disunify and control, to undercut any effort at political and class unity on the part of the white working classes...
...These were the perfect slaves, the kind of blacks that made absent planters pine for home—the Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas...
...it serves no indispensible cultural or socioeconomic functions and is not a critical element in the way people define themselves physically and socially...
...Ironically, this is the most questionable statement in that great work, and to the extent that this view informed the work to that degree it obscured understanding of its subject...
...The faces of the grieving working-class mothers as they looked on at this spectacle FALL • 1989 485 brought back forcefully to my mind's ear the cry of anguish from the working man out there in white Wisconsin...
...Homeostasis, Then and Now There is one critical finding of Ransom and Sutch's study of the postemancipation system that must be emphasized because it has remained of enormous significance down to present times...
...Rural peonage, as we will argue shortly, was covertly racist, even though set up as a means of controlling both black and white labor...
...9 Third, while employment opportunities for blacks in the South decreased during the first four decades of this century, and they faced formidable obstacles in the northern industrial sector, not least of all from racist unions that systematically excluded them, all was not lost...
...There were at least four modes of adjustment to the slave system leading to the emergence of four distinct types of black American subcommunities from at least the early nineteenth century...
...By 1918 the system of peonage had come to an end...
...And yet they were not hypocrites...
...This underlying structure was not necessarily overtly racist but it invariably had the effect of undermining the position and opportunities of the black population...
...They accepted fully the superiority of the whites...
...In other words, once the institutional control over the black population began to decline, the overarching racist culture immediately turned up its direct cultural controls in the form of legalized oppression: "Jim Crow had arisen as a form of racial repression to replace an economic system that had earlier stifled black initiative, ensured black poverty, and demoralized black leaders...
...This intensely selfconscious commitment to the ideal of freedom is largely explained by the fact that America was the only Western industrial society that had large-scale slavery within its borders...
...5 There were, however, two critical differences between the white poor and the black...
...How this happened constitutes an essential preliminary chapter on the sociology of American historical knowledge...
...4) We must eschew gross aggregation in our discussion of the black population...
...FALL • 1989 477 almost no American student of the subject has chosen to begin: with an understanding of what is unique about the slave relationship itself...
...David Ellwood describes the plight of this class of blacks: The poverty of two-parent families is the poverty of the working poor...
...Consider the following remarkable passage: In the city of Philadelphia the increasing number of bold and daring crimes committed by Negroes in the last ten years has focused the attention of the city on this subject...
...1960-1970 e. Post-Industrial Transfor =lion /Deindustrialization New Wave of Non White Immigration 19 (-present + The Infrastructural Web Model of Socio-Economic and Cultural Change In the Black Population That racist culture not only constrained blacks directly in the thoroughgoing way it poisoned the minds of all nonblack Americans, natives and immigrants, to black folks, by imprinting upon the national consciousness the view that blacks did not, and could not and would never belong...
...The assumption, however, is spurious, and so is the charge...
...He wondered if I knew how tough it was for him and his family...
...At each watershed new forces emerged that reinforced the persistence or continuity of these four basic groups and their respective modes of cultural adjustment...
...A problem may persist over time because of socioeconomic reinforcements that may vary from one period to the next...
...8 This is not a conservative social scientist writing about the Philadelphia underclass in the 1980s...
...A few days after this disturbing experience, working-class mothers in the black community of Boston went on a march to protest the alarming rise of black crime in the area...
...Uncle Tom was real, and he deserves our sympathy, if not quite our respect...
...That black leaders and their liberal allies are today among the most serious critics of this view must surely be the most tragic irony of present cornmentary on the black condition...
...As concerned Americans, it is time that we started taking the lives, the fears, and the aspirations of black working people seriously...
...And it is everywhere...
...Unfortunately, it is precisely such studies that are out of fashion today...
...But not all historical explanations are necessarily cultural...
...6 Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 226...
...Astonishingly, it was this mother of one of the victimizers whom the liberal Boston Globe selected as the protesters' representative...
...DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia, 1899) (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), p. 241...
...While not alone in its racist ideology, American slave society was unique in the complexity and sophistication of the culture of slavery that it developed and in the extraordinary role slavery and the slave culture played in that development...
...Third, there was the majority of the slave population...
...3 Orlando Patterson, "The Unholy Trinity: Freedom, Slavery and the American Constitution," Social Research (Autumn, 1987...
...They were compulsive liars...
...All cultural explanations have, by definition, a historical component...
...The study of slavery must begin where * Most notably in the early writings of Eugene Genovese, who interpreted the slave South as a highly paternalistic, precapitalist system...
...q., .6...
...It goes against the grain of the conventional academic and political wisdom about the black past...
...in the increase in racist graffiti on campuses, in the hardened stares at apparently successful blacks, in the renewed hostility to biracial couples, in the quite conspicuous artificial blonding of the white population as both women and men of all white ethnic groups embrace the Aryan somatic ideal, in the empty seats next to blacks on crowded northern trains and buses, in the excessive preoccupation with the underclass (the direct modern counterpart to the excessive preoccupation of the slaveholder class with the "incorrigible" shiftless class of slaves), in the mean-spirited intellectual hostilities and moral prevarications of neoconservative thinkers with their lately discovered, hypocritical concern for the honor and reputation of "deservingly" successful blacks, in the shameless celebration of greed, and, perhaps most depressing of all, in the quiet, deathly dissipation of all compassion for those who have failed to make it...
...2 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 206...
...These people, though rarely qualified to discuss cultural issues, tried to fill the intellectual vacuum left by the sociologists and urban anthropologists of the sixties...
...The son of one of the women, however, had been killed by the police when he had gone on a joy ride through the crowded streets of Boston in a stolen bus, risking the lives of countless black and white people...
...A fair amount has been written on this group...
...Do they necessarily imply any blaming of the victims...
...is the utterly unfounded assumption that culture cannot be changed, or does so only with imperceptible slowness...
...If blacks today want to find true collective heroism, this is the period of the group's history where they must search for it...
...It is a radical black sociologist, W.E.B...
...and the exclusion of slaves, which made it a 'citizens' club.' " 2 Consider the seeming paradox of what I have called elsewhere our confounding fathers...
...For one thing, there was not a single mode of response, no such thing as "the American slave...
...It used to be thought that the femaleheaded family was the norm for this group...
...England and France today both have racist ideologies in that many people there, perhaps the majority, believe in the inherent superiority of whites over nonwhite peoples...
...The answer to these questions is in the negative...
...It would have been a miracle had two and a half centuries of the most sustained form of social and economic domination and degradation in a peculiarly vicious racist culture not created pathologies...
...In what has been rightly hailed as the most important work on the post-Civil War era in recent times, Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch have brilliantly shown the ways in which institutional forces and the overarching racist culture reinforced each other in aborting black economic and social development beyond the initial gains right after emancipation...
...And use it they did...
...Second, what I have called the dependent class survives today in the group that modern analysts have identified as the working poor...
...Indeed, the poorer and more marginal these immigrants were, the greater became the marginal utility of racism for them...
...They seemed immune to punishment...
...10 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977...
...t-War Economy :1 ) .3Q 0 1940-1960 `'.'' v i 1 ovement 4...
...We take all of these for granted, the way we take the complex mechanism of our hearts for granted, because as the core institution in any culture its complex of valuational weights, meanings and expressions is highly institutionalized, early and deeply learned, and rarely questioned...
...Hence the arrows that flow between the overarching racist culture and the structural exploitation of black people are double-headed...
...Gunnar Myrdal opened his famous study of black America with the much-cited observation that there is a conflict in the American democratic commitment to equality...
...What a historical sociology of the black population will most likely show is that the set of structural changes that emerged at key moments offered considerable constraints but also some opportunities...
...Behind much of the ill-informed criticism of cultural analysis by liberal and leftleaning sociologists as well as ethnic cultural chauvinists (how laughably ironical that...
...by then the system of legally based segregation was fully in place...
...They constituted a distinct subgroup and they too have left their mark on black American culture...
...if I could even imagine what a nightmare it was for him as a father each time his children left their home and became exposed to the underground culture of the underclass that everyone seemed so concerned about...
...t * . cz...
...The structural web lines to the right of the key historical points suggest the more meaningful opportunities that these turning points offered and the fact that they reinforced the black working class and bourgeoisie...
...And yet, they did so without necessarily abandoning all dignity...
...3 Almost every one of these noble founders of the nation and of our democracy was a major slaveholder...
...3 World War II/P...
...The various slum centers of the colored criminal population have lately been the objects of much philanthropic effort, and the work there has aroused discussion...
...Several important aspects of this development must now be noted...
...We hear little about this group in historical writings on slavery today...
...2 This homeostatic principle continued to operate throughout the twentieth century...
...A house, as the saying goes, is not a home...
...0 On moving to the urban centers of the nation, it was they who then created the two traditions of music that were to become America's distinctive contribution to world culture: the popular art of the blues and the high art of Jazz, America's music...
...Second, when the system did finally change, the white poor not only had more resources to buffer the shock of depression, but had overwhelming access to opportunities where and when they came about...
...No understanding of black American society is possible without a clear grasp of its origins in slavery...
...Although it is good to applaud the quiet achievements of this group, we should be careful not to make supermen of them by failing to take account of those areas where the system was simply too overwhelming, resulting in compromises and problems that lingered long after slavery...
...Indeed, we have been living through the operation of just this principle of American racist culture over the past decade and a half...
...They worked out a symbiosis with the 480 • DISSENT white group, usually within the context of the household...
...The persisting culture of slavery directly constrained blacks and was effectively used by the white artisanal group to reduce black competition, the most striking effect of which was the extraordinary rapidity of the decline in the proportion of skilled blacks very soon after slavery...
...Today, a sociologist, if he dares whisper the words "culture" or "values" in polite academic circles, risks being immediately dismissed as intellectually passé, if not as a cryptoreactionary who dares to propound arguments that amount to "blaming the victim...
...It caught up whites in its trap, stifled their initiative, and curtailed their economic progress...
...The sociological problem is to isolate precisely which areas of black life have become normative or institutionalized...
...Lower-class black women are not normatively predisposed to masochism, whatever Spike Lee may imagine...
...In the eighties a renewed interest in cultural explanations emerged, but it came, of all places, from economists such as Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury as well as from neoconservative journalists...
...The most fundamental of these is the explanatory significance of cultural factors...
...It systematically undermined the marital and parental bonds, especially focusing on the male role...
...A great deal of what is evil in America, and—a point that cannot be overemphasized — a great deal of what later emerged as highly desirable, even for blacks, springs from, or originated in, a deep enmeshment with the culture of slavery and its positive valuation of racism...
...In our consideration of this group there ought to be greater concern with the segment of the black population most exposed to its violence and destruction...
...Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 168...
...Yet sadly, the thrust of most historical scholarship on American slavery since the seventies has been to undermine the critical importance of these two and a half centuries of the black, and American, experience...
...11 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, p. 198...
...One feels this revitalized racist 484 • DISSENT ambience everywhere, though in its subtler forms it is hard to pin down...
...Not so in America...
...Indeed, one may seriously argue that the culture of slavery, by which I mean the whole set of values, meanings, and expressions directed at the black American as a slave and ex-slave, continued right down to the 1960s...
...The first is that when slavery was abolished only the personal, legally enforceable relation of slavery was removed...
...Thus when Daniel Moynihan, following a long line of black historical sociologists stretching back from E. Franklin Frazier to W.E.B...
...But there was a by-product of this effort at racial repression: the system tended to cripple all economic growth...
...As convinced, I might add, as were historians such as Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, and, more recently, John Hope Franklin...
...q Notes J.C.D...
...Up to the sixties it was quite acceptable to at least partially account for aspects of black society in cultural terms...
...What interests me is their distinctive mode of accommodation to the system of slavery and postemancipation society: the complex of values, meanings and expressions they developed and passed down to their inheritors, the black bourgeoisie...
...Descriptions of them abound...
...Nearly all the mothers who marched had had a child murdered by underclass youths...
...4. ..e:' 0 .19-1865 e err i tv "1,, Cj Debt P 'onage 4: 9)4...
...One has but to visit the corridors of the public buildings, when the courts are in session, to realize the part played in law-breaking by the Negro population...
...I will restrict myself to only a few important general observations...
...They were idle...
...First, blacks paid doubly dearly for this backward system because it "reinforced those racist beliefs" that were at the core of the overarching culture...
...The infestation began in 1894 and the first Jim Crow laws were introduced in 1898...
...Its conception of race was, from the early eighteenth century, extremely binary...
...There is independent evidence from the slave autobiographies and interviews that clearly indicates that a distinct group of shiftless, economically and socially deviant slaves existed...
...Indeed, like a highly evolved parasite that instinctively recognizes that the death of its host would entail its own demise, slavery reinforced the reproductive potential of the slave union even as it ate away at its inner institutional core...
...The institutional fragility of the black family, even within its most stable class, has always been and remains the group's most serious liability, the most pernicious heritage of its slave past...
...Larger in size was the group that I call the dependent or accommodating class of slaves...
...Were this indeed true, then the charge that cultural explanations were of the same order as racist ones might indeed have some merit...
...tit'' $e...
...It is what may be generalized as the homeostatic or compensating principle of the entire system of racial domination...
...It effectively reinforced the division of the exploited classes, especially in the South...
...And it is here that any study of the black * For an excellent critique of the "new" labor history's attempt to underplay the racist exclusion of blacks from good jobs by white workers, many of them recent immigrants, see Herbert Hill, "Myth-Making and Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, (Winter 1988...
...6) Which leads me to close with an appeal on behalf of the black working class, the silent, near-forgotten plurality of the black population...
...As W.J...
...There is a widespread feeling that something is wrong with a race that is responsible for so much crime, and that strong remedies are called for...
...Let me take the most important case in point: family life...
...This unbroken history of gender oppression has little to do with culture...
...DuBois, made the by-then familiar argument that the breakdown of the family during the period of slavery had persisted, and would persist, if reinforcing factors were not removed (and was irrationally pilloried by many of Frazier's and DuBois' greatest admirers), he was using a historical explanation, but he was not necessarily making a cultural one...
...In the history of modern industrial societies, no exploited class has received less, and has given more, to the civilization that so brutally used it...
...It is critical that we understand, too, a peculiar feature of this culture of racism...
...Exaggerating its importance can serve and has served racist purposes...
...West Africans were not supermen...
...This is highly questionable...
...To demonstrate this requires "thick descriptions" and deep interpretations of the abundant literary and related evidence...
...We have heard so much about the Harlem Renaissance, a second-rate bourgeois romantic movement if ever there was one...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
