re: Black Fatherhood: Myths and Realities

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quote: So you wanted to be separate but equal? Looking back on it, it wouldn't have been a bad idea. As long as we had real government protection everything would have worked out.

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It's not very PC to say, but it's true. The racial breakdown at my school last year was about 53/45/2 (white/black/other), with 87% on free lunch. Anytime I allowed a class or group to seat themselves in a classroom or elsewhere, inevitably whites sat in groups with other whites and blacks with other blacks with an exception here and there, but rare. Given the choice, we want to be with other people like ourselves. Forcing the matter may look good from a political perspective, but it doesn't work from a realistic perspective. This isn't a racist statement, it's real world observation.

That has to be the dumbest presentation of statistics I've ever seen: fathers that live with their kids tend to interact with them?

Great troll baw

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The damage was done on the government level as well. If the government had simply made sure we were protected, especially in the deep south, put more money behind black scientific research institutes, given out low interest loans to black scientists and businessmen and given us equal access to mineral rights and other natural resources there would have never been a problem. The black community could have been its own country essentially that just traded with the rest of America from within.

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I don't advocate segregation by choice because I think the Civil Rights movement was an unmitigated good with the exception of a few provisions of the 1964 CRA (namely, the pieces that were a genesis of widespread gerrymandering in the U.S.), but I think the real protection A-A's needed - besides obvious access to rights like voting, the array of legal rights, and so forth - was financial protection and equal access to capital, banking, and other financial services. Everything else you mention (education, mineral rights, etc.) would have probably closely followed without too much state intervention; probably some housing and property protections as well to go along with that.

The almighty dollar rules the world, even in a de facto if not de jure segregated society. Ensure property rights and fair access to capital, and any group can rule its world.

To be clear, I don't completely advocate the above - as I think much of the CRM in the 1950's and up through the 1960's was absolutely just and right - but I think, given a meta view of human history, that's probably how things would have worked out. It also brings me to my next point...

I also think it's unfortunate that the civil rights movement happened at the exact same time as the women's liberation, sexual, and drug revolutions. It's a truism throughout history in almost every culture that bourgeois social revolutions tend to hamper the lower-middle and working classes in the long run. Two of those three - the sexual revolution and the drug revolution - absolutely clobbered the lower-middle and working classes of all races in every part of this country. I think America would look very different if, for instance, the civil rights movement happened by itself a generation before, in the 1930's or so, than if it exactly coincided with women's lib, the sexual revolution, and so forth. We tend to tie them up in our historical mind as "The '60s", but it didn't have to happen that way, and in a way, I wish it wouldn't have.

I think the African-American family structure - already very strong by the 1950's and early 1960's - would have been a hell of a lot stronger and would have stood well against the torrent of social ills unleashed on the country by the sexual and drug revolutions. That's the biggest mistake of the 1960's: a society has to be given a little bit of time to absorb a major change (something that all great radical-ish historical leaders, from Napoleon to Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln, have all understood), and what happened then was just a torrent at once. Civil rights should have been first (should have happened in the 19th century, really, when we first got the chance) and then women's lib and then everything else, but that just wasn't the mentality at the time.

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But has anyone ever thought that one of the reasons black families were so close was because of the very powerful force of Jim Crow and other segregation laws.

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I hit on this in many "blacksession" threads. America's black folks, at least those who are not recent arrivals (and I certainly hate to be whiter-than-sour-cream and saying this, but I think it's supportable) went through a lot from enslavement on the continent (by a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious consortium of slavers, I might add), the middle passage, dispersal throughout the Americas and, specific to the United States, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, 2 World Wars as second (third?) class citizens, then a significant struggle for at least legalized equality in the 1950s and 1960s.

These struggles spanned 10 generations for some families - and a minimum of 5 or 6 for most. This caused, quite understandably, black folks to develop certain survival instincts. It should be noticeable to all that chief among these was an instinct to stick together. No doubt, this served them well.

Now, I fear, it is holding them back. "Snitches get stitches" - siding with OJ despite evidence of his guilt, siding with (black) victims of apparent police misconduct before the facts are in, etc., etc. It is also perpetuating certain stereotypes that may inhibit real progress on the real problems facing the community.