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March 07, 2004

The Legacy of Slavery

I don't know jack about slavery. Never studied it at all. My cousin the playwrite tells me that it's an absolutely fascinating subject. A while back, he read a great number of letters written by black soldiers in the Union Army to their wives and former masters. He informs me that what most people know about slavery could fit in about 500 words. He's generally right, especially when it comes to me.

Now as a black pundit, I get to talk about 'dysfunction' a lot. Not because I want to, it's just how some people wriggle their way into conversations, especially people with about 500 words to say. Within those 500 are often 'the legacy of slavery'. You remember the Reparations debate, all that stuff before nine-eleven? Anyway, I never went back to slavery. I have been quite satisfied in my understanding of the great disparities between black and white as a succession of oppressions. So I basically go back to my great grandfather's time just before WW1 and the great Flu epidemic in the early days of the Great Migration. But most specifically I take the Great Depression as a starting point.

When Hoover was president, enough blacks and enough whites were dead even in poverty for that to be a ground zero in my arguments. So I am prepared, when I have to talk about it, to say that all the racism just in the last 70 years is sufficient to account for every discrepancy between blacks and whites in America. You don't have to go back to slavery. Just go before the invention of the suburb in the days when every 10th white american was in the Klan. Go to the days of Eugene Debs and all of his whites only unions. Go to the days of the segregated army adn the all-white civil service. That's enough.

Any legacy of slavery that got manifest through the not too distant bad old days is truly deeply embedded in America. So much so, I contend, that it doesn't much matter politically. Nobody is capable of making changes within this democracy capable of undoing something that deep. At this moment I am not prepared to say what any of those embedded qualities ar, other than to suggest that they are not psychological.

So when it comes to the subject of 'dysfunction' and I hear 'legacy of slavery' applied to things like teenage pregnancy, gang violence, drug addiction, etc, my bogosity meter peaks. Now I understand that slavery was very real and very devastating, but any black family that survived the Depression, in my opinion, has overcome. On the other hand racial essentialism is not real, so anyone who attributes such dysfunctions on race stands on even shakier ground.

There is nothing inherited by African Americans via the 'legacy of slavery' that a fair amount of money and social power can't fix.

How much? Your guess is as good as mine. More later.

Posted by mbowen at March 7, 2004 11:00 AM

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Comments

First: your politics are pretty damn far from mine, but I enjoy your blog anyway. It never fails to be entertaining, educational, and thought-provoking---even when your conservatism drives me crazy. Now, with that said...

"Eugene Debs and his whites only unions"?!! You may have never studied slavery, but it's very clear you missed out on labor history too. You must mean Samuel Gompers and his whites only unions, as Eugene Debs was a vocal supporter of integrated unions and a strong critic of Gompers. Debs' insistence on equality for blacks, immigrants and women was frequently criticized by other, more 'conservative' white men in the labor movement and Socialist party, but he never backed down.

I'm tempted to fill your comments page with Debs quotes, but instead I'll just encourage you to do a little reading on your own. Really. Just saying, "Ahh, Gompers, Debs, what's the difference?" is intellectual laziness (not something that I generally expect from your blog, or I wouldn't visit it). The historical and philosophical diffence between the two is relevant; as it continues today in the labor movement (one of the seldom cited reasons for the decline in union membership today, in my humble rank-and-file opinion).

Posted by: amarettiXL at March 7, 2004 04:23 PM

Thank you for that bit. Perhaps you could tell me which of the unions Debs founded and which blacks ascended into their leadership, and if so how it was that those particular unions failed or succeeded to raise the stakes for blacks in the labor movement. Perhaps A. Phillip Randolph was inspired by Debs, but that didn't help blacks get much further than the railroads.

I've always been of the opinion that a successful black labor movement would have put African Americans at least 20 years ahead in prosperity that integration brought. Had blacks unionized the domestics, maids, butlers, waiters, and such industries they dominated in the pre-Civil Rights Era, a great deal of what is now the hospitality industry would be controlled by blackfolks.

Something went radically wrong with unionization and race and I can't see what Debs good intentions could have done to change it. The fact is that it failed.

Posted by: Cobb at March 7, 2004 08:03 PM

I'm gonna bullshit for a moment or two. Perhaps unions didn't mix with black folks for the same reason socialism didn't mix with religion. I don't know, though.

Posted by: TLL at March 8, 2004 12:53 PM