> “There are no facts to show that either way, so for her, or you [hopespringseternal], or anyone else to make a statement in the affirmative that there is a worse percentage now than then is without basis.”
Well, RINOs suck said, “One study of nineteenth century slave families (Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925) found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father.” (”Up to” is a rather suspicious word, though.) That’s some indication, for what it’s worth.
The phrase in the pledge “...in a two-parent household...” bothered me a bit, though. It evokes an image of a little cabin with a nuclear family — father, mother, and children. With less than 30% having that now, the current rate wouldn’t seem hard to beat, but many slaves didn’t live on large plantations like Gone with the Wind’s Tara. They were often dispersed into smaller groups and lived on smaller farms.
I don’t recall the exact percentages, but most slaveholders owned only a small number of slaves. (Besides having read that somewhere, I’ve seen indications of it myself in looking at census records.) Often they’d been bequeathed in wills to the various members of a slaveholding family. Though it’s possible that a black father would have more contact with his children then than in many families now, he might well live down the road on another farm, and not in his own two-parent household.
I’m a bit skeptical about this image of black slaves, mother and father, coming home from a hard day’s work in the fields to a nice, stable two-parent family. It’s true that there was moral pressure among slaveholders not to break up families, and especially not to separate mothers from relatively young children, but when it happened, the forcible separations were one of the cruelest things about slavery. Sometimes slaves were sold to distant parts of the country and never saw their family members again.
In discussing the family, it’s best to emphasize the relatively recent decline and not to make comparisons with slavery.
I read that too, and I couldnt help wondering exactly what it meant. Does it mean that if a woman had 4 kids, that all four of them had the same father, does it mean that three of the four had the same father, or does it mean that three fourths of slave families had the same mother and father? But I dont read that statement to mean that the kids grew up with both parents. And in the post I received from Walter E Williams, the point he makes is the point you make at the end of your post. The black family was destroyed somewhere between the 30’s and the 70’s, and that should be the focus. His only mention of slavery is to show that at one time, blacks pulled themselves up that within 4 generations they had gone from being slaves to having stable families.
Unfortunately, I dont have a copy of Gutman’s book, so I cant look up the stats he uses. But the two links that were given to me as proof both only cited data from the 1880’s and up, and on whether those children had 2 parents. There was just no data presented about whether children grew up as slaves with both parents. So that is why I think Bachmann made a stupid move. The footnote in the pledge links to a document that does not have data to support the claim the pledge is making.