For the past 35 years I have spoken about fatherhood in the African-American community passionately, incessantly and exhaustingly. When disingenuous critics ponder the lack of fathers in the African American community the finger is often pointed accusingly at African Americans. The words culture or morals are used as the operative words to blame African Americans for the current conditions of the African American family. We are lectured by the conservative right, political establishment and by intellectuals like George Will, Andrew Sullivan and even African Americans like Thomas Sowell. We are scolded by very rich propagandists such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson of Fox News that the impoverished conditions, educational deficits, disproportionate incarceration rates and economic divide are simply originated from the distilled down choice of African Americans refusing to marry our women and raise our children.
The African American family did not immigrate here, they did not come out of a desperate desire to have a better life or to seek asylum like Jews escaping from Nazi Germany or the Irish fleeing religious conflicts or Italians out of severe poverty. We did not come for economic ascension, religious persecution or racial discrimination. Africans were captured from Africa and kidnapped to America for one reason, to be manufactured from free human beings of self governance into slaves. The African provided free labor to America helped build one of the fastest econonomy of any country. We were used as human capital, reduced to sub humans through torture, genocide, rape and terror invoked for profit of unpaid labor. Africans were brought to America on slave ships packed like sardines for efficiency. African women were raped carte blanche in front of their husbands and children which devastated the African American family for generations. America offered Africans state sanctioned domestic terrorism which had no comparison in the analog of human history. Their men, husbands, brothers and fathers, utterly powerless, held at bay by gun watched in excruciating agony as their women were raped by men who used whips and guns with the causality that we use cell phones today. Africans kidnapped in America learned an existential lesson in survival early on. They learned, that to survive they must consciously submit to the terrifying reality that any level of permanent intimacy regarding marriage, protection and care of their loved ones was washed away as aggressively as the ocean waters waves that pushed the slave ships to a new land of unimaginable terrors.
The propaganda demonizing Black men, Black fathers and the Black family was and is as effective at destroying the Black family as Hitler's propaganda campaign against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Ronald Reagan propagated the Welfare queen stereotype, the same Ronald Reagan whose was taped talking to President Richard Nixon stating "To see those, those monkeys from those African countries, damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes." President Nixon rather than admonish Reagan affirmed this racist insult with a huge laugh. These are the men that preach to African Americans about morality, decency and family structure. These are the men, descendants of the founding fathers of which many were slave owners that upheld and institutionalized laws and legislation crafted to destroy the African family. These are the men that instituted and maintained laws to maintain control of their property, to maintain the status of African Americans as slaves. These are the men whose benefactors and ancestors today date to judge and criticize the African American family.
Time capsule forward to Donald Trump, the symbolic manifestation of American hubris, benefactor of generation wealth and consummate hypocrite of American values. Donald Trump, serial divorcer, the only American President to have had five children from three different marriages. Trump, the serial draft dodger, who avoided the draft 5 times, once for bone spurs. Trump, the serial bankrupter, serial tax dodger, serial misogynist. Yet with all of these well published behaviors the so called Christian right whom wear their conservative principals like a badge of honor completely ignored Trumps immoral and liberally progressive lifestyle and installed him into the White House enthusiastically. Trumps conservative base never used the same measurements of moral judgement or character assessment used to measure the condition of the African American family. If there was any President that is the worst example of family values Trump easily wins the mantle yet millions of Americans that speak high of family values voted low in selecting Trump.
To most politicians knowing history is a critical part of their ascension if only for symbolic posturing. History however regarding the state of fatherhood and the African American family is not really discussed, indeed it is most often ignored. It actually falls under the nomenclature classification of what conservatives rally against called critical race theory which means we don't acknowledge it, consequently, it does not exist. So the conclusion from the conservative right is that African Americans landed magically on the shores of America and decided that family, marriage and fatherhood was a tradition that the African American would no longer embrace. Untold in this story however is that for the African slave, new to America, marriage was not legal or allowed by their slave owners. This part of American history that has been ignored, purged from history books and the victim of computer algorithmic editing. This is part of a brief history of the destruction of the African American family.
So lets take a brief moment to examine what happened to the African American family with historical references that in another time were referred to as facts.
African Americans have just barely survived five social tsunamis in a brief history of time.
The first tsunami faced by the African was the Atlantic Slave Trade. It lasted from 1526 to 1867 or 341 years. There were approximately 12.5 million Africans captured, men, women and children. The slave ships that transported the slaves was the first formal introduction of Africans to the European. On the slave ships, a three to six month journey, a journey engineered for the complete deconstruction of human beings. Packaged like sardines in a can the slave ship to the African was a laboratory of horror, excruciating evil and rendered the Africans as powerless as a white laboratory rat. The ships carried from 250 to 600 slaves. Diseases were rampant; cholera, scurvy, smallpox, the flu, dehydration, and suffocating conditions. One in five Africans died in transport, those who died were thrown overboard witnessed by the women and children. The mothers and the children who were often kept on deck for the sexual pleasures for the Europeans. At the complete and sole mercy of his European captor the slaves only avenue of escape, to jump overboard off of the ship into a certain death from the frigid salt water filling their lungs. The suicide of jumping overboard was still less terrifying than witnessing and living with the knowledge that their children and families had been sold, separated and murdered. The conditions were so bad that had the Africans been Christians they may have believed they had died and gone to an eternal hell.
From day one when the African was kidnapped to America, the African mans role, the fathers primary reason to exist, to protect, provide, maintain and sustain for his family was completely obliterated. The African male was reduced to a spectator, powerless, unable to defend his family. Defenseless in the ability to protect his keep his family to keep them together to prevent his wife from being raped and the hell on earth that they were about to experience was about to get much much worse. Rape by the slave owner was at will. Slave owner Robert Lumpkin of Richmond Virginia raped his slave Mary Lumpkin so many times as a child he impregnated her with seven children, five of whom survived. This was standard operating procedure and another long lasting contributor to the African American families destruction. Children who were the products of White slave owners had two fathers one that was wed to thier mother and powerless to father them and the other who raped their mother yet maintained there status as slaves. Children, ripped from their mothers arms never to be seen again and fathers unable to act watched in anguish as theeir masochistic slave owners chained and whipped them to unconsciousness. This was the first installment of the systemic and institutional destruction of the African and the African American family and the aftershocks of this 20 generational horror are with us today, still.
Slavery, the second tsunami, lasted four hundred years. Four hundred years is 20 generations of slavery suffered by the African American family. According to US News, "African Americans have been free in this country for less time that they were enslaved. Blacks have been free for 152 years, which means That most African Americans are only two to three generations away from slavery."
June, 19,2017 https://ww.usnews.com > articles
Slavery was enthusiastically supported legally by an aspirational American constitution with lofty words of freedom totally contradicted by the systemic legalization of slavery. African Americans have only had 2 maybe 3 years of legal generational freedom which has still not materialized today. It vigorously allowed for the greatest evil a nation could have, legalized slavery. Slavery started in 1619 when the slave ship, The White Lion arrived in Jamestown, VA with 20 enslaved Africans. Slavery ended (on paper only) December 6, 1865 or 246 years later. Slavery, the second tsunami lasted generations and generations and allowed for daily terrorism, rape, lynching and state sanctioned murder. Slavery reduced the newly arrived African below the status below that of a dog. The overwhelming majority of the White population was completely comfortable and complicit with American slavery just like the German population was complicit and comfortable with placing beings in gas ovens. So after 20 generations of lynching, torture, rape and selling African America children never to be seen by their parents again some dare ask why has the African American family not reached a level of normality. What happens to a human being yesterday matters regarding their current circumstances today. What has happened to the African American for over 20 generations for 400 years may not ever be fully reparable.
Reconstruction, the third tsunami was a psychological tease. According to the Equal Justice Initiative nearly 2,000 lynchings of Black people took place between 1865 and 1877. It allowed some African slaves in America in America for 39 years from 1861 to 1900 a very very brief moment of state surveillance freedom. In this world that offered you freedom the boundaries were vey narrow and very short and moving beyond those boundaries would minimally get you beaten, arrested, jailed or murdered. Imagine a once free man in his own land being taken to a strange land unable to use his own language knocked down to his knees on a slave ship journeying one to two months. Upon arrival to his new land of captivity he tries to stand but again is slammed down to his stomach with the knee of slavery on his back for 400 years. Then in this nightmarish desert he awakens to an oasis called reconstruction. In this desert, a twilight zone of infinite sand, he reaches the oasis and to his brokenhearted awakening finds out that the oasis is only a mirage called reconstruction. What little hope he had for his desperate thirst for freedom dissipates in despair. Knocked down again he does not believe he shall rise again. He believes the desert of reconstruction will be his final burial ground his cemetery of rest with freedom only to be realized on the other side of life. Reconstruction never had full government support so slavery was still in full effect without monitoring and enforcement from the federal government.
The fourth tsunami of segregation lasted from 1865 to 1968 lasted 103 years
Segregation, the fourth tsunami still lives with Americans comfortably today and the segregation today is sponsored by federal and state sanctioned redlining, bank loans, mortgages, accessing better school systems preventing African Americans from buying homes, moving to better neighborhoods. But now, a new promise called segregation offers a new freedom, a separate but theoretically equal world. The segregation that we are under today is best classified as sanitized segregation. While it promises equality regardless of race, as Jonathon Kozol has illuminated on the American school system in his great seminal book Savage and Inequalities, the American schools are as segregated today as they were in 1954. In addition African-American men that served in the military in higher percentages than their White peers were denied using the to GI Bill if they were fortunate to come home alive from war. Another opportunity for freedom the new African American rises again slowly, cautiously for a moment but again is slammed down with the full weight of federally enforced segregation on himself, his woman and his children. Then on paper it seems he is free, he tries to find his way, tries to smell and taste freedom although he never had full entrance through the doors of education, housing, employment or full status as human. His veteran status overseas gives him the rights to fight for foreigners freedoms, those same freedoms while in his own country are denied. The welfare system stereotyped for the African American wad not even provided to African Americans as Whites received it. The GI bill denied to millions of African Americans which prevented home home ownership which is the fastest way to build generational wealth. Denied the GI Bill and college grants which prevented African American veterans and their families from going to college. Imagine going to fight for freedom in foreign lands when in your own country those same freedoms were denied. Coming back from war seeing signs everywhere Whites here Coloreds here and no niggers allowed. The African American veteran the most patriotic American unable to find stable employment opportunities thus unable to marry thus unable to sustain a functional family.
The fourth tsunami, the war on drugs officially started in 1971. The 50-year war on drugs imprisoned millions of African Americans
https://en.m.wickipedia.org
In June 1971 President Nixon declared a "War on Drugs." stating that drug abuse was "public enemy number one"
In an interview conducted by journalist Dan Baum and published in Harper magazine,, Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon campaign had two enemies: " the antiwar left and Black people." Timeline: Americas War on Drugs
The prison industrial was the baby, the offspring of the war on drugs. As late as 1975 the United States had barely two hundred thousand people in prison. Then the war on drugs was declared. The war on drugs, a not so elegant euphemism for the war on African American males where one of three born today will spend time in the criminal justice system. This stunning percentage of African Americans disproportionately incarcerated begs and pleads a profound question. Are Africans Americans born with a genetic predisposition for crime encoded on their DNA? Is there some unknown cultural force subconsciously planted in us that do not allow us the ability to marry and raise children together? Is it because we disproportionately vote democrat that demonizes us? These are actual proclamations by the conservative right and are so potent a form of propaganda that it has distilled down into the minds of some African Americans as well. Many African Americans suffering from Stockholm syndrome due to their colonial state of captivity identify more with their colonial masters than their own African cultural history that they never had benefit of embracing. America land of the free home of the brave is 4 percent of the worlds population but incacerates more citizens than any country. For African Americans, going to prison at a rate five times higher than Whites, the ability to forge a majority of father led homes with married households is virtually impossible. The prison industrial system. is another major barrier for the sustainability of the African American family.
When we disregard history, we maintain a state of denial, this denial unchecked leads to schizophrenia. I would submit today that we have a culture, and American community of which are operating outside of reality. A nation that in spite of copiously documented empirical evidence shows that African Americans are treated grossly different from White Americans regarding every aspect of American life. So rather than face that statistical evidence rather than face every horrid aspect of slave history, it is far more convenient to point to the victims and tell them that their status as African Americans has nothing to do with their history. It is far more convenient to promote the ahistorical lie that the state of the African American family is because of their unwillingnesst to enter into the American dream.
Today 400 years later with barely 2 to 3 years of generational freedom, the state of the African-American American family has still not recovered after 20 generations of slavery. Today, we are still plagued with single headed households, unemployment, underemployment, health and educational deficits, crime epidemics and disproportionate incarceration rates which disables families, neighborhoods and community. Many African American women remain single because African American men are still not granted economic stability and are plagued with non violent criminal records, and that is a fundamental reason they struggle to marry and start a sustainable family.
Denial has a psychological function that is necessary for human beings to maintain a functional level of sanity, individually and institutionally. I would submit that the majority of Americans including many African Americans are victims of post Stockholm syndrome because of slavery. In never acknowliging the horrors of slavery both African Americans and Whites live in a state of unhealthy denial never understanding their divide. A society that is in denial of slavery no less than Germany and their extermination of the Jews, no less than the American Indian holocaust which has rendered the Indians on the verge of extinction. Americans are in a collective state of schizophrenic denial about the viral and systemic nature of racism and how it affects all of us. For who indeed could function and remain sane knowing and understanding that they were benefactors of a nations legacy with state sanctioned terrorism that allowed rape, torture, lynching, selling human beings and free labor for 400 years and remain sane. So when the questions is asked why is the African American family still struggling in a land where they have been for four hundred years, now we are armed with a breif history of the destruction of the African American family.
Ray Davis
Author of the upcoming book, The Maintenance of Denial, Americans in Mass Denial and the Social Tools that Maintain our Denial.
The writer writes about all things cultural and global but has always focused on the family.
Raydavisgroup@aol.com
Fatherhoo6570
443.413.9425
