Conservatives are wrong about the black family

It's true that welfare encourages single-motherhood. But many of the problems in the black family were present at the time of slavery.

Written by Lipton Matthews.

It has often been claimed that the pathologies of black American families are an inevitable consequence of slavery. This is what the 1965 Moynihan Report argued, for example. Yet conservatives have spawned myths of their own in an effort to counter the standard narrative.

The conservative claim that welfare discouraged marriages among black Americans – by subsidising single-female headed households – is accurate. After all, when generous welfare minimises the father’s role as provider, men become marginal to family life (one study found that  a 10 percent increase in welfare reduced the rate of remarriage for single mothers by 8 percent). However, historical research shows that black families at the time of slavery were afflicted by many of the ills that still plague them today.

Before discussing this historical research, I will briefly review the evidence that black nuclear families existed in slave societies – for readers’ benefit.

Scrutinising data on family unions in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica, Professor Barry Higman discovered that the nuclear family was prominent in all three colonies. Professor Michael Craton notes that the Bahamas was similar to these colonies in the propensity of slaves to form families. His research uncovered diverse family types on different plantations, with the nuclear family being the dominant one. He argues that slavers encouraged family formation as a pro-natal policy designed to increase the slave population.

Supporting the results of Higman and Craton is a recent review by Trevor Burnard and Randy Browne that shows fathers were far from marginal in the plantation society of Berbice. Enslaved men exerted control over family members by taking important decisions and disciplining unruly loved ones. They also defended the welfare of their children and protested the abuse of their wives.

Studying the marital status of slaves in Louisiana using hospital records, Trevon Logan and Jonathan B. Pritchett found that slave marriages were common. Contrary to the claim that slavery destroyed the black family, planters allowed and even encouraged slave unions because they promoted stability by tempering resistance. Some reasoned that relationships made slaves happy and therefore improved productivity. In the classic economic text, Time on The Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel concluded that slave families were an asset to planters.

Other scholars suggest that  assimilating into white culture by getting married granted certain benefits to slaves. So the decision to get married was an expression of agency rather than a response to the paternalist sentiments of the planter class.

Of course, slavery was a barrier to family formation in that sales separated families. Yet even when slaves did not reside on the same plantation, they cultivated intimate relationships and sometimes got married. Emily West has studied the phenomenon of cross-plantation marriages. She notes that cross-plantation marriages were preferable to some slaves, who dreaded the shame of being abused by planters in the presence of their spouse.

Herbert Gutman’s seminal work, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, is the cornerstone of revisionist scholarship. It argues that black families were, in fact, highly resilient to the hardships and injustices of slavery.

However, other scholars have seriously challenged Gutman’s conclusions. James Q. Wilson pointed out that a reliance on larger plantations biased the data, since slaves were more likely to form nuclear families on such plantations – simply because there were more opportunities to find a spouse. Citing the research of Allan Kulikoff, Wilson observes that nuclear families were rare on smaller plantations.

He further notes that according to Gutman’s data, up to 28 percent of black children shared residence with an unmarried mother during the period 1865-1866. What’s more, this trend continued after abolition with Gutman’s 1880 census data recording that about 25 percent of all African-American families in urban places such as Mobile and Richmond were headed by women. Likewise, Steven Ruggles estimated that even in 1850, high rates of single parenthood were not unusual in free black populations.

Gutman’s overarching claim that slavery failed to disintegrate the black family has not been overturned. However, slave families were marred by many ills that still afflict the black community today – casting doubt on conservative explanations for the decline of the black family.

A consistent finding in sociological research is that blacks have lower quality marriages. They are more likely to complain that a spouse is unfaithful, unloving, or squanders money. As Burnard and Browne note, enslaved women were often reluctant to marry because of the fear that men would neglect or mistreat them. After emancipation, Jamaican women were encouraged to marry but many worried that marriage would restrict their autonomy by shackling them to unproductive men.

Another problem that deters marriage is the high risk of adultery. In the contemporary US, 22 percent of ever-married black men admit to infidelity, compared with 16 percent of whites and 13 percent of Hispanics. 28 percent of black men report that they have been intimate with someone other than their spouse, compared to 20 percent of whites and 16 percent of Hispanics. These findings comport with historical accounts of slave life. On some plantations, promiscuity was a badge of honour, elevating men’s esteem in the slave community. Of course, promiscuity was not a peculiarly male trait. Brenda E. Stevenson describes the epidemic of adultery in the black church:

As early as 1774, for example, the records of the local Broad Run Baptist Church documented that the church excommunicated the “Negro Dick” for having lived in “Adultery.” Several years later, they ex-communicated ‘Negro Grace belonging to Mr. Colbert for having lived in adultery.” Over the next fifty years, the church ousted several slave worshippers, the majority for adultery.

The diaries of two plantation managers in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood and Matthew Lewis, recount various examples of adultery. Both are laced with sordid tales of slaves in long-term relationships who cheated on their partners. Indeed, adultery was a source of tension in slave relationships that often led to their dissolution.

Another source of tension was the unwillingness of some men to provide for their families. Trevor Burnard notes that the careless behaviour of male slaves infuriated Thomas Thistlewood, “He...blamed fathers for mistreating children, flogging slave men on three occasions when he felt that they were deliberately or carelessly starving infant children.” In contrast, academic studies suggest that white planters generally did care for their illegitimate children with black women, often sponsoring their education in Europe.

Another consistent finding is that black relationships are characterized by high levels of intimate partner violence. The available evidence does not permit scholars to conclude that intimate partner violence in the slave community was abnormally high, but it does suggest that such violence was a feature of slave life.

Emily West recounts numerous tales of intimate partner violence among slaves. Sifting through the primary sources, she found evidence that both sexes perpetrated violence and that it was common. According to her research, any factor could incite abuse – from the perceived tardiness of a wife to the dysfunctional personality of a husband.

Studies of marital relationships in pre-colonial Africa also disconfirm conservative assumptions. Some anthropologists theorise that African marriages are less stable than Eurasian ones because large agricultural surpluses in Eurasia required the policing of female sexuality to ensure that wealth remained in the family. In Africa, by contrast, subsistence farming depended on the utilization of human labour – which meant that reproduction was prioritized. This led to greater tolerance of adultery and pre-marital sex.

Shane Doyle tested this theory in a study of sexuality in pre-colonial Africa. Yet his conclusions have prompted more questions than answers. Doyle found that even under Eurasian conditions, Africans followed looser sex norms. There was, in fact, a discrepancy between beliefs and actions: social rules could proscribe pre-marital sex and adultery; but such rules were breached with impunity.

In the author’s opinion, scholarship in this area would be more fruitful if it were built on the theories of J.Philippe Rushton and Edward Miller. Notwithstanding minor differences, both Rushton’s life history theory and Miller’s parental investment theory posit that the colder Eurasian climate selected for long-term orientation, family stability, and a preference for parental investment over maximal reproduction. As Miller explains:

Offspring survival in cold climates requires provisioning by male hunters, while it is not critical in warm climates. Thus, the optimal male tradeoff between seeking copulations and provisioning depends on climate. Hence, the colder the climate a population evolved in, the more they should have evolved drives that lead to provisioning(altruism, sexual restraint, rule following behavior) while in tropical areas the drives should have evolved towards competing for mating opportunities (which implies dominance seeking, high masculinity, extraversion etc.). This can explain many of the observed differences between the races.

An overlooked advantage of evolutionary approaches is that they can account for the differences in achievement between black men and women. Miller argues that in regions where men devote considerable effort to mating, women have to fend for themselves and their children, and should therefore be more oriented toward work and professionalism. His argument is consistent with studies showing that black American women outearn white women after controlling for socio-economic background, whereas black men trail their white counterparts. Economic assessments of immigrant wages by gender point to the same conclusion. The stereotype that African men are “lazy” is so common that studying it has become a cottage industry.

Conservatives tell us that “welfare destroyed the black family”. And while there’s evidence that perverse incentives can increase divorce and single-motherhood, historical literature shows that problems in the black family are not new. Conservatives, it seems, are creating new myths to justify their own egalitarian pieties.

Lipton Matthews is a research professional and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute, The Epoch Times, Chronicles, Intellectual Takeout, American Thinker and other publications. His email address is: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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