At an event in Philadelphia promoting Donald Trump and the Republican Party on Tuesday, Representative Byron Donalds of Florida made the eyebrow-raising assertion that Black families were stronger, and Black people more conservative, under the Jim Crow regimes of the former Confederate states.
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”
When met with pushback from Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, Donalds responded with a video posted on X, in which he said that “you had more Black families under Jim Crow” and that it was “Democrat policies … under the welfare state that did help to destroy the Black family.”
Donalds, who is as much a provocateur as he is a lawmaker, is almost word-for-word parroting the arguments of the prolific conservative commentator Thomas Sowell, who made this critique of the federal social safety net the cornerstone of his commentary on the status and prospects of Black Americans in the 1980s and ’90s. “The Black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of liberals’ expansion of the welfare state,” Sowell wrote.
Now, there have always been a few problems with this assessment, beginning with the underlying assumption that the relative economic success of white Americans is due primarily to stable family structure and not the result of broad and largely unrestricted access to education, economic opportunity and public goods as well as full political representation and the protection of the law.
But the single most important problem is that to the extent that we can speak of these things as singular entities, neither the Black family nor the Black community was all that strong or intact under either slavery or Jim Crow, nor were there — in Donalds’s formulation — more Black families.
American chattel slavery was practically defined by the fundamental instability of Black families. The institution rested on the expropriation of the reproductive capacities of the enslaved. Men and women were forced to have children who were then sold for profit. Families were torn apart as a matter of course. Natal alienation was the rule.
Here is an except from the abolitionist Josiah Henson’s “Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life,” published in 1858:
My brothers and sisters were bid off first, and one by one, while my mother, paralyzed by grief, held me by the hand. Her turn came, and she was bought by Isaac Riley of Montgomery county. Then I was offered to the assembled purchasers. My mother, half distracted by the thought of parting forever from all her children, pushed through the crowd, while the bidding for me was going on, to the spot where Riley was standing. She fell at his feet and clung to his knees, entreating him in tones that a mother only could command, to buy her baby as well as herself, and spare to her one, at least of her little ones.
Will it, can it, be believed that this man, thus appealed to, was capable not merely of turning a deaf ear to her supplication, but of disengaging himself from her with such violent blows and kicks as to reduce her to the necessity of creeping out of his reach and mingling the groan of bodily suffering with the sob of a breaking heart? As she crawled away from the brutal man I heard her sob out, “Oh, Lord Jesus, how long, how long shall I suffer this way!” I must have been then between five and six years old. I seem to see and hear my poor weeping mother now.
Enslaved people worked hard to preserve family ties and maintain kinship networks. They married, even as the law would not recognize their unions, and tried to keep their households intact as best they could. But they lived ultimately at the mercy of the master, who could and would destroy those families for profit and personal gain.
On the same note, you cannot discuss the Black family under Jim Crow in isolation from the poverty, exploitation and lawless, atavistic violence that marked the experience of Southern apartheid.
What does it mean to say that the Black family was stronger when most Black laborers were confined to low-wage work and mired in deprivation? What does it mean to say that the Black family was more intact when the wrong glance or a stray word could end with the annihilation of a father, mother or child at the hands of an angry mob, a corrupt judicial system or ordinary citizens acting in defense of the segregated racial order? Jim Crow did not spare the families of Medgar Evers or Emmett Till or Laura Nelson or those killed in Rosewood or Tulsa or Elaine or East St. Louis.
Byron Donalds, I’m sure, does not actually care about the real state of the Black family in the American past. But if you’re inclined to believe his assessment — or even take it seriously for a millisecond — you should also remember that slavery and Jim Crow destroyed as many Black families as could have possibly been preserved.
What I Wrote
My Tuesday column (which ran on Wednesday this week) was an extended argument that it is actually bad for Trump’s campaign that he is a felon.
The myth of Donald Trump is that he is immune to scandal — that there’s nothing he could say or do that would undermine his political prospects. In this rendering of the Trump dynamic, his shamelessness helps him glide past controversy, and the unshakable devotion of his base keeps him afloat through the worst of storms. The truth of Donald Trump is very far from the myth. Yes, he is shameless. Yes, he is surrounded by a cult of personality. But neither has made him invulnerable to the blows of political combat.
My Friday column was on the nature of Trump’s claim to authority and power. Hint: It doesn’t flow from the Constitution.
At no point, you’ll notice, do Republicans deny that Trump is a criminal. They’ve made no effort here to defend his honor or to say he’s innocent of the charges levied against him. They almost seem to accept, like most Americans, that the former president is guilty of fraud. But they don’t accept the verdict. They don’t accept the idea that Trump could be tried in a court of law on these charges. They reject the authority of the jury. For Republicans — no matter the law, no matter the evidence and no matter the testimony — the conviction is illegitimate. In their view, Trump is sovereign, and the law is not.
And I was on the latest episode of “Matter of Opinion” with my colleagues Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and David French, discussing Trump, masculinity and American politics.
Now Reading
Suzanne Schneider on how illiberal democracy in Israel has become a model for the global right, in Dissent.
Leila Farsakh on Palestinian statehood for Boston Review.
Aryeh Neier on Israel’s war in Gaza for The New York Review of Books.
Daniel Schlozman on the No Labels group for n+1 magazine.
Richard Brody on Elaine May for The New Yorker.
Photo of the Week
I took this while walking around Charlottesville a few months ago. It was at the base of one of the more imposing churches downtown. For whatever reason I found the combination of light, shadow and signage compelling.
Now Eating: Spicy Shrimp Masala
As long as you do your prep beforehand — with all your ingredients ready to go into the pan — this shrimp masala comes together very quickly. You can moderate the heat either by omitting the Thai green chiles or by reducing the amount of Kashmiri chile powder. You can also add a bit more coconut milk than the recipe calls for. I like to serve this with steamed rice and a green vegetable. Recipe from New York Times Cooking.
Ingredients
1 pound large shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 ½ teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
¼ cup ghee or neutral oil
½ teaspoon ginger paste or freshly grated ginger
½ teaspoon garlic paste or freshly grated garlic
1 medium red onion, finely chopped
1 teaspoon Kashmiri red chile powder
½ teaspoon ground cumin
¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
2 to 3 Thai green chiles, finely chopped
5 plum tomatoes, finely chopped
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
¼ cup coconut milk, stirred (optional)
1 to 2 tablespoons lemon juice (from about ½ lemon)
¼ teaspoon garam masala
1 to 2 tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped
Directions
Pat shrimp dry, sprinkle with 1 teaspoon pepper and set aside.
Heat ghee over medium heat in a wok or large (12-inch) frying pan until it has melted, about 30 seconds. Add ginger, garlic and onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until onion has softened, 5 to 7 minutes.
Add chile powder, cumin, turmeric and Thai green chiles. Stir until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add tomatoes and salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes have broken down and start to stick to the wok, about 15 minutes. Add coconut milk if you like it saucy.
Add shrimp. Stir so that shrimp are evenly coated, and continue cooking, stirring occasionally so the shrimp cook evenly, until the shrimp turn pink and appear firm, 4 to 5 minutes.
Turn off the heat, sprinkle with lemon juice, garam masala, cilantro and remaining ½ teaspoon black pepper.
The post No, Byron Donalds, Jim Crow Didn’t Create Stronger Black Families appeared first on New York Times.