Michele Bachmann is Nostalgic for Slavery Days

July 8, 2011 in Gender, History, Politics, Race, Research, Sexual Violence, Youth | by | 8 comments

So Michele Bachmann has signed a pledge to support families that’s got some very creepy stuff in it. In particular, there’s this:

“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

Others have noted just how brain-curdlingly offensive this is, and I agree 100% with what they’ve written. But I want to pause for a second and look at the numbers behind the claim.

The pledge cites an invalid source — the 1880 census doesn’t have great data on slave family structures, it turns out — but the standard estimate for the number of slave families broken up by the sale of children away from one or both parents is about one in three. With life expectancy so much lower in the 19th century than it is today, I’d guess that about half of all slave families in the antebellum US were ones in which children were living with both of their parents.

And yes, the percentage of two-parent households in the black community today is a little lower than that.

But again, let’s pause for a second. Contrary to stereotypes, most African American fathers who don’t live with their kids are involved with them on a regular basis. Almost half see their kids or speak to them by phone at least once a week, and fully two-thirds spend face-to-face time with them at least once a month. (This percentage, by the way, is significantly higher than the analogous stat for white fathers who don’t live with their kids: 67% vs 59%.)

So when you compare slave families to black families today and wring your hands about the decline in the two-parent household, you’re not just ignoring the fact that slave children lived in “households” where their white master, not their own parents, had final authority over them. You’re not just ignoring the fact that many of them saw their parents savagely beaten and their mothers repeatedly raped. You’re not just ignoring the fact that their parents were in many cases prohibited by law from reading them a bedtime story. You’re not just ignoring all that.

You’re also saying that a family destroyed by the sale of its children is functionally identical to one in which the kids sleep at their mom’s most nights but have a bedroom in their father’s place, cereal in his cupboard, and drawings taped to his walls.

You’re saying, not to put too fine a point on it, that my ex-wife and I, by amicably separating and choosing to raise our children together while living apart, behaved comparably to the slaveowner who tore a toddler screaming from her mother’s arms and sold her away forever, permanently severing the bond between parent and child.

That’s what you’re saying. And it’s an repulsive insult to every parent in America.

Update: Santorum signed the pledge too. And Pawlenty is apparently considering it.

Hello DC! Hello Campus Progress!

July 5, 2011 in Campus Protests, Organizing, Politics, Student Power, Youth | by | Leave a comment

Heading down to Washington today for tomorrow’s Campus Progress national conference. I’ll be moderating a panel on students and youth in social justice movements in the United States with Carmen Berkeley of Choice USA (a former US Student Association president), John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, and Evangeline Weiss of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

It should be a really good panel. If you’re going to be at the conference, stop by and say hi!

NOTE: The conference schedule has changed to accommodate Bill Clinton’s schedule (he’s keynoting). Our panel starts at 11:00 now.

Quote of the Day

July 4, 2011 in History, Quotes, Race | by | Leave a comment

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”

–Frederick Douglass, July 4, 1852.

DA’s Office Claims DSK Accuser Lied About Her Actions After Alleged Rape

July 1, 2011 in Media, Police, Sexual Violence | by | Leave a comment

This morning’s New York Times story on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape investigation declared that the case was collapsing due to “major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her.” That article, however, contained no allegations that the complainant had lied about the attack itself. Instead, the paper claimed that prosecutors had found inconsistencies in her asylum application and evidence that she had engaged in (and attempted to cover up) shady financial dealings prior to the incident. In the wake of the publication of the Times piece, many — myself included — have argued that such alleged misrepresentations had no bearing on the question of whether she had given an accurate account of her encounter with Strauss-Kahn.

Now, however, in a letter to DSK’s lawyers, the District Attorney’s office contends that the accuser lied to them about the immediate aftermath of the incident itself.

In conversations with detectives and prosecutors, they say, as well as in her grand jury testimony, DSK’s accuser repeatedly declared that she fled to a nearby hallway after leaving his suite (Suite 2806), remaining there until she encountered her supervisor, to whom she reported the assault. “The complainant has since admitted,” the DA’s office says, “that this account was false and that after the incident in Suite 2806, she proceeded to clean a nearby room and then returned to Suite 2806 and began to clean that suite before she reported the incident.”

Such misrepresentations do not themselves prove that DSK’s accuser was not attacked. As I’ve noted before, a woman who has been “raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question … can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.”

That said, though, this latest allegation is of a very different character than those the paper reported earlier. The Times bungled the story, and in doing so seriously misrepresented the state of the case.

Happy Birthday to the Youth Vote!

July 1, 2011 in Civil Liberties, History, Organizing, Politics, Student Government, Student Power, Voting Rights, Youth | by | 1 comment

Throughout the student movement of the 1960s, most American college students were denied the right to vote.

From the birth of the American republic the voting age had stood at 21. Pressure for earlier voting had been building since 18-year-olds were first drafted in the Second World War, but despite the baby boom, the student movements of the sixties, and the deaths of thousands of Americans under 21 in Korea and Vietnam, reform went nowhere for decades. It was only in May 1970, after National Guard troops shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State University, that Congress finally took action.

In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, the 18-year-old vote was introduced as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act. One senator threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.

The Voting Rights Act, as amended, was signed into law by President Nixon that June. The Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional that winter, ruling that Congress didn’t have the power to enfranchise youth in state and local elections, but the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress the following spring and ratified by the states in record time, gave 18-to-20-year-olds the vote for good.

That ratification came forty years ago today.

With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.

A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed lobbying organization. State Student Associations (SSAs) and state student lobbies soon followed, making the 1970s an unprecedented boom-time for student electoral organizing.

The SSAs of the 1970s transformed American politics and higher education forever, altering the balance of power between students and educational institutions while giving students a voice in state and national politics that reached far beyond the campus.

Happy birthday, youth voting!

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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