Cultural Degradation

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a piece explaining why he thinks white progressives are wrong to assign 'cultural residue' from Jim Crow a leading role in the problems afflicting the black community. I think he has to be right about this part of his argument:

In his masterful history, Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner recounts the experience of the progressives who came to the South as teachers in black schools. The reformers "had little previous contact with blacks" and their views were largely cribbed from Uncle Tom's Cabin. They thus believed blacks to be culturally degraded and lacking in family instincts, prone to lie and steal, and generally opposed to self-reliance.... In short, white progressives coming South expected to find a black community suffering the effects of not just oppression but its "cultural residue." ...

[What they actually found was that b]y 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also "quite incidentally" from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, "the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them."

The point here is rich and repeated in American history—it was not "cultural residue" that threatened black marriages. It was white terrorism, white rapacity, and white violence. And the commitment among freedpeople to marriage mirrored a larger commitment to the reconstitution of family, itself necessary because of systemic white violence.

"In their eyes," wrote an official from the Freedmen's Bureau, in 1865. "The work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited."

Coates goes on to impute from this that the problems afflicting the black society today are also due to white supremacy, which systematically damages black attempts to live together in the family structures they would prefer if un-oppressed.

I'm unpersuaded by that conclusion, and I'll tell you why. The difference between the 1865 case and the 1950-present case is that, in the present case, the collapse of marriage and family is occurring across all "racial" demographics. Some of these groups are more afflicted than others, but all are afflicted, and the afflictions track each other.

The likelihood isn't that blacks are being forced by some white supremacist structure not to marry, or to divorce. It is that there is a broader cultural degradation -- affecting the whole of American culture, and many other cultures worldwide, especially in the First world -- that is destroying the family as an institution.

It is the same force that is destroying the other human connections that serve as a bulwark between the atomic individual, alone and weak, and the power of the almighty state. The heritage of white supremacy, or its ongoing structures to whatever degree they exist, could at most explain why the black family began its collapse before the white family, which also explains why black families are less likely to be strong today than white families or Hispanic families.

But all these families are collapsing along the same trend line.