Cliven Bundy echoes larger right wing revisionist history

[alp227]

Last edited Thu Apr 24, 2014, 11:09 PM - Edit history (1)

According to Dave Weigel in this new Slate.com article today:

I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

I was annoyed but not surprised to hear about Cliven Bundy's bigoted comments today. Why not surprised? Weigel responds:

Obviously, Bundy is a crank. But he’s not alone. Not only are these views shared on the survivalist fringe of American life, but they’re fairly common within the conservative movement. Enterprising pundits—almost all of them African-American—have built careers out of telling white audiences that slavery was better for black families than welfare.

There’s Walter Williams, a conservative economist at George Mason University, who told the Wall Street Journal that “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do … that is to destroy the black family.” Likewise, there’s Star Parker—a frequent speaker at conservative gatherings like CPAC and the Values Voter Summit—whose Uncle Sam’s Plantation argues the same.

As a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia, E.W. Jackson told his supporters that “slavery did not destroy the black family … government did that,” and last year, FreedomWorks—a Tea Party group—released a documentary called Runaway Slave, which details the “Democratic plantation” of welfare and entitlement benefits, used to lure African-Americans away from the Republican Party. And key to the narrative is the idea that these benefits ruined black families, succeeding where slavery failed.

Contrary to their romanticized accounts of slavery (or pretty much anything that's truly "negative" about America), here is the naked truth about black families who lived in slavery:

...the slavery that marked everything about their lives made these families very different. Belonging to another human being brought unique constrictions, disruptions, frustrations, and pain.

Enslaved people could not legally marry in any American colony or state. Colonial and state laws considered them property and commodities, not legal persons who could enter into contracts, and marriage was, and is, very much a legal contract. This means that until 1865 when slavery ended in this country, the vast majority of African Americans could not legally marry.

Some enslaved people lived in nuclear families with a mother, father, and children. In these cases each family member belonged to the same owner. Others lived in near-nuclear families in which the father had a different owner than the mother and children. Both slaves and slaveowners referred to these relationships between men and women as “abroad marriages.” A father might live several miles away on a distant plantation and walk, usually on Wednesday nights and Saturday evenings to see his family as his obligation to provide labor for an owner took precedence over his personal needs.

Speaking of E.W. Jackson & family breakdown, Ed Schultz had a lively discussion with a few black panelists who ripped Jackson to shreds last summer when the comments first came out. A writer at the Campaign for America's Future also offers a more reality-based look at the African-American family:

What Jackson calls the “deterioration” of African-Americans could be halted and reversed by reversing the conservative economic policies that led to it in the first place.

A brother generally needs a paycheck before he can afford to “put a ring on it.” A 2006 poll conducted by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University found that “Black men report the same ambitions as most Americans — for career success, a loving marriage, children, respect.” But in this recession black male unemployment has reached depression era levels. Some 8% of us lost our jobs between 2007 and 2009.

You want to promote marriage in African American communities? Start with job creation.

You want to create jobs in African American communities? Stop giving corporations tax breaks for off-shoring jobs, and bring back manufacturing jobs. The thirty-year slow bleed of manufacturing jobs out of this country hurt African Americans disproportionately. In 1979, almost one in four African American workers had manufacturing jobs. By 2008, fewer than one-in-ten were in manufacturing.

This factually ignorant romanticization of slavery is pretty ironic for a crowd who complains about publik skulz indoktrunatin' the chillun with soshulizm, femunizim, commienizm, etc. Thomas Sowell, another black conservative useful idiot, has also been widely quoted: "The black family—which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions—began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to 'help.'" Umm, as the link above shows, black family life was HELL back in slavery. And never mind the trade-off: having a nuclear family as the theocratic authoritarians insist is "best" for kids, but lacking human rights for near 100-200 years in America.

[freshwest]

1. Thanks, alp. n/t

[Jamaal510]

2. K&R

[Johonny]

3. How are Dr. Benjamin S. Carson's views on social programs different than Bundy's?

In order for elitism to flourish, there has to be another class of people who are willing to acknowledge the superiority of the chosen ones. Elites cultivate this obeisance by providing goodies to the less fortunate ones. In our society today, those goodies consist of multiple kinds of entitlement programs. As the dependency on these programs grows, the position of the elite class is solidified because they will always be seen as the providers who need to be protected from any threats of power redistribution. The elitists constantly find ways to proclaim their goodness and their necessity for the well-being of the “oppressed,” while at the same time declaring how evil their opponents are, and how those evil people would utterly destroy any hope of a reasonable life for the oppressed if they were to gain power.

Yet because he avoids the "key" bad words when saying social programs leave you basically a virtual slave to mythical liberal elite masters this type of conservative rhetoric has never really been questioned by the press. Bundy's views are main stream Republican views and it isn't hard to find just about any major conservative figure echoing his talking points... just cleaned up for polite audiences. Where did Bundy learn his views? It isn't really that hard to figure that one out.