WRITING AT VFR, Sage McLaughlin responds to a commenter who says that blacks were better off under slavery than they are in communities that are violent and chaotic. McLaughlin writes:

American blacks after Reconstruction and before the civil rights era made fantastic progress in terms of education, productivity, and overall well-being. While not producing the sort of civilizational achievement that was typical of whites, American blacks had intact families, communities built around a healthy Christian religious tradition, and unique cultural expressions that were fully a part of a vibrant American society (especially in the realms of spiritual and improvisational musical styles). The notion that free blacks were more retrograde and unproductive than black slaves is offensive and ignorant.

Post-Great-Society black communities have been devastated, and the gains they made in education have been completely reversed. It is true that the present state of blacks in American society is more culturally degraded than it ever was during slavery, but only in the very uninteresting sense that black slaves were not permitted any culture of their own in the first place. It is simply not the case that there are only two options before us–to keep blacks in a bondage that deprives both them and their keepers of dignity, or to encourage their lowest tendencies while discouraging all their best tendencies as is done under liberalism. To suggest otherwise is to deny that blacks are capable of living as dignified human beings in reasonably productive communities, and that is observably false even in the narrow and unique case of the American experience.

                                   — Comments —

Mrs. H. writes: 

Well said! I always wonder why Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver receive little recognition or press during “Black History Month.” I have always greatly admired those men, especially Dr. Carver, whose biography by Augusta Stevenson I read in grade school.

Laura writes:

In the thread at VFR, James P. writes:

Blacks are capable of living as dignified human beings in reasonably productive communities only when whites demand it of them and only when whites provide the economic, legal, and political basis for the black productive community to exist. What we observe when whites do not demand civilized behavior of blacks, and when whites do not underwrite the black community, is chaos, corruption, poverty, violence, and death.

Roger G. writes:

The myth of George Washington Carver is discussed here and here.

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