At an occasion in Philadelphia selling Donald Trump and the Republican Celebration on Tuesday, Consultant Byron Donalds of Florida made the eyebrow-raising assertion that Black households have been stronger, and Black individuals extra conservative, underneath the Jim Crow regimes of the previous Accomplice states.
“You see, throughout Jim Crow, the Black household was collectively,” Donalds stated. “Throughout Jim Crow, extra Black individuals weren’t simply conservative — as a result of Black individuals have at all times been conservative-minded — however extra Black individuals voted conservatively.”
When met with pushback from Consultant Hakeem Jeffries, the Home minority chief, Donalds responded with a video posted on X, through which he stated that “you had extra Black households underneath Jim Crow” and that it was “Democrat insurance policies … underneath the welfare state that did assist to destroy the Black household.”
Donalds, who’s as a lot a provocateur as he’s a lawmaker, is nearly word-for-word parroting the arguments of the prolific conservative commentator Thomas Sowell, who made this critique of the federal social security web the cornerstone of his commentary on the standing and prospects of Black Individuals within the 1980s and ’90s. “The Black household survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, nevertheless it has disintegrated within the wake of liberals’ growth of the welfare state,” Sowell wrote.
Now, there have at all times been just a few issues with this evaluation, starting with the underlying assumption that the relative financial success of white Individuals is due primarily to steady household construction and never the results of broad and largely unrestricted entry to schooling, financial alternative and public items in addition to full political illustration and the safety of the legislation.
However the single most necessary drawback is that to the extent that we are able to communicate of these items as singular entities, neither the Black household nor the Black group was all that sturdy or intact underneath both slavery or Jim Crow, nor have been there — in Donalds’s formulation — extra Black households.
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