I'm going to give Rep. Michele Bachmann the benefit of the doubt and say that she just hadn't very carefully read the original version of THE MARRIAGE VOW: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY (PDF) by the FAMily Leader (yes, they spell "family" funny, something that has meaning for the group itself).
Mind you, I'm giving her the benefit doubt despite the fact that the controversial statement in question (see below) sat on the first page of the vow, was its third paragraph and its very first bullet point:
- 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.3
Such an absolutely outrageous statement! Despite having since dropped this bullet point from The Marriage Vow (does this mean Rep. Michele Bachmann needs to sign it again?), I just had to find out HOW the FAMiLY Leader group felt so comfortable and confident presenting it in the public sphere for our possible future President of the USA to sign.
Surviving slavery bills of sale don't have notes of "Don't break up the set; buy the parents, too!" and "Mom and Dad included at no charge!"
The 3 on the bullet point refers to the following report:
3 Lorraine Blackman, Obie Clayton, Norval Glenn, Linda Malone-Colon, and Alex Roberts, “The Consequences of Marriage for African Americans: A Comprehensive Literature Review,” Institute for American Values, 2005 (http://www.americanvalues.org/pdfs/consequences_of_marriage.pdf).
Within this "Consequences of Marriage for African Americans" report, I believe the bullet point was attempting to redescribe this excerpt, which appears on page 8 of the 72-page PDF:
. . . But overall, family formation patterns were relatively similar for Blacks and Whites, with marriage occupying a paramount place in family life. For example, in 1880 and 1910 about 56.3 percent of Black and 66.9 percent of White households were nuclear households, about 23.5 percent of Black and 19.7 percent of White households were extended family households, and 20.3 percent of Black and 13.4 percent of White households were fragmented or “broken” homes.11
The 11 points to this footnote --
11. Ruggles (1994). It should be noted that the "extended family" category includes married-couple households with coresiding kin, grandchildren, etc. Thus, there were more married-couple families than those represented in the “nuclear households” category. Data from another study show that marriage rates increased among Blacks and decreased among Whites in Philadelphia after slavery, and were relatively similar in 1880 and 1890; Haines (1996).
The full Ruggles (1994) citation is:
Ruggles, S. “The Origins of African-American Family Structure.” American Sociological Review 59 (1994): 136-151.
After reading the Ruggles article, I believe it's this work that's been used to compose the bullet point -- despite it not actually providing evidence of the bullet point's claims!
The first misrepresentation is the 2005 report using the phrase "nuclear households," which stands in for two-parent household with child(ren). To put it more plainly than the footnote, Ruggles does not use this phrase in his 1994 article. In fact, in "Table 1. Percentage Distribution of Household Composition by Race: United States 1880-1980" of the Ruggles article, Ruggles employed specifically descriptive categories and sub-categories; Fragmentary Households were composed of Primary Individuals Households and Single Parents Households, and Married Couples Households were composed of Childless Couples Households and Couples with Children Households. Total Fragmentary Households for Blacks was 20.3 in 1880 and 20.2 in 1910. Total Married Couples Households for Blacks was 57.3 in 1880 and 55.4 in 1910.
And Ruggles had a third category, Extended Households, composed of the sub-categories Vertically Extended Households and Other Extended Households. Ruggles defined his terms for Table 1: "Fragmentary households consist of primary individuals and single parents residing with their children only. Married couple households include married couples residing with no other kin and married couples residing with their children and no other kin. Extended households include additional kin, such as parents, siblings, or grandchildren of the household head. Vertically extended households are those that include ancestors, descendants, or children-in-law of the household head." For Blacks, Total Extended Households were 22.5 for 1880 and 24.4 for 1910.
Recall that the 2005 report states that "...in 1880 and 1910 about 56.3 percent of Black and 66.9 percent of White households were nuclear households..." It appears that the 56.3 percentage comes from adding the Total Married Couples Households numbers for 1880 and 1910 and then dividing the total by 2! The sum of 57.3 and 55.4 is 112.7, divided by 2 equals 56.35. Comparatively, the same numbers for Whites are 67.3 for 1880 and 66.5 for 1910; its addition and division is exactly 66.9.
These numbers, Married Couples Households, represented the majority condition for all households in the USA, Blacks and Whites -- numbers that were "translated" to mean "nuclear households" in the 2005 study. In those terms, these numbers allowed for the claim in the bullet point that "...a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household..."
Remember that the Married Couples Households percentage was the one that included the Childless Couples Households number!
Throughout the 1994 Ruggles article, there are a few numbers available from 1850, but nothing that specifically refers to a child born in slavery in 1860. On the exact contrary, Ruggles presents a set of numbers from ten years earlier, in 1850, on free Black children.
Most importantly, Ruggles stated that the data set from which he drew his numbers, the U.S. Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS), allowed for comparisons only from 1880 forward. And then there is this statement from the article: "Some of the historical differences between blacks and whites in living arrangements of children resulted from differences in mortality; children could not reside with parents who were dead. In the late twentieth century, few parents die before their children are grown. However, parental mortality in the nineteenth century was common."
Most tellingly, though, the 2005 study admits on page 13, in a section under the heading, A Note on Family Classification in the Scholarly Research, the following:
One problem we encountered in our investigation of marriage and Black children is that many studies do not classify family structure as specifically as we would have liked. For example, some articles use categories such as “married-couple home,” or “two-parent home.” These categories conflate children living with married-biological-parents, cohabiting biological-parents, stepparents, and so on. Lumping these family forms together is problematic because they have important differences and are associated with different outcomes...
The use of overly-broad family categorizations makes it very difficult to isolate and study the effects of a particular family structure. This issue is particularly relevant for studying African American children, who live in an especially diverse range of family forms.
To the extent possible, scholars should use more precise family structure categories in future research.
Because focusing solely on traditional nuclear families would have made an investigation of marriage and the well-being of Black children nearly impossible, we chose not to exclude studies with less than perfect family structure categories. We acknowledge that this decision likely makes our findings less precise. Nevertheless, we believe that the studies under review still provide a very good estimate of the effect of parental marriage on the well-being of Black children...
Perhaps someone at FAMiLY Leader took a thorough look at how and why its blanket bullet point was at odds with the cited research and incredibly complex history and situations of African Americans in the USA, and realized the most prudent and sensible action was to pull it, since it simply couldn't be defended.
On a more personal note, I'd like to make the following plea.
The United States of America has scholars. There are hundreds of professors, researchers, and librarians through the decades that have dedicated their lives to finding out the truth on a wide array of matters, including studying this very troubling, inhuman, and inhumane period in our country's history when there was slavery.
Descended unquestionably on both parents' sides from enslaved families, I've known for a long time that tracking down historical information on my own ancestors means finding the right Bill of Sale.
Having learned more about the history of slavery in the world overall, I will never understand the mentality of those in the United States that thought it was perfectly fine to take citizens from various established nations on a whole other continent and bring them here for slave labor not for a finite period of time in exchange for goods or other services, as was done in most other cultures, including African ones, but for forever, for their own foreseeable futures and the foreseeable futures of any children and continued descendants. Citizens of Africa were brought to the USA and literally worked to death, and then the same was done to generation after generation of their children for hundreds of years. How does that not curdle your soul??
In any case, research has been conducted and continues to be conducted on this period. If you put yourself in the position to be asked to talk publicly about slavery--or about any subject--then you owe it to the public and especially to yourself to have done some reading about it! If someone asks you to put your name to something, make sure you've read and agree to everything on it. If there's a part that confuses you or strikes you as possibly not correct, STOP and ask questions about it. And continue asking until you get satisfactory answers to your questions.
The maxim is that the only stupid question is the one you didn't ask. Just to let Rep. Michele Bachmann know, in regards to that slavery bullet point on the original FAMiLY Leader Marriage Vow, we know you didn't ask and yes, you looked stupid.
ProQuest Abstract to 1994 Ruggles article: The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series is used to trace race differences in family structure between 1880 and 1980. Analysis confirms that the high incidence among African-Americans of single parenthood and children residing without their parents is not a recent phenomenon.
Just a few of the available resources on American slavery and slave families--
Dunaway, Wilma A. The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Features companion website of supporting materials: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/vtpubs/mountain_slavery/index.htm - Also see: page at Cambridge University Press website; entry in WorldCat online database. DESCRIPTION: In The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, Wilma Dunaway calls into question the dominant paradigm of the US slave family. She contends that US slavery studies have been flawed by neglect of small plantations and export zones and exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and Slave narratives, she identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American families, including forced labor migrations, structural interference in marriages and childcare, sexual exploitation of women, shortfalls in provision of basic survival needs, and ecological risks. This book is unique in its examination of new threats to family persistence that emerged during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Reconstruction Era and African American Marriages by Katherine M. Franke, excerpted from: Katherine M. Franke, Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of African American Marriages , 11 Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 251-309, 251-258, 307-309 (Summer 1999)
Slave Marriages, Families Were Often Shattered By Auction Block - NPR (National Public Radio) February 11, 2010: During the slavery era, when slaves wanted to get married, it often presented a range of complexities that today's couples can't even begin to comprehend. Professor Tera Hunter, who teaches history at Princeton University, talks with host Michel Martin about jumping the broom during slave times
Washington, Reginald. Sealing the Sacred Bonds of Holy Matrimony: Freedmen's Bureau Marriage Records 37 Prologue Magazine (Spring 2005) - Excerpt from article: On April 19, 1866, former slaves Benjamin Berry Manson and Sarah Ann Benton White received an official marriage certificate from the Freedmen's Bureau, officially known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The Wilson County, Tennessee, couple had lived as slave man and wife since October 28, 1843, and for the first time in more than two decades their marriage had finally received legal recognition... For the Mansons—who had lived intermittently on separate farms—the marriage certificate issued by the Freedmen's Bureau was more than a document "legally" sealing the sacred bonds of holy matrimony. Listing the names and ages of 9 of their 16 children, it was for them a symbol of freedom and the long-held hope that they and their children would one day live free as a family in the same household.
with coresiding kin, grandchildren, etc. Thus, there were more married-couple families than those represented
in the “nuclear households” category. Data from another study show that marriage rates increased among
Blacks and decreased among Whites in Philadelphia after slavery, and were relatively similar in 1880 and
1890; Haines (1996).
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