“You see, during Jim Crow, the black family was together,” said Florida Congressman Byron Donalds last Tuesday at an event in Philadelphia. “During Jim Crow, more black people were not just conservative—black people have always been conservative-minded—but more black people voted conservatively. And then (the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare), Lyndon Johnson—you go down that road, and now we are where we are.” Donalds defended his comments on MSNBC, saying he was not being “nostalgic” about Jim Crow but was making a point about black marriage rates and a stronger conservative identity. During the Jim Crow period, he said, “the marriage rates of Black Americans were significantly higher than any other time since then in American history,” and that, since then, “they have plummeted.”
Donalds is correct, as I show in yesterday’s essay on Freedom and Reason False Charge of Hypocrisy in the Abortion Debate and its Context. Last night, I listened to The Glenn Show and heard Glenn Loury and John McWhorter making the same points, noting at the 49:15 mark the “willful incomprehension” directed at Byron Donalds. McWhorter began by saying, “People are so willfully uncomprehending. All week people have been pretending—I really don’t know whether it’s pretending or that people can’t hear—they’re pretending that he was saying that Jim Crow caused the black family to be stronger. What moron would say it? What moron would think it? That’s not what he meant. He was saying that even under Jim Crow, the black family was stronger, which means that there were other factors that broke up the black family later.” The willful incomprehension must have made Donalds feel that his critics were trying to misunderstand him, he said in exasperation, adding, “That guy is dead on.”
McWhorter turned it back to Loury, asking if he agreed with what Donalds had said. Indeed, Loury responded. “It was simply a statement of fact.” Loury suggested, as I did yesterday, that the audience pick up Herbert Gutman’s book Black Family and Slavery and Freedom, where they would find a wealth of statistics from the early twentieth century showing a low rate of teenage births, a high rate of marriage, and a low rate of out-of-wedlock births among black Americans. Loury confirmed that we don’t see the dramatic significant transformation in black domestic relations until after 1945, reaching alarming levels in the 1960s. He noted sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s shock in the 1960s when 25 percent of black births were to unmarried women, a figure that has now reached 70 percent. Donalds’ statement reflects this historical reality, which is crucial for understanding disparities and addressing them. A nuanced sociological analysis would consider broader cultural trends, economic opportunities, and social welfare policies contributing to these changes, Loury argued. “Ignoring the transformation of the black family post-Jim Crow is unproductive.”
But it’s not ignorance. It’s political. Progressives are smearing Donalds because they are desperate to hide their record, especially from black Americans, who, they depend upon for electoral success (I explain the strategy in yesterday’s blog). This is why academic historians, overwhelmingly progressive Democrat in orientation, work tirelessly to confuse language, distract the audience, revise history, and smear people (especially disobedient blacks). You can see this in the historians interviewed by the The Tampa Bay Times it is “fact check” on Byron Donalds (see “Fact-checking Byron Donalds’ ‘Jim Crow’ comments on Black families”). The language used in the article is a case study of the function of political language in the hands of academics and media. If it is not designed to do this, it certainly functions to keep the reader locked in a cognitive habit of uncritically receiving partisan ideological distortion. That’s why Freedom and Reason exists—to adjust the signal to noise ratio.
The article begins the “fact checking” of Donalds’ claim that black people “voted conservatively” during the Jim Crow era. This is not possible to prove through hard evidence, the experts consulted told The Times. In the South under Jim Crow, “most black people could not vote,” University of Pennsylvania historian Kathleen M. Brown told the newspaper. There might be voting records for the fraction of Southern black people who were able to vote during the decades of Jim Crow laws, but this small group would not represent the views of the entire Southern black population. However, although northern blacks lived under conditions of the structural segregation constructed and maintained by Democrats, they did not live under live under Jim Crow’s legal and social strictures, and the records show that they did vote and, according to Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania historian, they “voted for Republicans as the party of Abraham Lincoln who ‘freed the slaves.’” Black people in the South would have been likely to vote Republican for the same reason if they’d been able, Harvard University historian Alexander Keyssar said.
According to The Times, historians contend that a pattern of black voters backing Republicans during the Jim Crow era would not support the idea that they were “conservative” in the way that today’s Republican Party is. Here’s where the propaganda usage of words becomes very plain to those who work from a standpoint free of partisan distortions of language. The Republican Party in that period “tended to be more conservative” on economic regulation, while also being seen as “more sympathetic to black rights,” Keyssar said. In fact, the Republican Party, with its philosophy of limited government and local control, rooted in democratic-republican principle, was economically liberal. The Democratic Party, which had been the party of the slavocracy, was the party of corporate statism, the phoenix that arose from the ashes of the Civil War. As the party of abolition and individual liberty, the Republican Party was naturally more sympathetic to black rights.
During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a growing reaction to the expansion of government programs and regulations from the New Deal and Great Society eras, progressive policies that advocates dressed in the language of liberalism. At the same time, the social movements of the 1960s were gaining traction. Because of the close association of liberalism with progressivism in corporate state propaganda (they are in fact opposites), people who supported economic liberalism (free markets, small government, lower taxes) but were also liberal on social issues (personal liberty, secularism) began to articulate the dual stance with the phrase “fiscally conservative, socially liberal.” This meme had become ubiquitous by the 1980s. But the economic philosophy of conservatives aligns with classical liberal economic principles. The meme thus introduces into language a confusion of terms. It also also mean that those who were fiscally liberal and socially conservative, i.e., Christian and traditionalist, took up the standard of democratic-republicanism. (See Republicanism and the Meaning of Small Government.)
So when The Times reports that, according to historians, “conservatism” as a defined ideological movement emerged in the 1950s, late in the Jim Crow period, what they describe is modern conservatism, which combines liberal views on economics and traditional views on cultural social matters. This is why the South became Republican after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The reconstruction of the slavocracy in the form of corporate statism could only have a hold on the South as long as the legacy of racial separation held, which is why Democrats filibustered the bill in the Senate. Even Democrats pushing the bill knew its consequences for electoral politics. Bill Moyers, a Johnson aide, recounted that Johnson told him after signing the Civil Rights Act, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” This was not because the Republican Party was the racist party, but because Southerners are instinctively individualist and favor small government.
When Donalds talks about “conservatism,” he is talking about is the traditional values blacks held about family and personal responsibility. American blacks were overwhelming Christian during the period of Jim Crow. The black community is known for its strong religious roots, which continue today. Many Black Americans attend church regularly, and religious beliefs often shape their views on social issues such as gender, sexuality, and abortion. So when Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie tells The Times that black voters have historically compartmentalized their views, separating what Donalds might consider their “conservative” perspectives on social issues from their more liberal views on racial issues, she is creating a false distinction between black traditionalism and the historical desire to be free from slavery and segregation. What Gillespie means by “liberal” is really progressivism, and the embrace of progressivism by blacks in America’s cities is the result of the dynamics I identified in yesterday’s essay: progressive policy making blacks dependent upon government. The fate of dependency on government is the destruction of traditional relations. This is what destroyed the black family.
The superficially of intelligent people testifies to the power of ideology. If a reporter sought me out for commentary on this story, he would find my answers to his questions bewildering. Gillespie told The Times that conservative black people “are more likely to still vote for and identify with the Democratic Party, despite the fact that liberals of other racial groups would be strongly predicted to be Democrats and conservatives of other backgrounds would be strongly predicted to be Republican. This is because of the Democratic Party’s 60-year issue advantage on questions of race and civil rights.” What advantage? The Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow until the 1960s and then, to keep the hierarchy going, institutionalized a dissimulated racial hierarchy that prevails to this day. The only systemic racism that exists in America is the one progressives established and maintain. The only way to end racism for good is to get progressives away from power.
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Note: Throughout the article, the Tampa Bay Times capitalizes “black” while leaving “white” in lowercase letters. You see this linguistic programming across the media and academic publishing. Blacks are elevated to a proper noun, whereas whites as left as a common noun. The function of differential capitalization is an attempt to rhetorically invert imagined white supremacy. Every appearance of the color words reinforces the myth. I have fixed this throughout the quotes I share from these source I used by making all color references common nouns.
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