Dr. Walter Williams: Welfare Has Broken up the Black Family: Welfare State Accomplished What Slavery Could Not: Destroy Black Family! (Fox)
Dr. Walter Williams says that welfare government programs have accomplished what slavery and Jim Crow laws could not do: destroy the black family. Williams points out that up until the 1940’s between 75-90% of all black children were being raised in two parent homes; which started changing immediately after Lyndon Johnson Implemented his ‘War on Poverty’ Nanny State. Today less than 33% of black children are raised in two parent homes. Williams points out that the illegitimacy rate amongst blacks was 18% in 1940 but ballooned to 72.5% in 2008. In his 1985 documentary Good Intentions; Williams suggests that government welfare programs, with their “good intentions” led America’s black families into Hell.
By Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times Published: April 22, 2010 (Excerpts)
The Slave Market (1867), by Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904): a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.
THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
Slavery Secret: Africans sold Africans into Slavery.. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS: "Africans sold other Africans to the Europeans..... There were African middlemen and they'd fight wars with other Africans to enslave them and to sell them to the white man.... Slavery was a huge business for different African kingdoms..... The story that we got when we were kids...it's not how it happened..... Africans sold other Africans to the Europeans."
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
