Lineages of Modernity by Todd Emmanuel;

Author:Todd, Emmanuel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509534494
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2019-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

Homo americanus: the Black version

Because this Other is inside, and has coexisted with the White We since the beginning, its culture is only American.

With Black Americans, we come up against a rare case of discontinuity in the history of family structures. As Franklin Frazier has shown in The Black Family in America, where he describes the difficulties in the emergence of a stable Black family organization between 1650 and 1930, the traditions of the slaves deported from Africa were methodically crushed in the United States.37

It was a political decision to mix ethnic groups and break up the embryos of family nuclei. In the New World, slaves were deprived of the right to a family, similar to the situation for slaves in the Roman Empire analysed by Weber. Black Americans have lost the memories of their family histories. Only a few families seem to have held on to a few myths about princely genealogies, though these seem to have been invented very late. On the other hand, any such transmission would, contrary to what we observe, have given a patrilineal bias to Black American family culture, since the majority of slaves were purchased in patrilineal West Africa. Admittedly, patrilineality is weaker on the African coast, as we have seen, but many of the individuals deported were captured inland, in highly patrilineal territory, before being transferred as livestock across the Atlantic. In certain West Indian islands, such as Haiti, these patrilineal traits have managed to survive.

The destruction of the Black family was first and foremost that of the masculine and paternal role, of which the genetic composition of Black Americans still preserves a trace. On the plantations, the White masters did not hesitate, by rape or the seduction of domination, to have sex with Black women. This is why modern genetics has measured a quarter of European descent among Black Americans, but it has also found that the male European component was 19 per cent and the female component only 5 per cent.38 Sexual relations between Black men and White women with the quasi-servile status of ‘indentured servant’ were certainly not negligible, but they were overwhelmed in the statistics by Black women being used sexually by their White owners.

Frazier was caricatured later in the 1965 Moynihan Report. But he gave an objective and nuanced picture of race and family relations in American history. In his work, we find not only the theme of the predominance of women and the importance of grandmothers, i.e. an implicit matrilineal lineage in the Black family, but also the theme of the gradual fraught emergence of the status of husband and father, constantly threatened by social and economic upsets, by the abolition of slavery and then by the great migration to the North.

The attachment to religion and the Bible, so strong among Black Americans, can be partly seen as the effect of this effort to stabilize the family and the masculine role. The Bible is a patrilineal dream, a counterbalance to bilaterality, even among Jews and White Americans, and can serve as an ideological backdrop to a reconstruction of the masculine role.

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