Cliven Bundy isn’t the only person who thinks slavery in the United States was just fine.
Cliven Bundy, Fox News celebrity famous for ranching illegally, has finally stepped in it.
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro […] they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children; they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Obviously, Mr. Bundy is ignorant of the truth of slavery. He’s unaware of the systemic destruction of black families, the hundreds of years of physical and psychological torture, the legal and pervasive rape of enslaved black women by slaveowners, and the lingering effects of the devastation of an entire ethnic group’s humanity. Since he doesn’t even recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. government, then he’s obviously never read Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, which considers a black slave to be three-fifths of a person .
Federal elected officials would never be so ignorant. Perhaps, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sen. Rick Santorum could educate Mr. Bundy on the horrors of human enslavement. Wait, no. No, they can’t. Because they signed a pledge to discriminate against LGBT citizens that also contained a passage which reads
“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.”
The passage seems to forget that “child born into slavery in 1860” was born into slavery . Not only was that child, through no fault of his/her own, born into a lifetime of brutal, involuntary servitude, but that child could be sold away from his/her parents at the whims of the slaveowner. So, no. That “two-parent household” was not quite as idyllic as Bachmann and Santorum seem to think.
Perhaps, Dr. Ben Carson could teach them a thing or two; he’s a Yale-educated M.D. He’s the first person to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head. He’s brilliant. He’s black— the history of dehumanization is in his blood. Then he said this about white liberals:
“They are the most racist people there are. Because they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”
No, Dr. Carson, no. A ‘plantation’ is not a metaphor for a political party. A plantation as you are referring to it is a large farm where hundreds of human beings were forced to work against their will due to threats of bodily harm, maiming, and death. Welfare, food stamps, and other government programs are not slavery . The only thing that is slavery is slavery.
Photo— Flickr/ Mike On Maul
I don’t know. I’d count the selective service system as pretty analogous to slavery, though less so in recent years. Also worth checking out is Robert Nozick’s “The Tale of the Slave”.
I wouldn’t consider welfare or any of that stuff Bundy or other said as “slavery” though.