... Blacks in America have become the perfect laboratory for the consequences of annihilating traditional sexual mores. At 70% illegitimacy, they have destroyed civilization at the molecular level. Still think it doesn't matter? Live it up, guys. Enjoy. ...

Can I pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that it's as cruel to describe human beings as illegitimate as it is to describe them as illegal? Well, I will anyway. And I promise to make this digression meet back up with the point.

There was a time in this country, not even a century past, when a birth certificate would note whether a person was illegitimate. In a day and age when the only job security most women could hope to have was as a spouse, being illegitimate made her unmarriageable to 'nice' men with decent incomes. Does it take a social sciences genius to predict that such women would have been more likely to end up in poverty, or with so-called illegitimate children of their own?

That's sometimes traced to the Victorian era (and back) upper class horror at the shocking proclivity of poor people to breed. Though it seems likely to me that it was also a publicly negotiated standoff position. It would certainly be one means to keep upper class women looking the other way while their husbands maintained entire second families with their mistresses, comforting themselves by being allowed to declare the competition illegitimate. 'She gets his affection and discretionary income now, my kids get every other financial and social benefit when the bastard keels over.'

Anyone want to bet against that exact thought having run through more than a few women's minds? And criminy, but wouldn't it be nice if we could move beyond the punitive social attitudes of a bunch of miserable people suffocating in a web of prudery and material entrapment? It's a lot easier to raise children with a partner, but that doesn't always work out for everybody. Why make it harder? Why not help out?

Back to race, Blacks in America were never part of the upper class or its striver hopefuls while these attitudes were being set up as publicly acceptable morality. Nor had they any hope at the time of so being. It had always been more or less expected in those not so long gone eras for the men of a household to make free (as the inappropriate saying went) with female servants and hired help who weren't actually slaves. Morality mainly applied to the upper class women whose legitimate heirs stood to gain property from the death of the only man they were allowed to bed. Lower class people whose lives were consumed in constant toil, privation, and the treatment of their bodies as the property of the well-off, for either entertainment or destruction, often took what they could get around the edges.

That was also the way White people treated each other. Even before we were called White people, which started so that all the migrant Germans, Irish, Polish, Italians, hereditary serfs, etc., wouldn't realize that they had more in common with the incoming Black slave class they were meeting up with in the New World than the wealthy landgrabbers.

You've at some point read or seen Much Ado About Nothing, right? The whole plot hinges around how completely acceptable sex with an unmarried female servant, whose sexuality had no value whatever, was mistaken for completely unacceptable sex with an unmarried female aristocrat, whose sexuality was the valuable property of her father and future husband. Crimes against sexual morality were originally seen mainly in the light of property crimes, specifically, crimes against men who owned sexual property. Religious attitudes then, as now, were ideals that were only really enforced when something important was at stake. Like inheritances.

The Puritans were quite anomalous. Which is why nobody liked them back home.

When it came to Black slaves, it was the norm for the males of the household to take whatever they wanted from their property. That's what having property means. So they had 'illegitimate' children with their slaves, who would then also be considered slaves in what can only be described as a pathological inability to care for one's own children. They would pick partners for their slaves or break up established pair bonds at whim. They treated the Blacks in their wholly illegitimate possession no differently than if they'd been bright, dextrous cattle. (And, btw, it should be noted that syphilis and gonorrhea are the enduring legacy of the fact that certain White males somewhere in our collective, murky past 'made free' with the sheep and cattle, too.)

Slaves weren't allowed to marry, and that was the legal status of most of the Black population of this country for most of their history here. Then after that, they could still be lynched at will for all too many years, a practice that disproportionately affected men. Even today, Black men are the most likely segment of the working age population to be unemployed, because a Black man with a clean record has a harder time getting a job than a White convict. Black men are the most likely to be or to have been incarcerated, not because they do drugs or commit crimes any more often than anyone else; because they are arrested, prosecuted and convicted at higher rates than anyone else.

Having low rates of stable partnerships in conditions like those isn't a matter of the morals or society of the people living in them, it's an inevitability. If it's an indictment of anyone or anything, it's the intentional and systemic injustice to which they've been subjected. Sniffing nastily about their desire under such circumstances to have sex and children anyway borders on saying that they should just go ahead and die out.  

But some people can live in a country about which all these things are true, with a cultural background like we've got, and believe phenomenally stupid and ahistorical things such as that Black people are destroying society. White society, presumably. Because it's ours. And we built it ourselves. Except for all the cheap slave and permanent underclass labor of the people whose families, community ties, educational traditions and collective wealth were erased as though they never existed, time and time again.

So who was it that destroyed whose society, again? Who funded whose kidnapping from their home countries? Who was it that spent five hundred years making sure that the Black experience in the Americas was systematic rape and murder and helplessness, then a bunch more decades after that making Black men a focal point for the projected fear that they'd turn around and act the same way towards Whites the minute they got the chance?

Who was it that destroyed whose goddam society, so their ignorant descendants could look down their noses at the morality of people whose living memory still includes relatives being lynched at Sunday picnic outings? Who was it that stole whose work for their own profit, so their ignorant descendants could mock those so mistreated and impoverished for their lazy destitution? Whose ignorant descendants try to pretend that 'I've got mine' is an honest expression of blessed gratitude, rather than a transparent load of blinkered, hypocritical, self-serving inhumanity towards their fellows?

Who. Destroyed. Whose. Society? So their descendants could be in a position to piously declare all debts wiped clean. Anyone?

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: A person who's more alarmed by sex between consenting adults than by fraud, kidnapping, murder, rape, pillage, collective punishment, injurious lies and grinding poverty, is never going to convince me they've got the moral chops to be put in charge of so much as an unsupervised grocery till.

Update [2007-11-26 0:19:31 by Natasha Chart]: * I originally credited that link to Jon Swift, though it's actually a link to a post by Ron at Centerface, which I owe Jon Swift a hat tip for.