Natalie's Narrative

What does U.S. slavery have to do with white evangelicals and political rhetoric?

This post is part of a paper I'm sharing as a result of disturbing, racially-coded rhetoric used by Republican presidential hopefuls.

Although many politicians uphold family values as a cure to social problems and see the decline of family as a moral failure, such discourse privileges the European-American hegemonic definition of family.  I've previously defined hegemony, which is a dominant group enforcing its norms against others.

The traditional ideal of family, which many politicians want to impose, is a sole heterosexual married couple and their biological children.  Ideally, the husband is the main wage-earner, who earns enough to allow his wife to at least dedicate more time to childrearing, even if she also works. 

Welfare policy and its surrounding rhetoric rely on the above definition of family.  Traditional "family values" discourse is racialized, even without explicitly using racist language.

The white hegemonic notion of family has been simultaneously held from, used, and imposed onto black families both throughout history and today.  This type of family is held out as a cure-all for social problems, and many African-Americans’ failure to conform is viewed by white religious and political conservatives as a moral shortcoming.

Slavery and the historical development of welfare have served up racially-charged, damaging rhetoric.  Slavery began the systematic degradation of black families and the distortion of many whites' perceptions of blacks.

The disruptions and distortions began as soon as European-Americans brought African slaves to U.S. soil.  Early historians already blamed failure to form families on slaves' alleged character deficiencies.¹ 

(Note there is no singular definition of the antebellum slave family.  Whites’ systematic denigration of slave families should not detract from complex family structures in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and other West African countries, commonly exploited by slave traders.  West African family models were communal and child-centered, and many did not look like "traditional" white U.S. families.)

Slaves were thrown into a system with no concern for family relationships, a system rife with double standards.  Family formation was allowed when convenient for slaveowners, but prohibited when considered a threat. 

The biological tie of a slave mother and slave father to their child was critical in conferring slave status, yet when white male slaveowners had children with slaves, this familial tie was downplayed.  No matter who fathered the child, she would be a slave if born to a slave mother.  To preserve white supremacy, slaveowners reinforced the socially-constructed racial caste system by emphasizing a clear demarcation between black and white.

In the antebellum South, some slaveowners encouraged marriage to ensure loyalty, while also portraying themselves as moral, benevolent masters.  But, a marriage could be dissolved at the master’s whim, or by a sale of one or both spouses.  In fact, a slaveowner’s desire to have his women slaves provide slave offspring would result in forcing women to live with various men at different times.  Monogamy—much less marriage—was not many slaveowners’ concern.  

Another systematic denigration is that black women were left out of the definition of a “good mother.”  Slave mothers were continually forced to perform backbreaking labor, so the era's dominant mindset, which emphasized women as nurturing, stay-at-home mothers, rendered slave mothers aberrant.²  

Slaveowners maintained racially-based slavery, but at a cost: relatives were ripped apart, and slaves were often prohibited from establishing families.  “Family” was an empty concept, allowed and simultaneously prohibited in paradoxical ways when convenient for whites. 

What do the rhetoric and hypocrisy surrounding slave marriage and family have to do with white evangelicals today?  This history informs the current "family values" rhetoric.  In my next post, I'll share the political rhetoric that reared its ugly head once welfare recipients moved largely from "deserving" white widows, veterans, and Depression-era families with temporary setbacks, to predominantly single mothers of color.  

A discussion of this rhetoric can't be done unless we acknowledge the hypocrisy (of many "devout Christian" slaveowners) and systematic degradation of black families as a result of slavery.  

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¹ Damian Alan Pargas, Boundaries and Opportunities: Comparing Slave Family Formation in the Antebellum South, 33 Journal of Family History 316-345, 316 (2008). 

² Adrien Katherine Wing, Laura Weselmann, Transcending Traditional Notions of Mothering: The Need for Critical Race Feminist Praxis, 3 J. Gender Race & Just. 257, 273 (1999).

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White evangelicals, welfare, and racially-coded rhetoric

With Newt Gingrich's recent win in the South Carolina Republican primary, many are discussing the role family-focused evangelicals played in the victory of a candidate who has been married three times and has reportedly committed adultery.  Evangelicals comprised two-thirds of primary voters, and Gingrich won 44% of their votes.  At least 98% of these voters were white.  

Gingrich ran an ad in South Carolina, the first Southern state to hold a primary this season, featuring his exchange with debate moderator Juan Williams.  Williams had asked about Gingrich's repeated references to President Obama as the "food stamp president."  Gingrich has also made disparaging statements about poor children, remarking they have no work ethic.

Critics call this type of rhetoric racially coded:

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that the new racism entails individuals saying and doing things that perpetuate racial stereotypes and inequalities, but they do so in such a way that the offender is able to deny being explicitly racist.  One of the many types of new racist strategies Bonilla-Silva highlights is the use of racially charged code speak, or using indirect racial rhetoric and semantic moves to express an ideology that serves to reinforce white dominance over minorities.

I wrote a paper last semester that explored racially-coded language in "family values" and welfare-reform discourse, much of which is perpetuated by another Republican presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum.  

Santorum built his political career on promoting "family values" as the answer to social ills.  To move people off welfare, government must encourage the formation of families headed by heterosexual married couples.  Santorum authored the 1996 welfare reform act, which created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ("TANF"), limited how long participants could rely on TANF, and capped funding.  The act also restricted food stamp eligibility.

Many conservative politicians and talking heads use coded "family values" rhetoric to rail against black low-income families (especially mothers, i.e. Reagan's infamous "welfare queens") and rally the white voting troops.  

Gingrich may owe his newfound success to dubbing Obama the food stamp president, as many white conservatives see the rise in welfare recipients as a moral failure and a threat to society.  If we would "get back" to the work ethic and family values on which our country was founded, we would see less poor, inner-city (read: black) families rely on government aid.

In light of GOP presidential candidates' disturbing racist rhetoric, and especially given many evangelicals' response to this rhetoric, I will share parts of my paper over the next few weeks.  

Much ink has been spilled recently over the African-American family (see Ralph Richard Banks' controversial book Is Marriage for White People?).  But I do not dare speak to or at black U.S. Americans who earn lower incomes or who are not in a "traditional" two-parent family.  

Rather, I'm interested in how the political discourse on family values and welfare has ugly undertones, often supported by white evangelicals.  Fred Clark at Slacktivist pointed out that Richard Land, "ethics czar" of the Southern Baptist Convention, defended Gingrich, accusing the NAACP of being too sensitive. Land even uttered the phrase “off the liberal plantation and out of the liberal barrio.” 

But aside from racially-coded language, the statistics, among all races, are intriguing.  Over the last 50 years, the number of married adults in the U.S. decreased by 20%.¹  Thirty-two percent of black adults are married, compared to 56% of whites.  Birth statistics tell the same story: the number of births to unmarried women in the U.S. rose from 5% in 1960 to 41% in 2008.  Among white mothers, 29% were unmarried in 2008, while 72% of black mothers and 53% of Hispanic-American mothers were single.  

Conservatives are not exaggerating numbers to incite panic about crumbling "family values."  But, using racially-coded language and blaming only people of color are too often hallmarks of some political and religious leaders' discourse.  This is why I'm interested in pulling back the curtain on such rhetoric.

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¹All statistics are from the Pew Research Center, Pew Social & Demographic Trends, The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families, November 18, 2010.  

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Inerrancy is weak

The next section in Chapter 7 of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible encourages an understanding of various meanings the written word can take on, which biblicists often fail to appreciate.  As a result, biblicists find themselves in some tough spots.   

A written phrase can simply make a descriptive statement, or it can evoke commands, promises, warnings, criticism, surprise, inspiration, insults, etc.  

Smith points out "the use of speech to communicate is not a simple matter of speakers intending to make clear propositional statements that, when properly interpreted, reproduce the original propositional meaning in the minds of those receiving the statements." When translating written utterances into different contexts, "significant problems of meaning arise."

Smith continues: "the meanings of terms such as 'error,' 'mistaken,' 'inaccurate,' and 'fallible' become not entirely straightforward when speech acts are understood in this way."  In imposing these categories (which I argue are very modern Western notions), what does it mean for warnings, expressions of surprise, insults, appeals, promises, expressions of honor, etc., to be in error?  Smith writes:

Given the richness of the variety of kinds of speech acts that appear to be at work in the Bible, therefore, it seems quite inadequate to try to describe or defend scripture’s truthfulness, reliability, authority, and whatever else we might say on its behalf with single, technical terms like “inerrancy.” That particular term—a favorite of many evangelicals—tends to zero in on matters of accuracy in reporting on facts and events as a matter of correspondence between propositions and the real states to which those propositions refer. But that term tends not to capture the multitude of other ways in which the locutions of texts and their illocutionary and perlocutionary acts may or may not be reliable, authoritative, compelling, powerful, inviting, and so on.

We don't parse the accuracy of a comforting word given during a time of grief - and inerrancy as applied to the Bible works the same way:

Evangelical defenders of biblical inerrancy are used to the typical charge by more liberal critics that “inerrancy” is too strong, extreme, or demanding of a concept to accurately describe what the Bible is. What I am suggesting here is quite the opposite. “Inerrancy” is far too limited, narrow, restricted, flat, and weak a term to represent the many virtues of the Bible that are necessary to recognize, affirm, and commend the variety of speech acts performed in scripture.

Genesis 1-2 is an excellent example.  What was the intended effect of the written words of these chapters?  Was it to convey to the reader that the Yahweh God created a good world with his power?  Or was it to communicate a literal scientific account about the precise method and time period of the creation of the world?  Was it to banish rival pagan narratives of the earth's origins?  Or, anachronistically, was it to motivate followers of the Yahweh God to mobilize against teaching evolution in schools?  

To impose our categories of literalism and factual accuracy onto a rich, ancient text disrespects the intended effect of Scripture's written words.  Inerrancy forces the Bible to look like a collection of "error-free propositions with which to construct indubitably true systematic theologies[.]"  But the living God of the Bible "actively promises, confronts, beckons, comforts, invites, commands, explains, encourages," and more.  

I don't want the flat and weak version of Scripture that inerrancy hands us.  I want the complicated, perplexing, diverse, active, and living Scripture that isn't forced into categories such as "factually-correct," "error-free," or "literal."

The next section in Chapter 7 that I plan to post about is a discussion of biblical authority, which inerrantists usually bring up in response to the idea that the Bible was never intended to be viewed as factually error-free.

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