Dave Denslow: The sin of slavery did not end with abolition – Gainesville Sun

If you understand relations among races, a social more than biological concept, youre ahead of me. Have you had an experience like this? In western North Carolina at the 50th wedding anniversary of a friend from my grade-school years, the fiddlers vocalist sang that people who thought men descended from monkeys were as dumb as monkeys. Pointing to the Confederate battle flags on my friends pickup, I asked whether his son, at whom I pointed, objected. No, he said. He knows I fly them to honor our heritage.

My friend and his wife, both white, adopted their son, now a successful black entrepreneur, when he was a troubled adolescent. Though parading Confederate flags is their privilege, why do it? I did not ask their son for his view.

The Czechs were right to tear down the Stalin Monument in Prague, and the Taliban were evil to blow up the 1,700-year-old statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. Though slave owners and racists, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson built our nation and their monuments should stand. Robert E. Lee, in contrast, though a unifier after the war, fought as a traitor. We may hesitate, thinking of the Taliban, to destroy statues, but most of his should be moved or given context.

Though slavery is our original sin, the sin did not end with abolition. New evidence for the economic facet of that, as if more were needed, comes in a paper by William Collins and Marianne Wanamaker entitled, Up from Slavery? Painstakingly putting together data from census records from 1880 through 1930, Collins and Wanamaker address the question: Why were blacks in 1930 no higher in the income distribution than in 1880? The painstaking part of their work was linking sons to fathers from census to census, to see how far sons rose or fell from their fathers place in income rank.

They did that because the low income of blacks in 1930 could arise, in a mathematical sense, from starting very low, or from making little progress from father to son. (It was impossible, since women took their husbands names, to link daughters to parents.) Obviously blacks, newly freed, started low. More important, however, was that at all income ranks, sons of black fathers had far less chance of climbing. Even sons of well-off black men were likely to end up below the sons of poor whites.

It was the inheritance of race, not social class, that held back the former slaves and their descendants. The simple reason blacks did not rise before 1930 is racism. Collins and Wanamaker highlight two aspects of that. Though there were public schools for all, racial gaps in school quality widened from 1880 to 1910, and by 1910 the political disenfranchisement of southern blacks was nearly complete.

The statues at the center of controversy today, as is often noted, were erected to celebrate not the Civil War but the Jim Crow eras repression of blacks. Had it not been for that repression, the relative incomes of African Americans would have been as high by 1910 as they are today, a century later.

What about the years after 1930? Though black progress was greater than before, it has still been slow. First, World War II tightened labor markets, helping most those on the bottom rungs of the job ladder. A further boost came from the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the mid-1960s, which improve employment opportunities for blacks, especially men. After being forced to hire African Americans, employers discovered that they worked just as hard and ably as whites.

The Civil Rights Act also had a delayed effect in the 1990s. With improved black family incomes and with hospitals forced to serve minorities, the health of black infants improved dramatically during the post-neonatal period the period from one month to, say, three years. When those infants became adults, their better health, both mental and physical, resulted in higher incomes and less disability.

With that exception, however, there has been little progress since the early 1980s. Minority children have been re-segregated into poorer schools. Soaring imprisonment has disrupted black neighborhoods. And now we see racism coming into the open.

Dave Denslow is a retired University of Florida economics professor.

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Dave Denslow: The sin of slavery did not end with abolition - Gainesville Sun