Critique of a journal article: The Black Family during Slavery: Addressing Stereotypes Restoring Truth

In the article “ The Black Family during Slavery”, the author Verene Shepherd put into context the black family during slavery and tries to lay to rest some of the myths that still exist to this day about the black man and woman of slavery. In doing this she explore two schools of research into enslave people’s family, these are: the structuralist and class theorist.
The structuralist believes that the system of slavery constraints cultural expressions including family formation. This means that slaves were unable to maintain proper familial structure base on their very way of life, because they were restricted to what their owners would permit.
The class theorist argues that slavery allows those enslave some autonomy in constructing kinship and other forms of culture. It means then that this system allows slave to explore other cultures and choose their own partner and also develop familiar familial structures similar to present day realities.
Shepherd posits that the stereotypes that were created about black families during slavery are to be cleared up because these were not the truth. She then tries to present the points that were not considered by the structuralist. To extricate the points that were presented, shepherd present research evidence that contradicts the structuralist arguments about black family’s and how they exist during slavery. These are: * The existence of black families under slavery despite the stresses that exist in their formation. * They were given some autonomy to choose their partners, although some owners tried to make matches. * There is evidence that nuclear families did exist and that families were not predominantly matrifocal. * That enslave women were not the promiscuous and irresponsible mothers as previously thought, and the notion of ‘stud farms’ was exaggerated and that those enslave had a low birth rate, partly because of enslaved women’s resistant behavior and also the conditions of slavery itself, with a few exception the enslave population fail to grow by natural means in the Caribbean.
She presented evidence that show both the black male and female in a more positive light, and clear up some of the misconceptions that still exist today due to the lack of exposure of the existence of stable black families during slavery in most texts. Shepherd shows that despise the strenuous existence of slavery, men and women had differential gender roles in the family.
Women had more responsibility in child rearing, domestic chores and infant socialization. She presented evidence for and against slaves being good parents. Edward Long postulates that “Blacks generally love their children even though sometimes they treat them with a rigor bordering upon cruelty” while A.C. Carmichael stated “Negroes are like all uneducated people, most unfit managers of children”. Shepherd tried to discard the negative views of these men and approach the subject matter without bias. It must be realize that having a family didn’t by no means protect those enslave from separation, because, either through the sale of one or both parents, that could render the child or children as orphans. This was so because the slaves were still the property of their owners.
Shepherd lamented the non existence of evidence to support the notion that black men were good husbands and fathers, in most contemporary text and uses evident to back her claim. At the same time, however, based on studies done by historians in the United States of America, they have forwarded the reality that many couples married during the bondage of relationships. One study that focused exclusively on slave marriages in North Carolina revealed slavery experienced long that a quarter of all marriages lasted between ten and twenty years and that ten percent of all slave marriages in the state lasted over three decades. Other studies have concluded that most female slaves married only once over the course of an occasionally long life. The overwhelming majority of these marriages, based on the available evidence which is skimpy at best, were happy. In fact, after the war, as the freeing of slaves were being overseen by Union Army Officers, one soldier personally noted in his diary that the marriages among slaves were admirable for their resilience.
None can argue that the way slaves were look at in the past was based on lack of empirical evidence but base on myths. In order to look at it without bias one must look deep beyond these myths and try to understand that slaves fight hard to keep their families together despite the obstacles and challenges face by them on a daily basis just to survive.