TOPIC:

How Do We Return To The Practice Of The African Proverb: “It Takes A Village To Raise A Child”?

OVERVIEW:

This passage is taken from the book “Brainwashed” Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority by Tom Burrell

Poverty remains one of the most treacherous barriers to the development of strong black families.  Critics will counter that other ethnic groups were subjected to forms of slavery and tyranny, and yet still managed to excel socially and maintain solid family structures. But as Harvard University professor Orlando Patterson noted in Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries, the “ghetto-ization” and poverty of non-African immigrants of the past century, had “not resulted in men’s massive abandonment of their wives and children.” Travel to poor countries that did not witness America’s slavery holocaust and, yes, you will find people living in the kind of squalor that no longer exists in this nation. However, you are also likely to find family units that are more intact than those families that descended from the slave era.

                Without weighing African American generational poverty within the context of a society based on generational wealth and privilege, the observations of other non-white family structures could, in fact, serve as proof that blacks are uniquely flawed. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that other ethnic groups who immigrated to this country came with their cultural and familial norms intact and were not included in the devious 17th-century plan to embed inferiority into an entire people’s psyche.

                Secondly, we must take into account the generational black poverty rate. It swelled after Emancipation and, to this day, hasn’t significantly changed since the year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It’s extremely difficult not having money in a society dictated by materialism.

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