Marking the 400th anniversary of African enslavement in the Anglo-United
States, 2019 has been a year of bitter remembrance. Commemoration events,
conferences, congressional hearings, news reports and public awareness
initiatives crammed our calendars over the past 12 months with retrospectives
on America’s heritage of racial slavery and its damaging legacies among
present-day African American communities.
Yet among the many themes addressed and debated about the legacy of
slavery, there is one glaring omission: America’s war on black love, a war
whose casualties are most apparent in the peculiar privation of love and
marriage facing black women today.
The majority of black women in America are single by circumstance, not
by choice, and the statistics are jarring. The
2010 U.S. Census revealed, for example, that in 2009, 71 percent of black women
in America were unmarried. Of that group, 71 percent of black women between the
ages of 25 and 29 and 54 percent between the ages of 30 and 34 had never
been married. By comparison, 43 percent of
non-Hispanic white women between the ages of 25 and 29 had never married.
The dilemmas surrounding black love in 21st-century America are all too
often mischaracterized as personal hardships that individuals must struggle to
surmount. But, in fact, over the past 400 years structural forces — racial
slavery and terrorism, government welfare programs and mass incarceration —
have forged the institutional basis for undermining black marriage.
The fracturing of black love and marriage began during the Middle
Passage, when women such as Hagar Blackmore recalled being “stolen away from
her husband and the infant that nursed on her breast.” In 1669, Blackmore described the
unique predicament of marital dissolution that most African women captives
experienced before ever setting foot on American soil.
Once they arrived, our nation’s founding legislative decisions denied
black women protections and advantages granted to white women, curtailing their
options for marriage. In 1643, for example, the Virginia General
Assembly ratified laws that levied taxes on black women’s labor, slave or free.
This African women’s labor tax priced many free black women out of the marriage
market, for if a free black woman was married, her husband was responsible for
paying the tax. It also placed an undue economic burden upon single black women
who had to finance the tax without spousal support.
Over the next two centuries, American slavery thrived on strategic
disruptions of black love, especially after the United States abolished the
foreign slave trade in 1807. The new law had the perverse effect of escalating
an already robust domestic slave trade that even further destabilized black
romantic relationships across slaveholding states.
As a result of the interstate trade, over 30 percent of enslaved couples
experienced dissolution of their first marriages after the Revolutionary War,
and between 1808 and the start of the Civil War in 1861 more than 670,000 people were displaced. Thousands
more couples were torn asunder by temporary or extended work assignments in
disparate locations.
After emancipation, freedmen and women went to great lengths to reunite
with their families. They often secured legal recognition of their marriages in
compliance with government regulations. But it was not always so easy. Love
triangles and plural marriages were among slavery’s unavoidable outcomes, and
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) agents
lacked empathy. “Whenever a Negro appears before me with 2 or 3 wives who have
equal claim upon him,” explained one agent, “I marry him to the woman who has
the greatest number of helpless children who otherwise would become a charge on
the Bureau.”
This process left many black wives neglected and cast aside. But America’s war on black love was not
always about privation. It also degraded the quality and assets of black
romantic relationships. In regions where tenant farming was prevalent, for
instance, white proprietors and Freedmen’s Bureau officials insisted on
negotiating tenancy contracts with husbands — in their eyes, legitimate ‘heads
of households’ tasked with regulating the labor of their wives and children. With the legal authority to control
their wives’ labor contracts, earnings and property, black husbands exercised a
new form of gender sovereignty while black wives experienced a new type of
gender subjugation.
During the earliest decades of freedom from bondage, Southern black
women, confronting the patriarchal intersection of agricultural labor contracts
and marital contracts, recognized immediately how personal liberties they
expected to enjoy as freedwomen were slipping away from them under legal
parameters they had never known in slavery.
Adding to this injury, marriage rights and privileges did little to
protect black widows of Civil War veterans
against federal, state and municipal powers that frequently denied them spousal
pension benefits. And this pattern of denial persisted
throughout and beyond the civil rights movement.
Black couples did not fare much better under government regulations in
the latter 20th century. Personal testimonies from black women and children
whose lives were touched by federal and state welfare programs, especially
during the 1960s, indicate that black love and marriage were adversely affected
by callous “man-in-the-house,” “suitable home” and “substitute
father” policies that played into racist tropes emphasizing
black women’s presumed propensity toward promiscuity, deceitfulness and inept
mothering. Most egregious is the image of the “welfare queen,” a trope that gained currency
during Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign and continued to surface within
policy debates during subsequent campaigns and administrations.
Operating alongside the welfare state, since the 1980s, the carceral
state has implemented America’s most effective strategy for containing
post-slavery black communities and black love. The prison industrial complex,
with its craving for black male inmates, became a principal mechanism of
subjugation, impeding black love and marriage with unmatched methodical
precision. By 2014, incarcerated black men outnumbered incarcerated black women by nearly
490,000.
But we need not look further than the most celebrated symbols of black
love in America today to identify the structural source of venomous attacks on
black women and black relationships. Despite wide public admiration for Barack
and Michelle Obama’s powerful romantic bond and enviable marriage, Michelle
still couldn’t escape Fox News’ pathetic attempt to reduce her to “Obama’s baby mama” or Pamela Ramsey Taylor’s
longing for a “classy, beautiful, dignified first lady” in the likes of Melania
Trump rather than the “Ape in heels” she was “tired of seeing.”
The pervasive image of the welfare queen and other “misogynoir” tropes in the white American
imagination empowered these invective caricatures of a black first lady who had
checked all the ‘respectability’ boxes along her path to marriage and
motherhood. Whether of common or uncommon stature, black women can’t seem to
catch a break. And the consequences are very real: Many black women who desire
a long life of coupledom with children will miss out on bearing offspring with
their spouses as well as the economic benefit of nearly doubling the wealth potential with
two incomes if, as statistics indicate, they are forced to delay marriage until
their early 50s.
During these final days in a charged year of 1619 commemorations, it is
high time we tackle America’s intractable legacy of forbidden black love, not
by reminding black women of the personal strategies they must deploy to remain
competitive in a depleted marriage market, but by confronting the structural
nature of this festering problem through the prism of black love, marriage and
family formation.
Dianne M. Stewart is
an associate professor of religion and African American studies at Emory University
and the author of the forthcoming book, "Black Women, Black Love:
America’s War on African American Marriage" (Seal Press, 2020).Follow
