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In reply to the discussion: "Welfare has done far more damage to the Black family than slavery could ever do" [View all]PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,848 posts)a generation after slavery ended, I'm outraged.
The black family was totally intact? No, it wasn't.
A few years ago I finally got around to reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and it was eye-opening on many levels. The only one I'll mention here is (and I may have some of the specifics wrong, for which I apologize)one of the white women talked about how slave women had no attachment to their babies, and at the same time complained bitterly that her own personal servant was mourning a baby that had been taken away from her. Harriet Beecher Stowe correctly captures cluelessness and cognitive dissonance.
For me, the most powerful aspect of that book was that before it was written a decade or so before the end of slavery, it simply did not in any way anticipate that slavery would really come to an end. Unlike every other pre end of slavery novel written since 1965.