Cliven Bundy Slavery
April 24, 2014 by staff
Cliven Bundy Slavery, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Cliven Bundy, the rancher who has spent the past few weeks telling us the many things he claims to know about American freedom, said the other day, at a press conference in Bunkerville, Nevada. The event “drew one reporter and one photographer,” Adam Nagourney, of the Times, reported, “so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.” The supporters were there because they liked the way that Bundy drove agents from the Bureau of Land Management, who had tried to enforce a court order to seize his cattle, off public property. And here are some of those views on race, inspired, he said, by the sight of a public-housing project in Nevada, where “there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do”:
They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.
One of the most delusional parts of Bundy’s musing was the phrase “having a family life.” A great moral crime of slavery was depriving people of family. There was family love, because that can’t be defeated, but it was often violated. Slaves were denied the sovereignty of family ties. Your children might be sold, and you’d never see them again. You might be raped, and not choose who the father of your children would be. Sexual violence had a broad brutality. The pattern of your life was set by the rhythm of someone else’s family—a death that broke up an estate or a marriage that turned your daughter into someone else’s wedding gift. And the great moral delusion of slave owners was that these transactions and acts of brutality built one big family household, simply by calling an old slave Auntie or Uncle.
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