Many believe that the effects of slavery have passed and that no issues or problems Black Americans face today can be attributed to the crimes of slavery, but nothing can be further from the truth. The truth being, the Black family structure suffered greatly because of separation of mother/father and child or husband and wife or by the tearing down of the pure African bloodline mingled with the blood of past Euro-rapist.

Black Americans have no genealogical blueprint from which to draw a family history or bloodline, no accurate records kept, and no way to effectively trace our roots without hitting a dead-end of red tape or a white family tree. Without these records, we have no way of knowing who our true relatives are in America or Africa.

From generation to generation of separation and rape, for all we know, each Black American has blood-related family in different states that we will never know of. There are parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins that were taken from distant relatives during slavery without a way to track the change on paper.

We have become a nation of illegitimate children not knowing who we are marrying or carrying on relations with. Sad and even scary, but true. For instance, if a child was sold away from its parents in 1812 and moved to a plantation in another state, and that slave bare children while leaving some behind, those children never knew of each other.

Eighty years later, they still do not know of each other and have born children and started families unaware of their blood relatives in another state. Fifty years later, that same family still having no knowledge of the other, one member chooses to move back to the former state, unknowingly, and has relations with their long-lost relative, can have damaging reproductive, biological, or developmental effects on the next generation.

Furthermore, without a source of wealth passed down to either generation, there has always been a lack of in nearly every Black family from the start. Now, we are expected to function as a normal people despite our years of financial setbacks and family dysfunction.

Without considering this truth, no scholar in their right mind or critic of the Black family - or even individual accomplishment - has a factual or cogent argument to stand on but are arguing from a completely fallacious point of view about the achievements of Black America.

The Black family structure (and individual psychological normalness) was damaged severely when children were taken from mothers and husbands from wives and forbidden to reunite. Families were destroyed by practices of slavery, policies of Jim Crow, and biased social, legal and institutional services and governmental amendments. And still today, our families are in ruins because we never really had a solid structure from which to build due to the purposeful dismantling of the Black family by America's so-called founding fathers.

If restitution ever becomes a serious issue, the reasoning should seriously include the travesty that hindered the Black family's ability to succeed in the United States. Without long-term research and an attempt to access and analyze the Black family condition, living blind to this reality leaves out an important part of Black development.

© December 2005 By CR Hamilton