2011 Conference Program (PDF) - Syracuse University College of Law

destructive side effects of our collective history of slavery. By extension, all American
families bear these destructive effects as the white family is the dominant cultural norm
that models for all others. Scholars have explored some of the immediate and lingering
effects of slavery on the black family; little has been done examining the destructive
effects on the white family and, through the applicable model, on all families.
Reginald Robinson
Dark Secrets: Can Obedience Training and Self Denial By Black Parents Also Explain
The Failure, Anger, Joblessness, Hopelessness, Killing of Their Children That
Destabilizes Families and Communities
Within the West African tradition, black slaves taught their children to know their place,
which was violently enforced during slavery and Jim Crow. Ralph Ellison, writing about
parenting practices during Jim Crow, observed unrepentantly and with a hint of his own
self-deception that mothers particularly beat their children severely. That ugly admixture
of violence and tenderness, or cruelty as love, has plagued the black community perhaps
more than white racism and its violence ever could because in addition to violence, this
“dark secret” depends on humiliation and manipulation, too. Hence, the “dark secret”
saps a child’s life force, often leaving him – in the worse cases – angry, violent, diffident,
distrusting, murderous, and haunted by a victim’s consciousness, and yet ever hopeful
that real love will be visited upon him if a caregiver who literally cannot love him
because, through self-denial and self-deception, she’s never received love either.
Susan Bitensky
Legalized Corporal Punishment of Children in United States
Legalized corporal punishment of children in the United States has antecedents in the
rampant use of legalized corporal punishment on slaves in the antebellum South. One
legacy of this history is that, although modern American children of all races can be
subjected to legalized parental corporal punishment and some of these children also can
be subjected to legalized school corporal punishment, it is Black children who receive the
lion's share of this form of chastisement. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Black parents
have traditionally relied upon corporal punishment more often than White parents;
federal statistics show that public schools paddle Black students twice as much as White
students. Original intent clearly supports such an interpretation: the abolitionists, appalled
by legalized physical violence perpetrated upon slaves, also struggled mightily during the
antebellum era to protect children, Black or White and free or enslaved, from the same
oppression; and, the abolitionists' aspirations and values pervasively influenced the
Thirteenth Amendment's drafters.
Paul Finkelman
Slave Law and the Limitations of Slave Families
Perhaps the most horrible aspect of American slavery was the status of slave families. At
a functional level, slaves married and raised children. But these marriages had no status at
law or within churches. Thus slave marriages existed solely at the sufferance of masters.
Masters were always free to sell slaves and divide families. Spouses could be sold from
each other and from their children. Children could be sent from their parents. For most
slaves family security and stability was a dream, easily punctured by the reality of
separation. Even when families remained intact, familial relations was always subject to
the whims and needs of the master class. This paper, based on statues, cases, legal
theories, and social commentary, will explore the way the South -- from the 1640s to the
1860s -- shaped and undermined black families.
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