While appearing on American Family Radio’s Today’s Issues with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, right-wing activist and onetime Republican congressional candidate Star Parker endorsed the claim that Black families were better off under slavery. She was discussing a pledge signed by presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum written by The Family Leader which “suggested that black children born into slavery were better off in terms of family life than African-American kids born today.” Parker, who recently argued that “too many Blacks do not want to be free,” said that under slavery “black family life, in the vulnerable state that it was, some could say more healthy than it is today,” even though black people were considered property and it was illegal for slaves to marry.
Parker: Now we don’t have clear data getting to your question about what black family life looked like during slavery as what the attacks are now even against people like Michele Bachmann who signed on to a document that said the black family was more intact than it is today. But we do know the reason we don’t have clear data of course is because only some data made it through the civil war.
Wildmon: What about prior to civil rights?
Parker: Well I’m going back to this point in history that they went back to, which was slavery, during slavery. Because black family life, in the vulnerable state that it was, some could say was more healthy than it is today.
