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programs of that same decade, the hard facts show that blacks' rise out of poverty was more dramatic before any of these government actions got under way.

There was a similar historical trend as regards the rise of blacks into professional, managerial, and other high-level occupations. The number of blacks in white collar occupations, managerial and administrative occupations doubled between 1940 and 1960, and nearly doubled in professional occupations. Meanwhile, the number of blacks who were farm workers in 1960 was only one-fourth of the number who were in 1940.1 5 These favorable trends continued after 1960 but did not originate in the 1960s. As regards the group preferences and quotas— "affirmative action"— which began in the 1970s, they produced litde or no effect on the relative sizes of black and white incomes. The median black household income was 60.9 percent of the median white household income in 1970— and never rose above that, or as high as that, throughout the decade of the 1970s. As of 1980, median black household income was 57.6 percent of median white household income.1 6

The facts are clear but the fallacies persist that it was the civil rights laws, the "war on poverty" programs of the 1960s, and affirmative action which caused the rise of blacks out of poverty and their ascent into middle class occupations.

Slavery

In addition to its own evils during its own time, slavery has generated fallacies that endure into our time, confusing many issues today. The distinguished historian Daniel J. Boorstin said something that was well known to many scholars, but utterly unknown to many among the general public, when he pointed out that, with the mass transportation of Africans in bondage to the Western Hemisphere, "Now for the first time in Western history, the status of slave coincided with a difference of race."1 7

For centuries before, Europeans had enslaved other Europeans, Asians had enslaved other Asians and Africans had enslaved other Africans. Only

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in the modern era was there both the wealth and the technology to organize the mass transportation of people across an ocean, either as slaves or as free immigrants. Nor were Europeans the only ones to transport masses of enslaved human beings from one continent to another. North Africa's Barbary Coast pirates alone captured and enslaved at least a million Europeans from 1500 to 1800, carrying more Europeans into bondage in North Africa than there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and the American colonies from which it was formed.1 8 Moreover, Europeans were still being bought and sold in the slave markets of the Islamic world, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.1 9

Slavery was a virtually universal institution in countries around the world and for thousands of years of recorded history. Indeed, archaeological evidence suggests that human beings learned to enslave other human beings before they learned to write. One of the many fallacies about slavery— that it was based on race— is sustained by the simple but pervasive practice of focussing exclusively on the enslavement of Africans by Europeans, as if this were something unique, rather than part of a much larger worldwide human tragedy. Racism grew out of African slavery, especially in the United States, but slavery preceded racism by thousands of years. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere.

The brutal reality is that vulnerable people were usually taken advantage of wherever it was feasible to take advantage of them, regardless of what race or color they were. The rise of nation states put armies and navies around some people but it was not equally possible to establish nation states in all parts of the world, partly because of geography. Where large populations had no army or navy to protect them, they fell prey to enslavers, whether in Africa, Asia or along unguarded stretches of European coastlines where

Barbary pirates made raids, usually	around the Mediterranean but
sometimes as far away as England	or Iceland.2 0 The enormous

concentration of writings and of the media in general on slavery in the Western Hemisphere, or in the United States in particular, creates a false picture which makes it difficult to understand even the history of slavery in the United States.

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While slavery was readily accepted as a fact of life all around the world for centuries on end, there was never a time when slavery could get that kind of universal acceptance in the United States, founded on a principle of freedom, with which slavery was in such obvious and irreconcilable contradiction. Slavery was under ideological attack from the first draft of the Declaration of Independence2 1 and a number of Northern states banned slavery in the years immediately following independence. Even in the South, the ideology of freedom was not wholly without effect, as tens of thousands of slaves were voluntarily set free after Americans gained their own freedom from England.

Most Southern slaveowners, however, were determined to hold on to their slaves and, for that, some defense was necessary against the ideology of freedom and the widespread criticisms of slavery that were its corollary. Racism became that defense. Such a defense was unnecessary in unfree societies, such as that of Brazil, which imported more slaves than the United States but developed no such virulent levels of racism as that of the American South. Outside Western civilization, no defense of slavery was necessary, as non-Western societies saw nothing wrong with it. Nor was there any serious challenge to slavery in Western civilization prior to the eighteenth century.

Racism became a justification of slavery in a society where it could not be justified otherwise— and centuries of racism did not suddenly vanish with the abolition of the slavery that gave rise to it. But the direction of causation was the direct opposite of what is assumed by those who depict the enslavement of Africans as being a result of racism. Nevertheless, racism became one of the enduring legacies of slavery. How much of it continues to endure and in what strength today is something that can be examined and debated. But many other things that are considered to be legacies of slavery can be tested empirically, rather than being accepted as foregone conclusions.

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The Black Family

Some of the most basic beliefs and assumptions about the black family are demonstrably fallacious. For example, it has been widely believed that black family names were the names of the slave masters who owned particular families. Such beliefs led a number of American blacks, during the 1960s especially, to repudiate those names as a legacy of slavery and give themselves new names— most famously boxing champion Cassius Clay renaming himself Muhammad Ali.

Family names were in fact forbidden to blacks enslaved in the United States,2 2 as family names were forbidden to other people in lowly positions in various other times and places— slaves in China and parts of the Middle East,2 3 for example, and it was 1870 before common people in Japan were authorized to use surnames.2 4 In Western civilization, ordinary people began to have surnames in the Middle Ages.2 5 In many places and times, family names were considered necessary and appropriate only for the elite, who moved in wider circles— both geographically and socially— and whose families' prestige was important to take with them. Slaves in the United States secretly gave themselves surnames in order to maintain a sense of family but they did not use those surnames around whites. Years after emancipation, blacks born during the era of slavery remained reluctant to tell white people their full names.2 6

The "slave names" fallacy is false not only because whites did not give slaves surnames but also because the names that blacks gave themselves were not simply the names of whoever owned them. During the era of slavery, it was common to choose other names. Otherwise, if all the families belonging to a given slave owner took his name, that would defeat the purpose of creating separate family identities. Ironically, when some blacks in the twentieth century began repudiating what they called "slave names," they often took Arabic names, even though Arabs over the centuries had enslaved more Africans than Europeans had.2 7

A fallacy with more substantial implications is that the current fatherless families so prevalent among contemporary blacks are a "legacy of slavery," where families were not recognized. As with other social problems

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attributed to a "legacy of slavery," this ignores the fact that the problem has become much worse among generations of blacks far removed from slavery than among generations closer to the era of slavery. Most black children were raised in two-parent homes, even under slavery, and for generations thereafter.2 8 Freed blacks married, and marriage rates among blacks were slightly higher than among whites in the early twentieth century.2 9 Blacks also had slighdy higher rates of labor force participation than whites in every census from 1890 to 1950.3 0

While 31 percent of black children were born to unmarried women in the early 1930s, that proportion rose to 77 percent by the early 1990s.3 1 If unwed childbirth was "a legacy of slavery," why was it so much less common among blacks who were two generations closer to the era of slavery? One sign of the breakdown of the nuclear family among blacks was that, by 1993, more than a million black children were being raised by their grandparents, about two-thirds as many as among whites, even though there are several times as many whites as blacks in the population of the United States.3 2

When tragic retrogressions in all these respects became painfully apparent in the second half of the twentieth century, a "legacy of slavery" became a false explanation widely used, thereby avoiding confronting contemporary factors in contemporary problems.

These retrogressions were not only dramatic in themselves, they had major impacts on other important individual and social results. For example, while most black children were still being raised in two-parent families as late as 1970, only one third were by 1995.3 3 Moreover, much social pathology is highly correlated with the absence of a father, both among blacks and whites, but the magnitude of the problem is greater among blacks because fathers are missing more often in black families. While, in the late twentieth century, an absolute majority of those black families with no husband present lived in poverty, more than four-fifths of black husband-wife families did not.3 4 From 1994 on into the twenty-first century, the poverty rate among black husband-wife families was below 10 percent.3 5

It is obviously not simply the act of getting married which drastically reduces the poverty rate among blacks, or among other groups, but the