The following quote is from Rituals of Blood. "It was not the intention of Preston and his colleagues to deny or underplay the role of changing socioeconomic forces in the evolving patterns of Afro-American gender and familial relations. Indeed, they make it clear that the "enormous burden of mortality clearly played havoc with the stability of black marriages" at the turn of the century and that it was precisely because the "true incidence" of widowhood was so "extraordinarily high...that the label was overused in other situations." Their point, rather, is that "underestimating past marital instability exaggerates the amount of observed change" and, at the same time, downplays the role of cultural factors in explaining Afro-American life, both those derived from Africa and those that emerged in Afro-Americans' forced adaptation to the slave environment" (Patterson, pg. 47)
When viewed in the context of genocide studies, this evidence flies in the face of Lemkin and the background paper written by J. M. Cates entitled, "United States Government on the Civil Rights Congress Publication "We Charge Genocide." Cates asserted that "We Charge Genocide" was communist propaganda and held no merit. The strength of his argument, supported by Lemkin was that lynching and race riots were incidents of violence incited against individuals and were sporadic occurrences of violence that were disconnected and not a part of any unified effort to exterminate the Afro-Americans who were being targeted. The main distinction Lemkin made between the attacks against Afro-Americans and the attacks on the Jews during the Holocaust was that these incidences were homicides against individuals, not premeditated crimes against the entire group. The quote above seems to indicate the opposing view. If the genocidal killings disrupted the family unit in a wide-spread and long-lasting way, these killings cannot be considered sporadic events that only affect the individuals who were murdered. Another idea that is loosely related but extremely relevant is the separation of children, particularly teen age boys from their families as an indicator of genocide. In Lemkin's autobiographical writings, he explained that "During four hundred years of control over the Christian countries in the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire the Turks used to take away every year a certain number of teen age boys from Christian communities ... My Greek friends told me that Greece is now a nation of seven million, instead of having a population of 16 million, only because the children were taken away for four hundred years. Such were the frightful consequences of this genocidal technique." Lemkin goes on to discuss the practice under the Russian Tzar of enlisting Jewish boys into military service for twenty five years and the devastating effects of the loss to "their wretched people." The parallel between these events in history and the plight of Afro-American males in the U.S. might be missed if we are permitted to fall back on our usual ignorance of history and fall into the trap of blaming the victim by shrugging our shoulders and saying, "well it's their fault if they can't get their acts together and stay off the streets." The most cursory glance at the history of incarceration in the post-reconstruction era in order to exploit Afro-American male labor for use in the steel and coal mines as described by Douglas A. Blackmon in "Slavery by Another Name" revels that no human being chooses a life-cycle of violence when they truly believe there is a better alternative available to them.
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