Debating the Black Family

The charge was to explore, in the words America," or, in Harvard University socioloof Salmagundi (Winter–Spring 2002) gist Orlando Patterson’s more specific ones, editor Robert Boyers, "the situation of Afro-"the gender, family, and sexual problems of African Americans," at the dawn of the 21st century.

The ultimate issue was the plight of black children, 60 percent of whom grow up in fatherless households. Patterson, whose Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (1999) was assigned reading for the 18 panelists gathered by the journal, acknowledged that he had changed his outlook since a similar roundtable almost a decade earlier. Then he had stressed unemployment and the absence of available jobs as the reason marriage was so unpopular among blacks; but now he suggested the reverse: "Men do not have jobs because they’re not married."

At the root of the contemporary black reluctance to marry or cohabit in a stable union, said Patterson, is "the most profound tragic experience in Afro-American history, namely slavery and its aftermath." Slaves did not even own their children, and fathers were especially irrelevant. Jim Crow and "the nightmare of lynching" carried on the emasculation, he said. The whole experience "was devastating culturally and psychologically." This past, he said, "gave us the [gender] attitudes which largely account for our present problems."

Kendall Thomas, a law professor at Columbia University, protested that "black people of all classes" in America today "continue to be menaced, threatened, subjected to violence of all sorts"—victims of "the ideology and the institutions of white supremacy." He objected to the idea of "normative masculinity and normative heterosexuality" as a solution to "the perceived gender crisis in the black community." Patterson was also faulted for slighting gay and other unions.

But Jacqueline Rivers, executive director of the Boston-based National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, which seeks to combat violence among inner-city youths, pointed out that homosexual unions are not the issue. "Clearly, what we have in the inner city are mostly short-term, heterosexual unions without any affiliated commitment to raising the product of those unions. That is what we have to deal with." Speaking "as a black woman and as a feminist," Jill Nelson said she felt "ambushed" by several panelists’ alleged implication "that black women’s commitment to feminism has to somehow be subverted to save the black man and the family." Nelson, a journalism professor at New York’s City College, also said she was offended by "the whole notion of the so-called ‘nuclear family’.... I think we’ve got to expand and become inclusive about family."

Most unmarried black women struggling to raise their children undoubtedly regret the absence of support from the fathers, observed Kendall Thomas. But "many young black men have not one, not two, not three but as many as four children by four different young African American women. They can only go home to one of them, if any, which leaves the rest of these kids with nothing." He suggested that black churches and community centers should do more to help mothers.

"In most lower-class, working-class neighborhoods" there is a correlation between church attendance and marital stability, noted the Reverend Eugene Rivers, pastor of Azusa Christian Community in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood (and Jacqueline Rivers’s husband). Any practical program to aid the black poor, he said, will require a fresh appreciation of the functional role religion plays in their lives.

"It would be the height of bad faith," commented James Miller, editor of Daedalus, for individuals without religious convictions, such as himself, "to suggest to other people that they should hold a religious belief... because it is sociologically convenient." He wasn’t sure what can be done. "I suppose that if you’re fully committed to the principle of dyadic coupling, you might favor a state policy making it punitively difficult to divorce once you’ve coupled to raise children. But beyond something as drastic as that I don’t know where you’d go."

Patterson, however, maintained that cultural attitudes often can be changed more readily than economic realities. "Over the past 50 years, America changed significantly from the system which we know as Jim Crow. Peoples’ attitudes do change." It’s not enough, he admonished, to just "keep on saying it’s jobs, it’s jobs, it’s jobs."