"The Negro Family: The Case for National Action"

Image via WikipediaWhen I popped open my Google news this morning, I wasn't expecting a story that parallels the warnings of the 1965 Moynihan Report to the modern-day AA "community."  Black folks, and Black women in particular have been duped for DECADES.  The AA "community" truly is the metaphorical Titanic.  Back in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Lyndon Johnson tried to warn the so-called AA "leadership" about all the icebergs surrounding us.  However, in true form, the "leadership" just wanted the band to continue playing as we crashed into iceberg after iceberg as the waters continued to rise.

I encourage everyone who has not read the Moynihan Report in its entirety to do so HERE.  However, I will point out some relevant excerpts.  Please don't write me and point out some of the "coddling" tendencies or racist undertones of the report.  I'm well aware of the historical context under which it was written. This is also NOT a call for the "keep black love alive" hope crew; the time for that has long passed.  Nor is this any indictment of the "ebil white man."   SMH However, regardless of how "we" as AA people arrived at the place we are today, it can not be denied that others foresaw the dangers of what "could" happen and for too many of us it HAS happened---that fact and only that fact is my point of discussion here.

it has to be said that there is a considerable body of evidence to support the conclusion that Negro social structure, in particular the Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.

Pinky : This is even MORE prevalent some 43 years after this report was originally written.



Chapter IV. The Tangle of Pathology

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary -- a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people.
But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.

Here an earlier word of caution should be repeated. These is much evidence that a considerable number of Negro families have managed to break out of the tangle of pathology and to establish themselves as stable, effective units, living according to patterns of American society in general. E. Franklin Frazier has suggested that the middle-class Negro American family is, if anything, more patriarchal and protective of its children than the general run of such families.27 Given equal opportunities, the children of these families will perform as well or better than their white peers. They need no help from anyone, and ask none.

Pinky: For me, this is the money quote.  The "system" was rigged against the Black family, but it was NOT impossible for those who wanted a "normal" structure to "beat" that system. This is why I summarily reject the notion that Black women are to blame for the downfall of the Black family.  Please.

While this phenomenon is not easily measured, one index is that middle-class Negroes have even fewer children than middle-class whites, indicating a desire to conserve the advances they have made and to insure that their children do as well or better. Negro women who marry early to uneducated laborers have more children than white women in the same situation; Negro women who marry at the common age for the middle class to educated men doing technical or professional work have only four-fifths as many children as their white counterparts.

Pinky: An early clue about marrying well and how your choice of a mate WILL affect you and your  children for generations ????

It might be estimated that as much as half of the Negro community falls into the middle class. However, the remaining half is in desperate and deteriorating circumstances. Moreover, because of housing segregation it is immensely difficult for the stable half to escape from the cultural influences of the unstable one. The children of middle-class Negroes often as not must grow up in, or next to the slums, an experience almost unknown to white middle-class children. They are therefore constantly exposed to the pathology of the disturbed group and constantly in danger of being drawn into it. It is for this reason that the propositions put forth in this study may be thought of as having a more or less general application.

Pinky : And he never lied here.  Mercy, this certainly came to pass.  GET OUT of heavily populated AA "ghettos."  GET OUT before the damage can be done to your children.  The damage spreads.

In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only: as things now are, their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the Negro.

Obviously, not every instance of social pathology afflicting the Negro community can be traced to the weakness of family structure. If, for example, organized crime in the Negro community were not largely controlled by whites, there would be more capital accumulation among Negroes, and therefore probably more Negro business enterprises. If it were not for the hostility and fear many whites exhibit toward Negroes, they in turn would be less afflicted by hostility and fear and so on. There is no one Negro community. There is no one Negro problem. There is no one solution. Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.

It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people. Although that will has reasserted itself in our time, it is a resurgence doomed to frustration unless the viability of the Negro family is restored.

The matriarchal pattern of so many Negro families reinforces itself over the generations. This process begins with education. Although the gap appears to be closing at the moment, for a long while, Negro females were better educated than Negro males, and this remains true today for the Negro population as a whole.

Pinky: *sigh*  Different decade, but same story.



Link to article Fractured black families