It's kinda hard living as the O-Mayg-U-S
But, somehow, someway
I keep writing funky, dope blogs like every single day.
Well..not EVERY day. But you know what I mean.
I was recently accused of being a racist. If you really want to know how this came to be, you can see it here. But in summation:
I regularly post on the NBA boards at FOX sports. At one point we started talking politics (I know, I know...talking politics on a sports website is just a disaster waiting to happen) and someone accused Barack Obama of being racist due to his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I disagreed and added what I thought was an offhand comment about Wright not being completely off-base. This kick-started a campaign by two other posters who said that by agreeing with Wright in this matter that I must also be racist. This completely confused me and we went back and forth for quite a while until I realized that there had been a miscommunication almost from the get go. The person who had initially mentioned Jeremiah Wright claimed that the reverend had said that White people attempted to commit genocide against Black people in this United States. When I responded with the "he's not completely off-base" comment, what I had in mind was what Wright actually said, which was the United States government had attempted to commit genocide against Black people in the U.S., with the "not off-base" part being a reference to the Tuskegee Experiments.
Whether or not that actually got cleared up is not entirely clear to me. It's possible that the two other posters might still think that I am racist. I don't find that to be a particularly big deal. I know that I'm not. Or at least I don't think that I am; it's probably better to ask people who know me to get a more accurate answer. But that conversation has caused me to start thinking...what exactly is racism?
At one point during the debate at FOX sports, I tried to explain the difference between individual racism and socialized racism, which seemed to fall on deaf ears. That frustrated me but I am not at all surprised. In modern day America, I think we've done a fairly decent job of vilifying the racism that is part of the nation's historical make up. No sane person today thinks that slavery or the decimation of the Native American nations were good things. Most people realize that the government-sanctioned treatment of non-White (and specifically Black) people as recently as the middle of the 20th century was appalling. Today, it's pretty hard to find a group of people who are more commonly reviled than the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis. These are good things.
However...
We have done ourselves a disservice here because we've gotten to the point where the above situations are now how we define racism, completely leaving out so many other things that need to be addressed. On FOX sports, I think I had a pretty simple way of showcasing what institutionalized racism is. When someone asked me to explain it, I wrote the following:
But, somehow, someway
I keep writing funky, dope blogs like every single day.
Well..not EVERY day. But you know what I mean.
I was recently accused of being a racist. If you really want to know how this came to be, you can see it here. But in summation:
I regularly post on the NBA boards at FOX sports. At one point we started talking politics (I know, I know...talking politics on a sports website is just a disaster waiting to happen) and someone accused Barack Obama of being racist due to his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I disagreed and added what I thought was an offhand comment about Wright not being completely off-base. This kick-started a campaign by two other posters who said that by agreeing with Wright in this matter that I must also be racist. This completely confused me and we went back and forth for quite a while until I realized that there had been a miscommunication almost from the get go. The person who had initially mentioned Jeremiah Wright claimed that the reverend had said that White people attempted to commit genocide against Black people in this United States. When I responded with the "he's not completely off-base" comment, what I had in mind was what Wright actually said, which was the United States government had attempted to commit genocide against Black people in the U.S., with the "not off-base" part being a reference to the Tuskegee Experiments.
Whether or not that actually got cleared up is not entirely clear to me. It's possible that the two other posters might still think that I am racist. I don't find that to be a particularly big deal. I know that I'm not. Or at least I don't think that I am; it's probably better to ask people who know me to get a more accurate answer. But that conversation has caused me to start thinking...what exactly is racism?
At one point during the debate at FOX sports, I tried to explain the difference between individual racism and socialized racism, which seemed to fall on deaf ears. That frustrated me but I am not at all surprised. In modern day America, I think we've done a fairly decent job of vilifying the racism that is part of the nation's historical make up. No sane person today thinks that slavery or the decimation of the Native American nations were good things. Most people realize that the government-sanctioned treatment of non-White (and specifically Black) people as recently as the middle of the 20th century was appalling. Today, it's pretty hard to find a group of people who are more commonly reviled than the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis. These are good things.
However...
We have done ourselves a disservice here because we've gotten to the point where the above situations are now how we define racism, completely leaving out so many other things that need to be addressed. On FOX sports, I think I had a pretty simple way of showcasing what institutionalized racism is. When someone asked me to explain it, I wrote the following:
Do you believe that all races in the United States are today treated equally? Does the average Black child born in America today have the exact same chances of failure or success as the average White child? If your answer to either of those questions is "no" then you have already acknowledged what institutional racism is.
If your answer to either of those questions is "yes," then let's discuss this: according to the Human Rights Watch, Black people make up 12.32% of the United States population. Yet they make up 43.91% of the population that is in prison. If all races are treated equally, then why is there such an enormous discrepancy in those two numbers? There are only two possible explanations. One, Black people are inherently more likely to commit crimes. Two, different races are not treated the same. There are no other possible reasons. You tell me which one is the answer.
When you look at it that way it becomes a bit clearer why socialized racism isn't discussed as much. Protesting individual racism is easy. Anyone who discriminates against someone else because of his or her skin color or ethnic background is wrong. That is simple and straightforward. As individuals we can examine our own actions, and if we know that we don't do that, then we can feel good about ourselves. But how do you solve a problem that is beyond what you as an individual can control? The answer, obviously, is that we cannot. And in a society in which we have been conditioned into thinking of racism as being just about an individual's choice, it is difficult to get people to pursue a line of thinking that points to a broader picture that is outside the realm of control of any one person, or even multiple people.
That brings me to the big question: what are we supposed to do about this? Is it an unsolvable problem? I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, it IS possible for people of various ethnic backgrounds to coexist without the racial tension prevalent throughout the US. I used to work with someone who grew up in Puerto Rico before moving to the mainland. I remember him telling me how shocked he was to observe the casual racism he encountered here. He told me that there was nothing of that sort in Puerto Rico. According to him, because there is no historical dominance of one ethnic group over the others, as there is in the United States, people don’t look at one another as different races. They simply see each other as Puerto Ricans. Now, I’ve never even visited Puerto Rico, much less held residence there, so I have no idea how realistically he portrayed his island; nevertheless, until someone can definitively prove that this is not the case, I will hold on to hope.
However, it is what is in the other hand that causes my pessimism. While I believe in the viability of harmonious ethnic coexistence, I question how possible it is in the United States. When my friend described his shock at observing racism for the first time, the sad thing is that what he described were things that I had come to accept as matters of fact. There are multiple reasons that cause me to question if things will ever really change:
- The belief that nothing needs to change. It is very much tied in to the lack of understanding what institutional racism is. I tend to hear this from White people more than anyone else. The general rationale behind it goes along the lines of, “Minorities are better off than they were 40 years ago. They get special consideration for colleges and jobs. Why do they still complain?”
- The undiscussed reality of the situation: in order for people who have been disenfranchised to ever gain equal footing in a society, the group that has served as the ruling class will have to give up some of its power/status. It is unlikely that that will be done willingly.
- The transformation of EVERYTHING into a racial issue. I most often hear this from Black people and it is championed by guys like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Anything that can be even remotely tied into race is. A recent example of this is the whole unnecessary uproar about the Vogue cover that featured LeBron James and Giselle.
- The influx of new racism. Historically, racism in the United States has been tied into the relationship between White Americans and Black Americans because that allows us to examine the most egregious examples. But more recently, more varied examples have reared up due to the increasing mixture of different races and ethnicities. The 9/11 attacks fueled a sentiment against anyone from the Middle East or even India. Additionally, as more and more people immigrate to the US from other countries, they bring with them their own prejudices. As I have witnessed first hand, someone who grew up in Nigeria, surrounded by other Nigerians, is much more likely to be suspicious of people “not like them” than someone like me who, at various times in my life, has lived in White neighborhoods, African-American neighborhoods and Mexican-American neighborhoods.
The interesting thing about this one is that it goes beyond people dividing themselves by color. Instead the boundaries are determined by common heritage. There is a member of my extended family who has said that she cannot support Obama. Her reason? She doesn't think that the first president of the United States who is of recent African decent should be from Kenya, he should be from Nigeria. I don't know how seriously she means that but the fact that she even thought of it is interesting. It doesn't stop there, however. The most disparaging remarks I’ve heard about African-Americans haven’t come from White people, they’ve come from African immigrants. Of course, the vice versa is also true. That isn’t a particularly new phenomenon in American history. Early British-Americans were prejudiced against Irish-Americans who in turn were prejudiced against Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc. I guess differences aren’t that big a deal as long a there is another group that can commonly be hated.
So what does this all mean? In 1899, British writer Rudyard Kipling penned his poem, "The White Man's Burden." Almost since its first publication, readers have debated as to whether Kipling intended this poem to be literal or if it were meant to be satirical in nature, a la Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." In summary, Kipling's poem is an exhortation of cultural imperialism and explains to the White race that it has an obligation to rule over all other races and help them evolve from their barbaric ways. You probably won't find too many people today who will publicly express that same viewpoint. However, it does bring up an interesting question: do certain races have certain obligations?
There is one thing that I am 100% certain of, and that is that racial reconciliation will NEVER happen without open communication. Some people don't want to talk about it because they feel that we are past that. Other people are all too willing to talk about it but only in terms of how they can benefit. Both of those are wrong. Racism still exists. Most Black people in the United States could lay testament to that. Here's my question though: is it wrong for a White person to not see that? Should Black people expect White people to see racism just because we do? Is that fair?
I don't know if it is. I don't know if it is fair for a population to be expected to see slights that are never used against them. I don't know if it is fair for White people to be expected to apologize for atrocities that were committed by their forefathers or by their less intelligent brethren. I know that I don't want to have to always apologize for other Black people who suffer from "nigga syndrome." So I wonder if that is the Black Man's Burden. Do Black people have an obligation to teach and explain what racism in the modern day is? And if so, how should that be accomplished? Personally, I'm sick and tired of seeing protests. They have their place but when every single thing that is perceived as a slight results in Jackson or Sharpton jumping on a soapbox, exactly how much effect can protests be expected to have when it comes to racial reconciliation? The Jena Six? Protest worthy. LeBron James on a magazine cover? Not so much. Again, racial reconciliation will not happen without frank and open discussion and such discussion will not and cannot happen with protests occurring over every little slight.
--
The interesting thing about the original accusation that kick started this whole line of thinking is that the timing of it was juxtaposed next to an annual hip hop event in Austin, B-Boy City. While I wasn't able to attend all the events that I wanted to, I did manage to hang out with some b-boys during a practice session as well as attend what was supposed to be an emcee battle and ended up just being a bunch of hip hop fans hanging out.
Something that struck me about these moments was the diversity in the ethnic makeup of the people who were there. There were literally people there from every imaginable ethnicity. But here's what I noticed even more: nobody talked about it. Not once did I hear anyone mention race or ethnicity. And the reason it was never mentioned is because nobody cared. In the world of underground hip hop there is only one thing that ever matters: skills. If you have skills then you will earn respect and that's it. No one care about what color you are, what part of the world gave birth to your ancestors, how much money you have or anything of the sort. You earn respect by proving that you belong. And you prove that you belong by demonstrating your talent--end of story. What a fascinating concept.
One of my favorites songs is "If You Can't Say Love" by the Visionaries. During his verse, LMNO drops this line:
"Embrace grace, cut the chase, know our place:
In a world of anger with piles of waste
We're some do-gooders with the filteration
We're Mexican, Islander, Euro, African, Asian
Celebrate Creator before creation
Division we're erasing."
He's speaking specifically about his crew, which is a group of six guys with a multi-ethnic background.
(L-R: Lord Zen, Dannu, 2Mex, Key Kool, Rhettmatic, LMNO)
However, every time I hear those words, I can't help but think how
much better off we ALL would be if we took heed of them.
One day we all will be able to say "love."
7 comments:
Word.
Racism is going to be around for a long, long time. In fact, I'm fairly certain it'll never go away..the sins of the father will always come back to plague the children
...and the moral to the story is...stop responding to idiots via the internet!
I think that in America racism will never go away...But it will died down...hopefully dying out. Im glad u sent me this link. Its something to think about. I especially like the part about hip hop...U know what Mag...Most ppl fail to realize back when hip hop started thats how it was...It was mixed...Because most of the ppl that were into hip hop came from punk rock and disco. So hip hop has always had white and hispanic dancers and graf artist djs too...Its just that the MCees were mostly BLACK...thats why most ppl identify HIP HOP with black ppl. But its a good look for hip hop on a positive note...But they will still focus on the negatives. STAY FOCUSED
Your blog inspired me to leave my general thoughts on the black community in general. I don't mean to be long winded but...
I also put this on my 360 page and its basically an excerpt from my Master's Thesis.
First some basic truths on the subject of class, the black family and mobility.
1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city. By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children.
Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American. So why do so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years.
That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty. To go back to the political and social moment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is to return to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty had hardened into fixed orthodoxies—before phrases like “blaming the victim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of-wedlock childbearing” (the term at the time was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current.
While solving the black poverty problem seemed an immense political challenge, as a conceptual matter it didn’t seem like rocket science. Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had. Conditions for testing that proposition looked good. Between the 1954 Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal racism had been dismantled. And the economy was humming along; in the first five years of the sixties, the economy generated 7 million jobs. Yet those most familiar with what was called “the Negro problem” were getting nervous.
About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-sixties, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the fifties, was sputtering to a halt. More blacks were out of work in 1964 than in 1954. Most alarming, after rioting in Harlem and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1964, the problems of the northern ghettos suddenly seemed more intractable than those of the George Wallace South. Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.”
In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order. Convinced that “the Negro revolution . . . , a movement for equality as well as for liberty,” was now at risk, Moynihan wanted to make several arguments in his report. The first was empirical and would quickly become indisputable: single-parent families were on the rise in the ghetto. But other points were more speculative and sparked a partisan dispute that has lasted to this day. Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination.
Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Moynihan’s argument defied conventional social-science wisdom. As he wrote later, “The work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what ‘everyone knew’: that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so.” But Moynihan went much further than merely overthrowing familiar explanations about the cause of poverty. He also described, through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior. Moynihan may have borrowed the term “pathology” from Kenneth Clark’s The Dark Ghetto, also published that year.
But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called “the wild Irish slums”—he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot—the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to “the basic socializing unit” of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their “matriarchal” family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and “alienated.” More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality.
Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.” Astonishingly, even for that surprising time, the Johnson administration agreed. Prompted by Moynihan’s still-unpublished study, Johnson delivered a speech at the Howard University commencement that called for “the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.” The president began his speech with the era’s conventional civil rights language, condemning inequality and calling for more funding of medical care, training, and education for Negroes (not my word here, I am paraphrasing the speaker). But he also broke into new territory, analyzing the family problem with what strikes the contemporary ear as shocking candor. He announced: “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” He described “the breakdown of the Negro family structure,” which he said was “the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.” “When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged,” Johnson continued. “When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled.” Johnson was to call this his “greatest civil rights speech,” but he was just about the only one to see it that way. By that summer, the Moynihan report that was its inspiration was under attack from all sides.
Civil servants in the “permanent government” at Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and at the Children’s Bureau muttered about the report’s “subtle racism.” Academics picked apart its statistics. Black leaders like Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) director Floyd McKissick scolded that, rather than the family, "it’s the damn system that needs changing.” In part, the hostility was an accident of timing. Just days after the report was leaked to Newsweek in early August, L.A.’s Watts ghetto exploded. The televised images of the South Central Los Angeles rioters burning down their own neighborhood collided in the public mind with the contents of the report. Some concluded that the “tangle of pathology” was the administration’s explanation for urban riots, a view quite at odds with civil rights leaders’ determination to portray the violence as an outpouring of black despair over white injustice. Moreover, given the fresh wounds of segregation, the persistent brutality against blacks, and the ugly tenaciousness of racism, the fear of white backsliding and the sense of injured pride that one can hear in so many of Moynihan’s critics are entirely understandable. Less forgivable was the refusal to grapple seriously—either at the time or in the months, years, even decades to come—with the basic cultural insight contained in the report: that ghetto families were at risk of raising generations of children unable to seize the opportunity that the civil rights movement had opened up for them. Instead, critics changed the subject, accusing Moynihan—wrongfully, as any honest reading of “The Negro Family” proves—of ignoring joblessness and discrimination.
Family instability is a “peripheral issue,” warned Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League. “The problem is discrimination.” The protest generating the most buzz came from William Ryan, a CORE activist, in “Savage Discovery: The Moynihan Report,” published in The Nation and later reprinted in the NAACP’s official publication. Ryan, though a psychologist, did not hear Moynihan’s point that as the family goes, so go the children. He heard code for the archaic charge of black licentiousness. He described the report as a “highly sophomoric treatment of illegitimacy” and insisted that whites’ broader access to abortion, contraception, and adoption hid the fact that they were no less “promiscuous” than blacks. Most memorably, he accused Moynihan of “blaming the victim,” a phrase that would become the title of his 1971 book and the fear-inducing censor of future plain speaking about the ghetto’s decay. That Ryan’s phrase turned out to have more cultural staying power than anything in the Moynihan report is a tragic emblem of the course of the subsequent discussion about the ghetto family.
For white liberals and the black establishment, poverty became a zero-sum game: either you believed, as they did, that there was a defect in the system, or you believed that there was a defect in the individual. It was as if critiquing the family meant that you supported inferior schools, even that you were a racist. Though “The Negro Family” had been a masterpiece of complex analysis that implied that individuals were intricately entwined in a variety of systems—familial, cultural, and economic—it gave birth to a hardened, either/or politics from which the country has barely recovered. By fall, when a White House conference on civil rights took place, the Moynihan report, initially planned as its centerpiece, had been disappeared. Johnson himself, having just introduced large numbers of ground troops into Vietnam, went mum on the subject, steering clear of the word “family” in the next State of the Union message. This was a moment when the nation had the resources, the leadership (the president had been overwhelmingly elected, and he had the largest majorities in the House and Senate since the New Deal), and the will “to make a total . . . commitment to the cause of Negro equality,” Moynihan lamented in a 1967 postmortem of his report in Commentary. Instead, he declared, the nation had disastrously decided to punt on Johnson’s “next and more profound stage in the battle for civil rights.” “The issue of the Negro family was dead.” Well, not exactly. Over the next 15 years, the black family question actually became a growth industry inside academe, the foundations, and the government. But it wasn’t the same family that had worried Moynihan and that in the real world continued to self-destruct at unprecedented rates. Scholars invented a fantasy family—strong and healthy, a poor man’s Brady Bunch—whose function was not to reflect truth but to soothe injured black self-esteem and to bolster the emerging feminist critique of male privilege, bourgeois individualism, and the nuclear family.
The literature of this period was so evasive, so implausible, so far removed from what was really unfolding in the ghetto, that if you didn’t know better, you might conclude that people actually wanted to keep the black family separate and unequal. Consider one of the first books out of the gate, Black Families in White America, by Andrew Billingsley, published in 1968 and still referred to as “seminal.” “Unlike Moynihan and others, we do not view the Negro as a causal nexus in a ‘tangle of pathologies’ which feeds on itself,” he declared. “The Negro family is, in our view, an absorbing, adaptive, and amazingly resilient mechanism for the socialization of its children and the civilization of its society.” Pay no attention to the 25 percent of poor ghetto families, Billingsley urged. Think instead about the 75 percent of black middle-class families—though Moynihan had made a special point of exempting them from his report. Other black pride–inspired scholars looked at female-headed families and declared them authentically African and therefore a good thing. In a related vein, Carol Stack published All Our Kin (please read this book), a 1974 HEW-funded study of families in a midwestern ghetto with many multigenerational female households. In an implicit criticism of American individualism, Stack depicted “The Flats,” as she dubbed her setting, as a vibrant and cooperative urban village, where mutual aid—including from sons, brothers, and uncles, who provided financial support and strong role models for children—created “a tenacious, active, lifelong network.” In fact, some scholars continued, maybe the nuclear family was really just a toxic white hang-up, anyway. No one asked what nuclear families did, or how they prepared children for a modern economy.
The important point was simply that they were not black. “One must question the validity of the white middle-class lifestyle from its very foundation because it has already proven itself to be decadent and unworthy of emulation,” wrote Joyce Ladner (who later became the first female president of Howard University) in her 1972 book Tomorrow’s Tomorrow. Robert Hill of the Urban League, who published The Strengths of Black Families that same year, claimed to have uncovered science that proved Ladner’s point: “Research studies have revealed that many one-parent families are more intact or cohesive than many two-parent families: data on child abuse, battered wives and runaway children indicate higher rates among two-parent families in suburban areas than one-parent families in inner city communities.” That science, needless to say, was as reliable as a deadbeat dad. Feminists, similarly fixated on overturning the “oppressive ideal of the nuclear family,” also welcomed this dubious scholarship. Convinced that marriage was the main arena of male privilege, feminists projected onto the struggling single mother an image of the “strong black woman” who had always had to work and who was “superior in terms of her ability to function healthily in the world,” as Toni Morrison put it.
The lucky black single mother could also enjoy more equal relationships with men than her miserably married white sisters. If black pride made it hard to grapple with the increasingly separate and unequal family, feminism made it impossible. Fretting about single-parent families was now not only racist but also sexist, an effort to deny women their independence, their sexuality, or both. As for the poverty of single mothers, that was simply more proof of patriarchal oppression. In 1978, University of Wisconsin researcher Diana Pearce introduced the useful term “feminization of poverty.” But for her and her many allies, the problem was not the crumbling of the nuclear family; it was the lack of government support for single women and the failure of business to pay women their due. With the benefit of embarrassed hindsight, academics today sometimes try to wave away these notions as the justifiably angry, but ultimately harmless, speculations of political and academic activists. “The depth and influence of the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s are often exaggerated,” historian Stephanie Coontz writes in her new book, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. This is pure revisionism.
The radical delegitimation of the family was so pervasive that even people at the center of power joined in. It made no difference that so many of these cheerleaders for single mothers had themselves spent their lives in traditional families and probably would rather have cut off an arm than seen their own unmarried daughters pushing strollers. Take, for instance, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, who wrote a concurring assent in the 1977 Moore v. City of East Cleveland decision. The case concerned a woman and her grandson evicted from a housing project following a city ordinance that defined “family” as parents—or parent—and their own children. Brennan did not simply agree that the court should rule in favor of the grandmother—a perfectly reasonable position. He also assured the court that “the extended family has many strengths not shared by the nuclear family.” Relying on Robert Hill’s “science,” he declared that delinquency, addiction, crime, “neurotic disabilities,” and mental illness were more prevalent in societies where “autonomous nuclear families prevail,” a conclusion that would have bewildered the writers of the Constitution that Brennan was supposedly interpreting. In its bumbling way and with far-reaching political consequences, the executive branch also offered warm greetings to the single-parent family. Alert to growing apprehension about the state of the American family during his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter had promised a conference on the subject.
Clearly less concerned with conditions in the ghetto than with satisfying feminist advocates, the administration named a black single (divorced) mother to lead the event, occasioning an outcry from conservatives. By 1980, when it finally convened after numerous postponements, the White House Conference on the Family had morphed into the White House Conference on Families, to signal that all family forms were equal. Instead of the political victory for moderate Democrats that Carter had expected, the conference galvanized religious conservatives. Later, conservative heavyweight Paul Weyrich observed that the Carter conference marked the moment when religious activists moved in force into Republican politics. Doubtless they were also more energized by their own issues of feminism and gay rights than by what was happening in the ghetto. But their new rallying cry of “family values” nonetheless became a political dividing line, with unhappy fallout for liberals for years to come. Meanwhile, the partisans of single motherhood got a perfect chance to test their theories, since the urban ghettos were fast turning into nuclear-family-free zones. Indeed, by 1980, 15 years after “The Negro Family,” the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks had more than doubled, to 56 percent. In the ghetto, that number was considerably higher, as high as 66 percent in New York City. Many experts comforted themselves by pointing out that white mothers were also beginning to forgo marriage, but the truth was that only 9 percent of white births occurred out of wedlock.
And how was the black single-parent famly doing? It would be fair to say that it had not been exhibiting the strengths of kinship networks. According to numbers crunched by Moynihan and economist Paul Offner, of the black children born between 1967 and 1969, 72 percent received Aid to Families with Dependent Children before the age of 18. School dropout rates, delinquency, and crime, among the other dysfunctions that Moynihan had warned about, were rising in the cities. In short, the 15 years since the report was written had witnessed both the birth of millions of fatherless babies and the entrenchment of an underclass. Liberal advocates had two main ways of dodging the subject of family collapse while still addressing its increasingly alarming fallout. The first, largely the creation of Marian Wright Edelman, who in 1973 founded the Children’s Defense Fund, was to talk about children not as the offspring of individual mothers and fathers responsible for rearing them, but as an oppressed class living in generic, nebulous, and never-to-be-analyzed “families.” Framing the problem of ghetto children in this way, CDF was able to mount a powerful case for a host of services, from prenatal care to day care to housing subsidies, in the name of children’s developmental needs, which did not seem to include either a stable domestic life or, for that matter, fathers. Advocates like Edelman might not have viewed the collapsing ghetto family as a welcome occurrence, but they treated it as a kind of natural event, like drought, beyond human control and judgment. As recently as a year ago, marking the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, CDF announced on its website: “In 2004 it is morally and economically indefensible that a black preschool child is three times as likely to depend solely on a mother’s earnings.”
This may strike many as a pretty good argument for addressing the prevalence of black single-mother families, but in CDF-speak it is a case for federal natural-disaster relief. The Children’s Defense Fund was only the best-known child-advocacy group to impose a gag rule on the role of fatherless families in the plight of its putative constituents. The Carnegie Corporation followed suit. In 1977, it published a highly influential report by Kenneth Keniston called All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure. It makes an obligatory nod toward the family’s role in raising children, before calling for a cut in unemployment, a federal job guarantee, national health insurance, affirmative action, and a host of other children’s programs. In a review in Commentary, Nathan Glazer noted ruefully that All Our Children was part of a “recent spate of books and articles on the subject of the family that have had little if anything to say about the black family in particular and the matter seems to have been permanently shelved.” For that silence, children’s advocates deserve much of the credit—or blame.
The second way not to talk about what was happening to the ghetto family was to talk instead about teen pregnancy. In 1976 the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, published “Eleven Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done About the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States?” It was a report that launched a thousand programs. In response to its alarms, HEW chief Joseph Califano helped push through the 1978 Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention and Care Act, which funded groups providing services to pregnant adolescents and teen moms. Nonprofits, including the Center for Population Options (now called Advocates for Youth), climbed on the bandwagon. The Ford and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations showered dollars on organizations that ran school-based health clinics, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation set up the Too Early Childbearing Network, the Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored “A Community Strategy for Reaching Sexually Active Adolescents,” and the Carnegie, Ford, and William T. Grant Foundations all started demonstration programs. There was just one small problem: there was no epidemic of teen pregnancy.
There was an out-of-wedlock teen-pregnancy epidemic. Teenagers had gotten pregnant at even higher rates in the past. The numbers had reached their zenith in the 1950s, and the “Eleven Million Teenagers” cited in the Guttmacher report actually represented a decline in the rate of pregnant teens. Back in the day, however, when they found out they were pregnant, girls had either gotten married or given their babies up for adoption. Not this generation. They were used to seeing children growing up without fathers, and they felt no shame about arriving at the maternity ward with no rings on their fingers, even at 15. In the middle-class mind, however, no sane girl would want to have a baby at 15—not that experts mouthing rhetoric about the oppressive patriarchal family would admit that there was anything wrong with that. That middle-class outlook, combined with post-Moynihan mendacity about the growing disconnect between ghetto childbearing and marriage, led the policy elites to frame what was really the broad cultural problem of separate and unequal families as a simple lack-of-reproductive-services problem. Ergo, girls “at risk” must need sex education and contraceptive services. But the truth was that underclass girls often wanted to have babies; they didn’t see it as a problem that they were young and unmarried. They did not follow the middle-class life script that read: protracted adolescence, college, first job, marriage—and only then children.
They did not share the belief that children needed mature, educated mothers who would make their youngsters’ development the center of their lives. Access to birth control couldn’t change any of that. At any rate, failing to define the problem accurately, advocates were in no position to find the solution. Teen pregnancy not only failed to go down, despite all the public attention, the tens of millions of dollars, and the birth control pills that were thrown its way. It went up—peaking in 1990 at 117 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage girls, up from 105 per 1,000 in 1978, when the Guttmacher report was published. About 80 percent of those young girls who became mothers were single, and the vast majority would be poor. Throughout the 1980s, the inner city—and the black family—continued to unravel. Child poverty stayed close to 20 percent, hitting a high of 22.7 percent in 1993. Welfare dependency continued to rise, soaring from 2 million families in 1970 to 5 million by 1995. By 1990, 65 percent of all black children were being born to unmarried women. In ghetto communities like Central Harlem, the number was closer to 80 percent.
By this point, no one doubted that most of these children were destined to grow up poor and to pass down the legacy of single parenting to their own children. The only good news was that the bad news was so unrelentingly bad that the usual bromides and evasions could no longer hold. Something had to shake up what amounted to an ideological paralysis, and that something came from conservatives. Three thinkers in particular—Charles Murray, Lawrence Mead, and Thomas Sowell—though they did not always write directly about the black family, effectively changed the conversation about it. First, they did not flinch from blunt language in describing the wreckage of the inner city, unafraid of the accusations of racism and victim blaming that came their way. Second, they pointed at the welfare policies of the 1960s, not racism or a lack of jobs or the legacy of slavery, as the cause of inner-city dysfunction, and in so doing they made the welfare mother the public symbol of the ghetto’s ills. (Murray in particular argued that welfare money provided a disincentive for marriage, and, while his theory may have overstated the role of economics, it’s worth noting that he was probably the first to grasp that the country was turning into a nation of separate and unequal families.) And third, they believed that the poor would have to change their behavior instead of waiting for Washington to end poverty, as liberals seemed to be saying. By the early 1980s the media also had woken up to the ruins of the ghetto family and brought about the return of the repressed Moynihan report. Declaring Moynihan “prophetic,” Ken Auletta, in his 1982 The Underclass, proclaimed that “one cannot talk about poverty in America, or about the underclass, without talking about the weakening family structure of the poor.”
Both the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times ran series on the black family in 1983, followed by a 1985 Newsweek article called “Moynihan: I Told You So” and a 1986 CBS documentary, The Vanishing Black Family, produced by Bill Moyers, a onetime aide to Lyndon Johnson, who had supported the Moynihan report. The most symbolic moment came when Moynihan himself gave Harvard’s prestigious Godkin lectures in 1985 in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of “The Negro Family.” For the most part, liberals were having none of it. They piled on Murray’s 1984 Losing Ground, ignored Mead and Sowell, and excoriated the word “underclass,” which they painted as a recycled and pseudoscientific version of the “tangle of pathology.” But there were two important exceptions to the long list of deniers. The first was William Julius Wilson. In his 1987 The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson chastised liberals for being “confused and defensive” and failing to engage “the social pathologies of the ghetto.” “The average poor black child today appears to be in the midst of a poverty spell which will last for almost two decades,” he warned. Liberals have “to propose thoughtful explanations for the rise in inner city dislocations.” Ironically, though, Wilson’s own “mismatch theory” for family breakdown—which hypothesized that the movement of low-skill jobs out of the cities had sharply reduced the number of marriageable black men—had the effect of extending liberal defensiveness about the damaged ghetto family. After all, poor single mothers were only adapting to economic conditions. How could they do otherwise?
The research of another social scientist, Sara McLanahan, was not so easily rationalized, however. A divorced mother herself, McLanahan found Auletta’s depiction of her single-parent counterparts in the inner city disturbing, especially because, like other sociologists of the time, she had been taught that the Moynihan report was the work of a racist—or, at least, a seriously deluded man. But when she surveyed the science available on the subject, she realized that the research was so sparse that no one knew for sure how the children of single mothers were faring. Over the next decade, McLanahan analyzed whatever numbers she could find, and discovered—lo and behold—that children in single-parent homes were not doing as well as children from two-parent homes on a wide variety of measures, from income to school performance to teen pregnancy. Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, McLanahan presented her emerging findings, over protests from feminists and the Children’s Defense Fund. Finally, in 1994 she published, with Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent. McLanahan’s research shocked social scientists into re-examining the problem they had presumed was not a problem. It was a turning point. One by one, the top family researchers gradually came around, concluding that McLanahan—and perhaps even Moynihan—was right. In fact, by the early 1990s, when the ghetto was at its nadir, public opinion had clearly turned. No one was more attuned to this shift than triangulator Bill Clinton, who made the family a centerpiece of his domestic policy.
In his 1994 State of the Union Address, he announced: “We cannot renew our country when, within a decade, more than half of our children will be born into families where there is no marriage.” And in 1996, despite howls of indignation, including from members of his own administration (and mystifyingly, from Moynihan himself), he signed a welfare-reform bill that he had twice vetoed—and that included among its goals increasing the number of children living with their two married parents. So, have we reached the end of the Moynihan report saga? That would be vastly overstating matters. Remember: 70 percent of black children are still born to unmarried mothers. After all that ghetto dwellers have been through, why are so many people still unwilling to call this the calamity it is? Both NOW and the National Association of Social Workers continue to see marriage as a potential source of female oppression. The Children’s Defense Fund still won’t touch the subject.
Hip-hop culture glamorizes ghetto life: “ ’cause nowadays it’s like a badge of honor/to be a baby mama” go the words to the hit “Baby Mama,” which young ghetto mothers view as their anthem. Seriously complicating the issue is the push for gay marriage, which dismissed the formula “children growing up with their own married parents” as a form of discrimination. And then there is the American penchant for to-each-his-own libertarianism. In opinion polls, a substantial majority of young people say that having a child outside of marriage is okay—though, judging from their behavior, they seem to mean that it’s okay, not for them, but for other people. Middle- and upper-middle-class Americans act as if they know that marriage provides a structure that protects children’s development. If only they were willing to admit it to their fellow citizens. All told, the nation is at a cultural inflection point that portends change. Though they always caution that “marriage is not a panacea,” social scientists almost uniformly accept the research that confirms the benefits for children growing up with their own married parents.
Welfare reform and tougher child-support regulations have reinforced the message of personal responsibility for one’s children. The Bush administration unabashedly uses the word “marriage” in its welfare policies. There are even raw numbers to support the case for optimism: teen pregnancy, which finally started to decline in the mid-nineties in response to a crisper, teen-pregnancy-is-a-bad-idea cultural message, is now at its lowest rate ever. And finally, in the ghetto itself there is a growing feeling that mother-only families don’t work. That’s why people are lining up to see an aging comedian (Bill Cosby) as he voices some not-very-funny opinions about their own parenting. That’s why so many young men are vowing to be the fathers they never had. That’s why there has been an uptick, albeit small, in the number of black children living with their married parents. If change really is in the air, it’s taken 40 years to get here—40 years of inner-city misery for the country to reach a point at which it fully signed on to the lesson of Moynihan’s report. Yes, better late than never; but you could forgive lost generations of ghetto men, women, and children if they found it cold comfort.
i used to live in owerri
This is an excellent post, and such food for thought. I found your blog months ago searching for some lyrics by Mars Ill on Google. I have been a reader ever since. Thanks for the most interest posts. Hope you keep them coming for a long time!
May God bless you and keep you in love,
Ja:)
This comes many moons after you posted it, but I needed to read it at this momment and express my gratitude for such a provocative piece... Please don't stop doing what you do...
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