Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Eugene Robinson

Author:Eugene Robinson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Social Science, African Americans - Economic conditions - 21st century, African American Studies, 21st century, Social classes, Group identity, Economic conditions, United States - Race relations, African Americans - Race identity, Social mobility, African Americans - Social conditions - 21st century, Group identity - United States, Discrimination & Race Relations, United States - Social conditions - 21st century, Social classes - United States, United States, Ethnic Studies, Social mobility - United States, Race identity, African Americans, General, Social conditions
ISBN: 9780385526548
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-05T04:15:54.696000+00:00

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The web of restraints that keeps Abandoned black Americans from escaping into the middle class has been examined from every angle, described in great detail, and lamented ad infinitum. But the web continues to tighten.

It begins in the womb. Poor black women are only one-third as likely as poor white women to have adequate prenatal care. This is partly mitigated by the fact that poor black women are much less likely than their white counterparts to smoke while they are pregnant; indeed, rates of tobacco, alcohol, and drug use among low-income young African Americans are generally lower than among low-income whites. Still, infant mortality is almost twice as high among African Americans. The incidence of low birth weight is also greatly elevated, and while most studies do not show an ironclad, direct relationship between low birth weight and a decrease in cognitive ability, they do indicate that low-birth-weight children are up to twice as likely to have problems in school. From a very early age, the children of the Abandoned are at much greater risk for several chronic, debilitating conditions—asthma, obesity, childhood diabetes—than low-income white children. Poor black children are behind even before the race begins.

Most infants born into low-income African American families are, of course, of normal weight and go home from the hospital in good health. But what kind of home?

In 1940, only 15.7 percent of African American households nationwide were headed by women who were either single, widowed, or abandoned by their spouses. In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were growing up in one-parent households. Today, an astounding 54 percent of all African American children are being raised in single-parent households12—and, in almost all cases, it’s the father who is absent while the mother struggles to take care of the family.

It is hugely significant that in most Abandoned black neighborhoods, as in the Lower Ninth Ward, most households are headed by a single woman—with no husband on the premises. In many cases, both the mother and the absent father were themselves raised by single mothers. To the extent that the example set by parents provides a model for children to emulate, girls grow up learning that it would be normal to raise children on their own and boys learning that it would be normal not to live with the mother—or mothers—of their children. The pattern tends to repeat in the next generation. Being a single parent is stressful, with the mother likely to pass that stress on to her children—along with all the well-documented physiological damage that stress can cause. The complex and subtle psychological impacts of single parenthood might be surpassed, however, by a simpler and more quantifiable economic impact: One low income provides approximately half as much money as two low incomes. This fact of arithmetic limits upward mobility. It also greatly increases instability because the slightest disruption of a household’s one precarious source of cash can create a situation in which the family has to move on short notice. And

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