Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age by Kay S. Hymowitz

Author:Kay S. Hymowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-10-28T19:07:00+00:00

Could the black family-in free fall since the 1965 Moynihan Report first warned of the threat of its disintegration-finally be ready for a turnaround? There's sure a lot of soul-searching on the subject. A 2001 survey by CBS News and BET.com, a website affiliated with the Black Entertainment Television network, found that 92 percent of African-American respondents agreed that absentee fathers are a serious problem. In black public discourse, personal responsibility talk, always encompassing family responsibility, has been crowding out the old orthodoxy of reparations and racism. Bill Cosby's just-discussed remarks, calling on parents to take charge of their kids and for men to "stop beating up your women because you can't find a job," set off an amen corner. Democratic National Convention keynote speaker Barack Obama, the black who was to be elected Illinois senator, celebrated family, hard work, and the inner-city citizens who "know that parents have to parent." In a New York Times op-ed, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates added his blessing when he asked, "Are white racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or have babies?" Even the wily Reverend Al Sharpton corrected one of the New York Times's most fervent PC watchdogs, Deborah Solomon, that, no, Cosby wasn't being racist, and that "we didn't go through the civil rights movement only to end up as thugs and hoodlums."

A few statistics even hint that a turnaround is already in motion. The Census Bureau reports that between 1996 and 2002 the number of black children living in two-parent families increased for the first time since the 1960s, from 35 to 39 percent. Black teen pregnancy rates have plummeted 32 percent in the last fifteen years, well surpassing the decline among white and Hispanic adolescents. Thanks to the 1996 welfare reform bill, black mothers have joined the workforce in record numbers and made enough money to pull more of their children out of poverty than we've seen since anyone's been keeping track of these things.

And the men-the much needed husbands and fathers? You can see a glimmer of hope here too. People are talking about fathers-a lot. The New York Times Magazine captured the emerging dadism in Jason DeParle's August 2004 profile of a thirty-two-year-old former crack dealer, pimp, and convict trying to go straight, delivering pizzas by night, taking care of his two-year-old son by day.

But the grim fact is that bringing a reliable dad into the home of the 80 percent or so of inner-city children growing up with a single mother is a task of such psychological and sociological complexity as to rival democracy-building in Iraq. Pundits point to the staggering rates of black male unemployment and incarceration as the major reason why black men don't get married. Others cite the poisonous relations between the sexes that too often lead to domestic vi olence. What is little understood is that all of these-single fatherhood, domestic abuse, unemployment, crime, and incarceration-are in effect the same problem. They are all part of a destructive pattern

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