The Black Family: 50 Years of Lies (Part 1)
After completing my latest book project, The Mis-education of Black Youth in America, I immediately began to work on my next literary endeavor, The Restoration of the Black Family Nucleus. There are several people who have inquired as to why I did not focus my effort on producing a volume on black group economics — understanding how passionate I am about group economics. The simple answer to the question is that as important as it is for blacks to embrace the idea of black group economics, the most effective way to permeate the idea throughout the collective, is through the institution of the family. Historically, the family has been the institution through which ideas, values, standards and norms have been inculcated into the psyche of individuals. The family can be viewed as the staging ground for the battle of life. It is where we are prepared to compete and win.
When the family nucleus breaks down with any particular group, social, moral and economic decline is inevitable. So, as much as economic empowerment is essential to the liberation and elevation of blacks, the black family nucleus is essential to developing the proper mindset to embrace the ideology of group economics, business ownership and generational wealth.
The Death of the Black Family
The problem is that the black family is currently on life support. When I began the process of writing my dissertation, The Influence of Cognitive Distortions on the Social Mobility and Mental Health of African Americans, I had no idea just how deep it would take me. When you spend a significant portion of your life studying the decline of your people, and attempting to develop some type of response mechanism to counter it, it can be easy to develop an arrogance based on what you think you know. What I found when researching and writing this in-depth work was, the more I learned about the complex nature of the dilemma my people are facing, the more I realize that I have only scratched the surface.
When examining the impact that cognitive distortions have had about the reality of blacks in America, it is also necessary to identify and anatomize the origin of these distorted and invasive thought processes. In doing so, I discovered multitudinous machinations that were specifically formulated for the purpose of destroying the black family.
The Black Family: 50 Years of Lies
While the slavery experience was a constant strain on the idea of the black family, the most pernicious assault on the black family may very well have been initiated when the politicians in Washington D.C. rejected the propositions set forth by Daniel Moynihan in what has become known as the “Moynihan Report.” In summation, the Moynihan Report suggested that social programs of entitlement would destroy the black family and plunge the black race into perpetual poverty. Moynihan suggested that it would be more beneficial to take the money that was designated for social programs and use it to create government funded jobs for black men, allowing them to provide for and support their families. He suggested that this idea was essential to helping to promote the black family. He also illuminated the fact that the impact of slavery on the psyche of African Americans could not be denied. As a doctor of sociology, Moynihan argued that slavery had caused severe psychological trauma, and the black family being intact was essential to effectively treating and healing the trauma. Needless to say that the politicians in power at the time completely ignored the warning, and implemented one of the most malignant forces that blacks have ever experienced via entitlement programs that maligned the role of the man, facilitating hostility between black men and black women.
Why Family is Important When Addressing Class, Mobility and Poverty
There is no shortage of well-articulated articles that illuminate the negative impact that poverty has had on the black collective — emphasizing the fact that class matters, and class is dictated by economic fluidity. What is rarely elucidated at a level in which the importance of the black family become evident, is the fact that poverty in Black America is multigenerational, and this multigenerational impediment is intricately intertwined and inextricably connected to the collapse of the nuclear black family in the inner city neighborhoods in America.
In 1960, nearly 75 percent of black children were born into homes in which both parents were present; however, the black family suffered a major blow over the last 50 years, with more than 70 percent of black children being born into single-parent households, with the predominance of these homes being headed by black women. There is a wealth of pragmatic and empirical evidence that reveals just how devastating the absence of a parent can be in the proper development and preparation of a young child.
What the numbers also reveal is that these single mothers are significantly more likely to be impoverished, and they are more likely to pass the ideologies and paradigms that underwrite that poverty to their children. There are some sophisticates that make the postulation that single parenthood is simply an inevitable reality that is a result of a shift in cultural paradigms, impacting all nationalities and races, and it is true that the social implications of a more self-centered ideology have produced more divorces and more single-parent households across the board. However, no group has been negatively impacted by this force more than blacks.
For the individual who is willing to put in the work, while abandoning their biases, it is easy to develop a lucid perspicacity of how the destruction of the black family nucleus, and the introduction of the single-parent paradigm, has wreaked immeasurable havoc on the black collective. Yet, there has been very little discussion about the current state of the black family. There are plenty of discussions surrounding racial inequality and economic castration, but there is a deafening silence when it comes to the current state of the black family.
To get gain a lucid understanding of what happened to place the black family, it is necessary to travel back through the annals of time about 50 years. The release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, which was officially entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, spurred academicians, politicians and pundits into a frenzy of activity, but unfortunately, the ultimate response to this report produced tragic results. For now, I will leave the postulations surrounding the intent of the policy makers to personal contemplation, but with so much evidence as to what would happen, why did these leaders choose to ignore the warning of Moynihan?
One area in which the powers that be failed to properly analyze the forces at play was in the influence of slavery of the thought processes of blacks, negatively impacting their view of almost every area of life, including politics, economics, generational wealth, materialism and more. Moynihan had warned of this dilemma in his report. Most of the bright minds that were left to grapple with the poverty issue in the black community simply believed that once racial equality was properly addressed that blacks would be able to improve their economic situation in the same way that poor migrants had. The problem is that poor migrants did not have to shoulder the psychological trauma of slavery — something that completely distorted how blacks viewed the world around them. Also, the inequality issue was never actually resolved.
During the Civil Rights movement, something of immense importance transpired. While certain legislation, conjoined with a growing black middle class, presented the illusion of equal opportunity and advancement for blacks, something was taking place in the black community. As more financially mobile black families moved into middle class white neighborhoods, they left black businesses behind to sputter. They also left less affluent blacks without role models to present a portrait of the black family and proper social structure. What happened is that there were actually more blacks out of work in 1964 than in 1954. Something else that was very alarming to economists and social strategists was the fact that in 1964, rioting in Harlem and Patterson, NJ revealed the problems of the Northern Ghettos was suddenly more intractable than those of the South.
The Moynihan report attacked the mindset concerning poverty and the cause of it. He used pages of disquieting charts and graphs to express the emergence of a distorted pathology that included joblessness, delinquency, crime, school failure and fatherlessness that distinctively characterized the black ghetto. Moynihan, having grown up in an Irish Ghetto, was immensely familiar with the destructive forces of the ghetto. He was also familiar with the elements of elevation that were capable of lifting families out of what could rapidly evolve into a perpetual state of existence. Moynihan also understood how this dynamic could negatively impact the important social institution of the family. Moynihan was one of the first to identify the matriarchal influence on the black collective — asserting that the group had a proclivity to abandon its men, leaving them adrift and alienated.
Okay, what made the Moynihan report so powerful was the fact that the author, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, understood the importance of scientific methodology in producing pragmatic and empirical evidence on which he could build his hypothesis concerning his study of the black dilemma. Additionally, Moynihan also understood the importance of properly framing facts through historical context. It was Moynihan’s understanding of how the family had functioned in history. The family has been an integral contributor to the development of character, values and the ability to compete in life. When the family is not functioning optimally, being diminished in capacity, the children suffer — meaning that future generations are at risk. So, while we understand the importance of black group economics, it is important that we understand that it is extremely difficult to teach a concept that is antithetical to the concepts and realities of the vast majority of blacks, based on the failure of the family to properly inculcate our youth with a mindset that is upwardly mobile.
In order for the black collective to experience true liberation and empowerment, it will be necessary to restore the black family. The black man must assume his natural role of leader, provider, protector and covering, and the black woman must embrace her spiritual role within the black family. A greater emphasis must be placed on being committed to family. There must be a balance of masculine and feminine energy in the home. It is the father that provides the sense of identity for the child, both male and female. It is the mother who nurtures and teaches during the early, developmental stages. The family is essential.
The disintegration of the black family has resulted in a race of people who have no direction and purpose. We wander aimlessly about hoping for relief from our suffering, when that suffering can be overcome through unification, but unification is another value that would be taught in the black family. You must admit that it is hard to emphasize unity when mom and dad are not even unified. This is not an issue that is subject to a quick fix, it demands a full commitment to rebuilding relationships and raising expectations on both sides of the equation. ~ Dr. Rick Wallace, Ph.D.