Black Fathers in Contemporary American Society: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Strategies for Change

FOREWORD

FOREWORD The family is arguably the core institution of human social existence . For this reason, those interested in understanding the conditions , status, and prospects of any ethnic-racial group typically make the family a central topic of concern. Social scientific efforts to assess the circumstances of African Americans have long focused a close analytical eye on the black family. A large and varied literature has developed through the years, spanning major scholarly treatises , policy papers, and other analyses, as well as bitter polemics and baneful jeremiads. But as economic structures, social policies, and social norms continue to change, we will need even more careful assessments of how these families are faring, especially the families of those most disadvantaged in society. Some crucial continuities in the dynamics of African American families have emerged in previous research. Indeed, the most important of these key themes can be traced back to the earliest scholarship in the area and are still relevant today. The first serious investigation of the black family was W. E. B. Du Bois’s pioneering sociological work The Philadelphia Negro, first published in 1899. In his meticulous study of blacks in the city’s Seventh Ward, Du Bois identi fied what he termed “the early breaking up of family life” among blacks as a serious problem (Du Bois 1899/1996, 66–67). One finds in DuBois’s work three themes of enduring importance for research on black family life: the greater fragility of the black family unit, coming out of the traumatic and oppressive experience of slavery; the importance of economic resources both to whether men and women decide to enter into marriage and to the sustenance of stable family units; and a call upon blacks, most often in the form of a value judgment, to establish stronger, healthier family ties and norms. Here as always, the normative benchmark has been that of the nuclear family, a stable husband-wife unit nurturing and raising their own biological offspring . Detailing and enlarging upon these themes continues to play a large part in discussions of black families, marriage patterns, and relations between black men and women. It is something of an understatement to say that controversy has been the most prominent feature of research on black families. In their ferocity, the public and scholarly debates have often drawn attention away from the important practical matters of black family dynamics that require our most urgent attention and concern. In the 1930s and 1940s the critical dispute was over whether there were any important African cultural retentions that needed to play a role in understanding black family life. In the 1960s and 1970s, of course, there was the highly divisive and ultimately counterproductive furor over the “Moynihan Report” and its depiction of black families as dysfunctional, matriarchal, and caught in a “tangle of pathology.” And more recently we have seen an equally caustic set of disputes around sex, sexuality, and marriage issues between black men and women—a set of tensions perhaps most vividly and distressingly epitomized by the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill controversy during the congressional hearings on his Supreme Court nomination. Separating the valuable wheat of good research and meaningful theory on African American families from the abundant chaff of contention and acrimony is no easy task. However, it is imperative that we do so, precisely because our understanding cannot be complete without a thoroughgoing analysis of so fundamentally important an institution as the family. Moreover, it is surely fair to say that African Americans can fully realize the American Dream only when their family units are whole, healthy, and vibrant, however those units may be configured. In all of the research and debate, surprisingly little attention has been dedicated to the part played by black fathers. In this critically important volume, Obie Clayton, Ron Mincy, and David Blankenhorn set out to understand black fathers, both their indispensable roles and obligations and the challenges and obstacles they face in contemporary American society. The research reported in this volume and the ways in which the issues are addressed cut straight through the old polemics and lines of contention. The work here provides serious and trenchant answers to the question of what types of contributions black fathers can and do make in families. This volume’s contributors address how much black fathers matter to their children, and why they matter. They also propose what both social policy and black families and communities now need to do to strengthen the contributions of black...