Marriage and Rev. Wright

Here's a strange connection for you. What do the Rev. Wright's sermons on white racism have to do with the culture of marriage? Yesterday I blogged about the notion that marriage is part of an overall life structure, one created to ensure long-term stability, a concept take from the book Marriage and Caste in America. Here's a little bit more from that book, discussing a generalization drawn from interviews of inner-city men who have drifted from one relationship to the next. Here, the connection between jobs and marriage is made.

(W)here do jobs fit in this script? The marriage market thesis has it that men who cannot find decent work in a job market that treats them so shabbily will inevitably seem inadequate marriage partners. But this argument confuses cause and correlation. What is clear from listening to men like Tyrell is that indifference toward marriage grows out of the same psychological soil as the inability to earn a decent living. Men do not get married because they have a steady job; they get married because they are the kind of person who can get and keep a steady job. As Datcher's story shows, the very task of looking for "the right woman" means projecting yourself into the future and taking a mindful approach to life.

One of the most striking things about talking to poor inner-city men is their sense of drift; life is something that happens to them. I asked several men where they would like to be in ten years; all of them gave me a puzzled, I-never-really-thought-about-it look. Both marriage and vocation are part of the project that is the deliberate pursuit of a meaningful and connected life. To put it a little differently, to marry and to earn a steady living are to try to master life and shape it into a coherent narrative.

The argument is that people are either acculturated to self-reliance and striving for a stable life, or to short-term survival and self-gratification. If you are constantly told that your failures are the result of external forces, then there is not much point in working towards long-term success. In the end, all your efforts could be destroyed by The Man.

With this in mind, take another listen to Rev. Wright. Listen to the underlying theme: the world is large and out to get you and that you are small and victimized by everything around you.

If this is the world view you are immersed in, what are the chances you will grow up "to try to master life and shape it into a coherent narrative?"