Oakland and Marriage

In yesterday's post on the decay of the American culture of marriage, I quoted from Marriage and Caste in America and the author's proposition that marriage is a goal that gives meaning and structure to your life long before you marry. Comparing that to Rev. Wright's lunatic rants that Barack Obama is now having to defend, it was obvious that the intellectual underpinnings of people like Barack and Rev. Wright are inimical to a culture of marriage. Today I want to look at a similar intellectual foundation that has contributed to the destruction of American families - that of multiculturalism.

In short, there is no consistently successful substitute for the traditional, nuclear family despite decades of academics and intellectuals telling us that there is.

In 1965, Daniel Moynihan's Department of Labor under President Johnson published a report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. It was a thorough examination of the state of the black family in 1965 by an organization deeply committed to overcoming the nation's racism. Here's a tidbit.

The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.

Moynihan's report was assailed as racist and an entire academic school of thought was created to combat the notion that nuclear families were crucial to society's success. To believe in the value of the nuclear family was to be a racist and a sexist. From Marriage and Caste in America:

Other black-pride-inspired scholars looked at female-headed families and declared them authentically African and therefore a good thing. In a related vein, Carol Stack published All Our Kin, a 1974 HEW-funded study of families in a Midwestern ghetto with many multigenerational female households. In an implicit criticism of American individualism, Stack depicted "The Flats," as she dubbed her setting, as a vibrant and cooperative urban village, where mutual aid - including from sons, brothers, and uncles, who provided financial support and strong role models for children - created "a tenacious, active, lifelong network."

You can get a whiff of Hillary and Barack in the "village" notion and the "authentically African" one as well. Rather than suggest that the nuclear family was the successful model to follow, academics and intellectuals suggested that there were any number of possible choices for success. Unfortunately, Oakland, the murder capital of the US, has proven them wrong.

Many of the convicted killers were quasi-homeless in grade school, moving every 90 days on eviction cycles, or bouncing between friends' and relatives' homes, where they slept on recliners and couches and floors.

Inside the home is pure chaos. Typically, they live with a third-generation relative, an elderly grandmother or aunt, who also opens her home to several other wayward relatives. They all pile into one home, bringing their boyfriends and girlfriends and their children. There's no particular person in charge, no house rules, and people come and go.

Often it's in these houses where young boys first learn how to hold a gun, how to break a rock of cocaine into dime and nickel bags for sale.

Without parents to help them mature, the mental world of these young killers stays stuck in an infantile, egotistic state, said forensic psychologist Shawn Johnston, who has conducted more than 15,000 court evaluations of adult and juvenile criminals in 15 Northern California counties.

"What keeps us from killing each other is empathy, and we learn it from bonding with parents who pick us back up when we get hurt or teased as children," Johnston said. "Without it, you get guys who live in a constant state of protecting the fantasy that they are the most important thing this side of the Milky Way. And because they don't have empathy, they will shoot or stab to protect their illusion."

Across the country, we are currently grappling with the results of the destruction of the American culture of marriage. Like a train in the first stages of derailment, the national debate is still about family structures that have proven to be failures. Gay marriage and single parent homes are legitimized by people who continue to use intellectual foundations that have long since been proven false.

All aboard for Social Pathologyville!
As the current presidential campaign moves on, a question I would like to hear asked of all the candidates is this. "What's the long-term solution for Oakland?" The answers would be illuminating.