Bob Herbert bemoans the state of the black family in
his column today. It, and the comments attached to it, rightly attribute social patholigies to the destruction of the family. He and his commenters, however, have
no idea how to solve the problem. Stop by his column and read through the comments. It's a glimpse into a culture of lost and wandering souls.
A question: According to the Pew Forum, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole.
ReplyDeleteSo how come the lack of morality arising from a lack of faith in God is so much more thoroughly destroying their families than families in other ethnic groups?
Slightly off-topic, but indulge me. Let me pull a quote out of a Washington Monthly profile of Bob Herbert:
ReplyDelete[H]e lives comfortably with his wife on the fifth floor of one of the Trump Place condominiums on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The main area of the apartment is a spacious living room with a wall of windows overlooking the West Side highway, the Hudson River, and New Jersey
When you are familiar with Herbert's corpus, that really grabs your attention. Please juxtapose it next to his elegant hand-wringing, the beautiful sanctimony, and the prophetic pose. Delicious.
Whatever limosine he drives, at least Bobby is bringing up the right issue.
ReplyDeleteTim, I've asked an expert to weigh in on your excellent point. I'm hoping he'll offer his opinion.
ReplyDeleteI also called on another source for an expert opinion. It will be interesting to see if they stop by, even with a link.
ReplyDeleteThis is something I haven't completely worked out for myself, but there seem to be two themes in the research literature about African-Americans and morality.
ReplyDelete1) They are more likely to affiliate with religion, and their religious and social values are rather conservative (though they are politically liberal).
2) Due to various social things, they exhibit high levels of various social difficulties, such as single-parent families.
One interpretation is that they use religion to combat the difficult place they're put into by society, but maybe it's not enough?
Here's an article I wrote about race and crime, and it involves religion. Gets at some of the same opposing-forces that I mentioned in my earlier comment.
ReplyDeletehttp://jrc.sagepub.com/content/46/3/327.abstract
While I think that religion and morality can certainly help the problem, a lack of exposure to religion is not the root.
ReplyDeleteThere are certain societal expectations in play here. Black families aren't expected to stay together. The black men aren't expected to do well in school, college, get good-paying jobs, and support their children and wives. Living on welfare is accepted. They live down to the societal expectations largely.
And, I'm afraid that certain political forces know, understand, and exploit these expectations. They offer to pay for healthcare, mortgages, and basic necessities. These dependencies keep black people enslaved as much as shackles and plantations ever did.
There is one quote that particularly struck me in Brad Wright's paper[1]
ReplyDelete"African Americans display relatively low rates of marriage
in part because of the paucity of eligible African American men to marry,
the result of African American men’s dying, being imprisoned, or not
receiving sufficient education (Bennett 1989; Wilson 1987)."
It sounds like, even if the churches work like crazy to persuade their members to get married and not have children out of wedlock, it simply cannot be done because there aren't enough men to go around who are (a)out of prison; (b) have good enough jobs to support a family; and (c) young enough to be of interest to young women.
And this assumes that the churches are, in fact, trying to achieve this goal, and are able to be effective. Something that I'm not very convinced of. I suspect that many (perhaps even most) pastors simply aren't very good at their jobs.
[1] I'm not entirely sure if that link will work for everybody, or if our library has made a deal with the publisher which makes it work for me but not anyone else. If it doesn't work for everyone else, I apologize, but if anyone is interested you should be able to get it through a local library through interlibrary loan.
Awesome comments, all. I've continued the post here.
ReplyDelete