>>> Rakesh Bhandari writes:
I sent this message to Gary but since it complements Yoshie's I forward
it. Best, Rakesh
A book by Robin DG Kelley titled Your Mama is Dysfunctional (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997) has been recommended to me. But skimmiming it on the way to the grocery store yesterday, I don't have a good sense of it yet, though I suspect it will be relevant. I have learned much from Adolph Reed, Jr's writings and draw from them here.
In the 60s the so called Negro Question was analyzed in a document called the Moynihan Report, which strangely enough upon its publication was supported by only one black group--The Nation of Islam. The report focused on the destruction of the black family through slavery and even recommendd the entry of more black men into the military so they could develop the correct patriarchal values to lead their families out of the mire of poverty and the tangle of pathology. Some would say that this suggestion, coming at a time of manpower shortages in the army, was quasi-genocidal. At any rate, as the argument developed over time, welfare became more of a target as it was claimed to allow single women to raise their children without dependence on a father figure the absense of which was the efficient cause of black pathology. In Boyz in the Hood, only Tre raised by Furious escapes the hood; Tre's mother is portrayed as an uppity professional who abandoned her son, and Furious' strict parenting is credited with his rise. Meanwhile, the children raised by the single mother both end up dead. Just for flavor, there is that other staple of Nation of Islam ideology--an attack on Koreans for their entrepreurship in the hood as the reason for black deprivation. So the solution to black poverty--get the whores off welfare, exhort the depraved men to take responsibility, scapegoat the chinks. Without the last bit, this is pretty much the message of the Thernstrom's book as well. But for the truest version of the argument, check out (former Reagan speechwriter and presently editor of a special tech Forbes supplement) George Gilder's Men and Marriage which should have made the Todd Gitlins and Michael Tomaskys a little more circumspect about their crotchety criticisms of the identity politics of women, homosexuals and the minority urban poor.
Charles - I agree with Rakesh. Moynihan put forth ( in that report or another) the infamous proposal of "benign neglect" and the idea that matriarchy is a main cause of alleged weakness of Black families.
In my opinion, greater equality of power between women and men is a strength, not weakness of Black families.
Another fundamental problem with this is that it locates the ORIGIN of social problems in the Black community in the Black family. Think about it. Did the Black family SPONTANEOUSLY disintegrate, on its own about 45 years ago ? or whenever this problem arises according to the sociologist putting forth the theory ? Or was the Black family bludgeoned into problems by institutional racism ? To me it clearly the latter. Overall the Black family has proven to be very strong to have been a basis for surviving the continuing genocide against the African American people by the U.S. bourgeois system, the latest installment of which is Reaganism, with its characteristic denial of its racism and reverse discrimination doctrine.
See "The Black Family:The Ties That Bind" By Angela and Fania Davis in _Women, Race and Culture_ by Angela Y. Davis