I also said that Kelly's point is a brute fact which needs wrestled with: the NOI, the family, many other things, mean and are experienced as different things to "insiders," than these same institutions do to "outsiders." This is something which needs negotiated, at least if you want to do more than merely compile data about the NOI, or about Malcolm X, etc. West's "dialoguing" or "struggling" is, in this sense, "a black thing." If you dont get this, then your claims to analyze "race" are pathetic, at least vis a vis the US. But then, you probably believe in such things as Objectivity.
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I think the inside/outside distinction regarding the institution of 'the' family is a bit misleading. Which is to say, none of us escape 'the' family even if we were raised in an orphanage and never ever create a particular family of our own. But I understand what you're saying. I responded to Rakesh off list with a version of the following:
West may well be blind to power relations in the family because of his own social location, his subject position if you prefer, whatevA. Hardly a new thought. He may also just be a prick, of course. West is a Black man, and in fact Hewlett and West spend a great deal of time--an entire chap.-- situating themselves and why they've come to the positions they've come to--none of which should be taken at face-value. If one takes a look at the lit on Black families written by Black men and women, it's pretty darn clear that there are some deep divisions in that literature that reflect the distinctiveness of Black men's and Black women's experience in this society, and particularly their experience of these power relations in the family.
Rakesh raised his own exp. of working in schools and encountering the attempt to segreate boys and girls. This is something advocated by a number of Black scholars and activists because they feel that Black men are overly influenced by Black women and Black matriarchy. (Not ole Moynihan's original idea). Segregating them in the schools seems to them a way to restore Black men's power, because they believe that the effects of capitalism and enslavement have rendered them powerless. They don't see women as powerless; what they see is that Black women sometimes have an easier time of holding down a job, and seem to have access to better (more professional) jobs. Now, the problem with their analysis is that- they don't examine structural changes in capitalism: deindustrializing, the rise of a service-oriented economy, gender inequality, racism, affirmative action, etc.
The reason I always found this interesting is because my grandfather experienced a similar kind of world in rural deindustrializing America, absent the racism of course. My grandmother held a steady job for decades in the same factory. Gramps was always moving from job to job as approx every five years the place he'd been working for closed up shop.
Katha maintained that the book ignores 'power relations' in the family. Well, gender dynamics manifest themselves quite differently in "the" family depending on what kinds of families you're talking about. Are we talking here about white middle class het families, lesbian/gay families, latino/a families, Asian American families, you get my point. So, while Katha complained that they universalized "the" family; she was also remiss in universalizing "the" power relations in the family. I would agree that gender inequality manifests itself in similar sorts of ways, but we should not remove that analysis from class, race, and ethnicity. We can do so analytically, for awhile, but we can't sustain that analysis forever and really grasp how gender inequality operates.
K
Kelley