In 1965, a report entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” was published by the assistant secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in 1976 would be elected the Democratic senator from New York. In what quickly became known as “the Moynihan report,” the author asserted that racial inequality, combined with the breakdown of the black family, was creating a “new crisis in race relations.” Moynihan combined structural and cultural arguments to analyze the deteriorating state of black families. The report created a firestorm of controversy due in part to the racial climate and popular ideology at the time it was published. America had moved against segregation in public schools in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, and other segregationist practices had been successfully attacked in the courts and influenced by legislation through the first half of the 1960s. The legal battle against discriminatory practices was welcomed by many but was still hardly universally embraced. Many Americans were skeptical about how much could and should change between blacks and whites in America, even while citizens with more liberal attitudes about race relations supported the end of segregation.
Given the volatility of race relations, liberal critics believed that Moynihan’s cultural arguments amounted to blaming African Americans for their own misfortune. This criticism ignored Moynihan’s careful attention to structural causes of inequality, and it created a backlash against the report that essentially shut down meaningful conversation about the role of culture in shaping racial outcomes. The Moynihan report is a particularly pertinent subject for a discussion of the black family because it not only anticipated later developments in black family fragmentation, but the controversy it generated clearly made the African American family the central focus of the structure-versus-culture debate. In a New York Times obituary for Daniel Patrick Moynihan in March 2003, I was quoted as saying that the Moynihan report is an important and prophetic document.1 I still stand by that statement. The report is important because it continues to be a reference for studies on the black family. It is prophetic because Moynihan’s predictions about the fragmentation of the African American family and its connection to inner-city poverty were largely borne out.
Because the Moynihan report was an internal document written for officials in the executive branch of government, not the general public, its findings and commentary were not edited to minimize the chances of press distortions and the odds of offending civil rights groups. Dramatic statements made in the report drew press attention and were often taken out of context. For example, in his chapter entitled “The Tangle of Pathology,” Moynihan boldly stated, “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental weakness of the Negro community at the present time” and “at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”2
Reporters and columnists organized their coverage around the attention-grabbing statements on the breakdown of the black family, and readers who had not read the actual document often had no idea that Moynihan had devoted an entire chapter to the root causes of family fragmentation, including urbanization, unemployment, poverty, and Jim Crow segregation. A Washington Post bylined article noted, according to “White House sources,” that the Watts riot in 1964—a race riot in a suburb of Los Angeles—strengthened President Johnson’s “feeling of the urgent need to restore Negro families’ stability.”3 Accordingly, as Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey observed, by the time many critics, including black critics, got around to reading the report, they “could no longer see it with fresh eyes but were instead heavily influenced by their exposure to the press coverage, particularly as this coverage tied the report to an official ‘explanation’ for Watts.”4
The critical reaction of many African Americans to the report was also influenced by racial sentiments in the black community flowing from the emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s. Some blacks were highly critical of the report’s emphasis on social pathologies within poor black neighborhoods not simply because such a conclusion carried with it potential for deep embarrassment. They believed that such a view of black life conflicted with their claim that blacks were developing a community power base that could become a major force in American society and would reflect the strength and vitality of the black community.
This critical reaction to the analysis of a prominent white social scientist and politician reflected a new definition, description, and explanation of the black condition that accompanied the emergence of the Black Power movement. This new approach, proclaimed as the “black perspective,” signaled an ideological shift from interracialism to black solidarity. It first gained currency among militant black spokespersons in the mid-1960s; by the early 1970s it had become a recurrent theme in the writings of a number of black academics and intellectuals.5 Although the black perspective represented a variety of views and arguments on issues of race, the trumpeting of racial pride and self-affirmation was common to many of the writings and speeches on the subject.6
In this atmosphere of racial chauvinism, a series of scholarly studies proclaiming a black perspective were published. The arguments set forth made clear a substantial and fundamental shift in both the tone and focus of race relations scholarship. Consistent with the emphasis on black glorification and the quest for self-affirmation, analyses that described some aspects of ghetto life as pathological tended to be rejected in favor of those that emphasized black strengths. Arguments that focused on the deterioration of the poor black family were dismissed in favor of those that extolled the strengths of black families. Thus, black-perspective proponents reinterpreted behavior that Daniel Moynihan, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and sociologist Lee Rainwater had described as self-destructive and instead proclaimed it as creative in the sense that many blacks were displaying the ability to survive and even flourish in a ghetto milieu. Poor African American families were described as resilient and were seen as imaginatively adapting to an oppressive society.
The logic put forth by proponents of the black-perspective explanation is interesting because it does not even acknowledge self-destructive behavior in the ghetto. This is a unique response to the dominant American belief system’s emphasis on individual deficiencies, rather than the structure of opportunity, as causes of poverty and welfare. Instead of challenging the validity of the underlying assumptions of this belief system, this approach sidesteps the issue altogether by denying that social dislocations in the inner city represent any special problem. Researchers who emphasized these dislocations—such as persistent unemployment, crime, and drug use—were denounced, even when their work rejected the assumption of individual responsibility for poverty and welfare and focused instead on the structural roots of these problems.7
The vitriolic attacks and acrimonious debate that characterized this controversy proved to be too intimidating to scholars, particularly to liberal scholars. Accordingly, in the early 1970s, unlike the mid-1960s, there was little motivation to develop a research agenda that pursued the structural and cultural causes of social and economic problems in the inner-city ghetto. Indeed, in the aftermath of this controversy and in an effort to protect their work from the charge of racism or of “blaming the victim,” many liberal social scientists tended to avoid describing any behavior that could be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing to people of color. As a result, in the years following the initial controversy of the Moynihan report until the mid-1980s, social problems in the inner-city ghetto did not attract serious research attention from US social scientists.
Although research on urban poverty has mushroomed in the last several years, lingering effects of the Moynihan controversy on the willingness of social scientists to pursue a cultural analysis of life in poverty still remain. We will discuss this issue shortly, but first I must briefly put Moynihan’s concerns in current perspective, to highlight the ways in which the report was prophetic.
Several trends that had earlier worried Moynihan have become much more pronounced. One-quarter of all nonwhite births were to unmarried women in 1965, the year Moynihan wrote the report on the Negro family, and by 1996 the proportion of black children born outside of marriage had reached a high of 70 percent; it then dipped slightly to 69 percent in 2005 (see Figure 4.1).8 And in 1965 a single woman headed 25 percent of all nonwhite families; by 1996, however, the proportion of all black families headed by a single woman had swelled to 47 percent, dropping slightly to 45 percent in 2006 (see Figure 4.2).9
One reason for Moynihan’s concern about the decline in the rate of marriage among blacks is that children living in single-parent families in the United States, especially families in which the parents have never been married to each other, suffer from many more disadvantages than those who are raised in married-parent families. A study relying on longitudinal data (data collected on a specific group over a substantial period of time) found that, in the United States, persistently poor families (defined as having family incomes below the poverty line during at least eight years in a ten-year period) tended to be headed by women, and 31 percent of all persistently poor households were headed by nonelderly black women.10 This is an astounding figure, considering that African Americans account for just 12.4 percent of the entire US population.11
As sociologist Kathryn Edin pointed out, “more children are poor today than at any time since before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty began three decades ago. Children living in households headed by single mothers are America’s poorest demographic group. This fact is not surprising, since low-skilled single mothers who work seldom earn enough to bring their families out of poverty and most cannot get child support, medical benefits, housing subsidies, or cheap child care.”12
In 2006, whereas the median income of married-couple families with children was $72,948, the median income of single-parent families in which the mother was divorced was $35,217. For families in which the mother had never been married, the median income was only $18,111. Likewise, whereas less than one-tenth of children in husband–wife families were living below the poverty line, nearly one-quarter of those living with divorced mothers and over half of those living with mothers who had never been married were classified as poor.13 Recent research firmly supports the idea that some of the increase in the child poverty rate can be attributed to changes in family structure (i.e., the gradual shift from married-couple to single-parent families).14 Finally, longitudinal studies also revealed that before passage of the welfare reform legislation in 1996, mothers who had never been married received assistance from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for a significantly longer period than did separated or divorced mothers.15
In addition to the strong connection linking single parenthood with poverty and welfare receipt, the available research indicates that children from low-income households without fathers present are more likely to be school dropouts, become teenage parents, receive lower earnings in young adulthood, be welfare recipients, and experience cognitive, emotional, and social problems. Moreover, daughters who grow up in single-parent households are more likely to establish single-parent households themselves than are those raised in married-couple households. And finally, single-parent households tend to exert less control over the behavior of their adolescent children.16
Although statistics that record nonmarital births provide some sense of the extent to which mothers are having children outside of marriage, they do not provide an accurate picture of how many mothers are actually parenting alone. The reason is that nonmarital-birth statistics measure marital status at the time of birth only, and do not take into account other types of co-parenting relationships, such as couples who marry after the birth of a child. For example, among women with nonmarital first births, 82 percent of whites, 62 percent of Hispanics, and 59 percent of blacks married by age forty.17 However, according to one recent study of fragile families in seven cities, when the focus was low-income minority families, three-fourths of which were black, only 15 percent of unmarried mothers were married by the time of their child’s first birthday.18
The decrease in the proportion of married parents in the previous forty years had been partially offset by an increase in the proportion of parents who were unmarried but maintained a relationship, as either cohabiting or visiting partners. However, despite the extent to which cohabiting-and visiting-partner relationships offset the decline in married-couple families, black mothers in the inner city are far more likely than mothers of other ethnic groups to reside in households in which no other adults are present, and these mothers face greater challenges in raising children. Whereas 44 percent of the black women living with their children in Chicago’s inner city had no other adults in the household when our research was conducted in the late 1980s, only 6.5 percent of comparable Mexican American women were the sole adults in their households. Furthermore, inner-city black women whose children were under twelve years of age were eight times more likely than comparable Mexican American women to live in a single-adult household.
Analyzing data from our study, Martha Van Haitsma found that “network differences translate into childcare differences. Mexican women with young children are significantly more likely than their black counterparts to have regular childcare provided by a friend or relative.”19 The high proportion of two-adult Mexican American households with working fathers, particularly among immigrant Mexicans, may be an important factor in the mother’s greater access to networks of child care.
Also in our study, the high percentage of black mothers who lived with young children in a single-adult household was associated with problems finding and keeping a job—what social scientists call labor force attachment.20 If a single mother in Chicago’s inner city lived in a co-residential household—that is, a household that included at least one other adult—and received informal child care, she significantly improved her chances of entering the labor force. Inner-city mothers who were not on welfare, lived in a co-residential household, and received informal child care had a very high (90 percent) probability of labor force activity; those who maintained sole-adult households and did not receive informal child care had a much lower (60 percent) probability of working. Of the 12 percent of inner-city welfare mothers who candidly reported that they worked at least part-time—probably in the informal economy—those who lived in a co-residential household and received informal child care were more than five times as likely to work as were those who lived in single households and did not receive informal child care.21
Given the sharp increase in single-parent families and out-of-wedlock births in the African American community and the research showing a relationship between these trends and economic hardships, few serious scholars would maintain that Moynihan’s concerns about the changes in the black family were unjustified, even though the percentage of nonmarital births and single-mother families has increased among whites and Latinos as well.22 What continues to be disputed is how we account for the fragmentation of the African American family. What is often overlooked is that Moynihan attempted to synthesize structural and cultural analyses to understand the dynamics of poor black families. This relationship between structure and culture is explored in the remainder of this chapter.
The Role of Structural Factors
The explanations most often heard in the public debate over the last several decades associate the increase in out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families with welfare. The general public discussions and proposals for welfare reform reflected a wide assumption that there was a direct causal link between the level or generosity of welfare benefits and the likelihood that a young woman would bear a child outside of marriage. The fact that welfare recipients received benefits for their children was assumed to provide an incentive for additional childbearing. This widespread belief led several states, as part of the 1996 welfare reform, to adopt a family cap policy that stopped increasing benefits for additional babies born. In addition, welfare policy is thought to discourage marriage because of the way income limits are used to qualify someone for benefits. In 1998 the federal poverty line was $13,133 for a single parent with two children, and it was just $3,400 more for a dual-parent household with two children ($16,530). Therefore, it is very easy for a dual-parent family to disqualify itself from welfare, even if earnings are very low.23 Accordingly, welfare has been construed as a disincentive for marriage.
However, scientific evidence gathered in the early 1990s offered little support for these claims.24 Research examining the association between the generosity of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock childbearing and teen pregnancy prior to the enactment of welfare reform in 1996 indicated that benefit levels had no significant effect on the likelihood that African American girls and women would have children outside of marriage; likewise, benefit levels had either no significant effect or only a small effect on the odds that whites would have children outside of marriage. There is no evidence to suggest that welfare was a major factor in the rise of childbearing outside of marriage.
The corollary to the “welfare encourages childbirth outside of marriage” assumption is that decreases in welfare benefits also hinder nonmarital births. But this does not hold true. The states with the largest declines in AFDC benefits did not register the greatest slowdown in out-of-wedlock births.25 The rate of out-of-wedlock teen childbearing had nearly doubled between 1975 and 1996, the year welfare reform was enacted, even though the real value of AFDC, food stamps, and Medicaid during that period had fallen, after adjustment for inflation. Indeed, while the real value of cash welfare benefits had plummeted from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, not only had out-of-wedlock childbearing increased, but the tendency for partners to marry following the birth of their child had decreased as well.26 In The Truly Disadvantaged, I argued that the sharp increase in black male joblessness since 1970 accounts in large measure for the rise in the rate of single-parent families, and that because jobless rates are highest in the inner-city ghetto, rates of single parenthood are also highest there. Thus, many of the structural factors that have contributed to the increase in joblessness among low-skilled black males and the corresponding sharp decline in their income discussed in the previous chapters—the decreased relative demand for low-skilled labor caused by the computer revolution, the growing internationalization of low-skilled labor, the decline of the manufacturing sector, and the growth of service industries—logically extend to a discussion of the factors that contribute to the fragmentation of black families.
Whereas almost 27.5 percent of young African American men nationwide (ages eighteen to twenty-nine) with annual earnings of over $35,000 were married in 2006, the marriage ratio decreased steadily for those earning less than that—21.7 percent for those earning between $25,000 and $35,000, 15.3 percent for those earning between $15,000 and $25,000, 7.6 percent for those earning between $2,000 and $10,000, and only 7.5 percent for those with no reported earnings.27
However, research on the relationship between male employment and rates of marriage and single parenthood has yielded mixed findings. Although there is a strong association between rates of marriage and both employment status and earnings at any given point in time, national longitudinal studies suggest that these factors account for a relatively small proportion of the overall decline in marriage among African Americans. Harvard professor Christopher Jencks points out that the decline in the proportion of African American men who were married and living with their wives was almost as large among those who had worked throughout the previous years as among black men in general.28 In addition, studies have shown only modest support for the hypothesis linking the sharp rise in poor, single-parent families to the declining employment status and income of young black men.29
However, these studies are based on national data, not data specific to inner-city neighborhoods where many experiences relate to race and poverty. How much of the decline in the black marriage rate in the inner city can be accounted for by the increasing joblessness among black males? Our study of family life and poverty in Chicago’s inner city was not a longitudinal study, but we did collect retrospective (or life history) marriage and employment data that help us estimate trends over time. An analysis of respondents’ retrospective data comparing the employment experiences of different age groups (cohorts) revealed that marriage rates had dropped much more sharply among jobless black fathers than among employed black fathers. But this drop applies only to the younger cohorts. Analyzing data from our survey, Mark Testa and Marilyn Krogh found that although employment had no significant effect on the likelihood that black single fathers ages thirty-two to forty-four would eventually marry, it increased that likelihood by eight times for single fathers eighteen to thirty-one years old.30
Joblessness among black men is a significant factor in their delayed entry into marriage and in the decreasing rates of marriage after a child has been born, and this relationship has been exacerbated by sharp increases in incarceration that in turn lead to continued joblessness. Nevertheless, much of the decline in marriages in the inner city, including marriages that occur after a child has been born, remains unexplained when only structural factors are examined.
The Role of Cultural Factors
Even though whites and Latinos have also experienced an increase in the percentage of nonmarital births and single-mother families, although at a slower rate than among African Americans, social scientists continue to argue about whether unique cultural factors may account for the fragmentation of the African American family. As mentioned earlier, the controversy over the Moynihan report resulted in a persistent taboo on cultural explanations to help explain social problems in the poor black community.
If the public release of the Moynihan report was untimely in terms of the changing racial climate, it was also unfortunately published during heated debate over anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s work on the culture of poverty. Although Lewis’s work had been conducted among Spanish-speaking persons in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and New York City, his argument that poverty is passed from generation to generation through learned behaviors and attitudes was irresistibly attractive—or repellent—to persons interested in the plight of poor black Americans. Indeed, the Moynihan report quickly became a reference point for debates about the culture of poverty. The link between the report and Lewis’s theory was made especially explicit following the publication of an article and later a book, both titled “Blaming the Victim,” written by the Boston psychologist and civil rights activist William Ryan as a critique of the Moynihan report.31 “Blaming the victim” became a slogan repeatedly used by critics of the culture-of-poverty thesis, and they made repeated reference to the Moynihan report when voicing their criticisms.
Relying on participant observation and life history data to analyze Latin American poverty, Oscar Lewis described the culture of poverty as “both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated capitalistic society.” However, he also noted that once the culture of poverty comes into existence, “it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effect on the children. By the time slum children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime.”32 Although Lewis later modified his position by placing more weight on external societal forces than on self-perpetuating cultural traits to explain the behavior of the poor, conservative social scientists embellished the idea that poverty is a product of “deeply ingrained habits” that are unlikely to change following improvements in external conditions.33
Although Moynihan devoted an entire chapter of the report to structural causes for the fragmentation of the black family and the downward spiral of low-skilled black males, a close reading of his report does reveal an implicit culture-of-poverty explanation as well. Like Oscar Lewis, Moynihan relates cultural patterns to structural factors and then discusses how these patterns come to influence other aspects of behavior. In the concluding chapter of his report, for example, Moynihan states that the situation of the black family “may indeed have begun to feed on itself.” To illustrate, he notes that from 1948 to 1962, the unemployment rate among black males and the number of new AFDC cases were very highly correlated. After 1962, however, the trend reversed itself for the first time. The number of new AFDC cases continued to rise, but black male unemployment declined.34 “With this one statistical correlation, by far the most highly publicized in the Report,” states the historian Alice O’Connor, “Moynihan sealed the argument that the ‘pathology’ had become self-perpetuating: pathology, here measured as welfare ‘dependency,’ was no longer correlated with the unemployment rate; it was going up on its own.”35 Also like Oscar Lewis, Moynihan talks about the adverse effects of children being exposed to the cultural environment or, as he puts it, to the tangle of pathology in the ghetto.
Unlike many conservative social scientists, however, Moynihan does not imply that the fragmentation of black families and the associated problems are immutable and cannot be changed through social policy. In addition, his implicit cultural argument on the impact of black family fragmentation, which many would associate with the culture of poverty, is, to repeat, part of a complex thesis on the black family that combines structural and cultural factors.
According to Orlando Patterson, the resistance to a cultural analysis of the fragmentation of the black family has been caused in no small measure by reactions to the Moynihan report.36 This reaction resulted in a lack of attention to possible cultural continuities in the black family that may be traceable back to slavery. It also led to a lack of understanding of the role of culture in accounting for how black people respond to poverty, and indeed how cultural practices may contribute to either the increase or reduction of poverty.
Let’s briefly discuss the issue of cultural continuities. As Patterson correctly points out, scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Kenneth B. Clark exemplify a long tradition of African American scholarship that partly explains the distinctive African American gender and familial patterns that follow from the experiences of slavery. Following the Moynihan report, however, “the ideological and scholarly tide turned sharply away from this claim of continuity toward a denial of any such connection.”37
The most persuasive and widely cited critique of this view was a book by the historian Herbert G. Gutman, who challenged Moynihan’s view that the African American family was weak, disorganized, and matrifocal (meaning that women occupied a central position) as it emerged from slavery.38 Relying on census data and historical documents, including letters and diaries, Gutman argued that far from being weak, black American families had been strong and resilient after emancipation. In the early twentieth century, most were married-couple families and a majority of the children were born within marriage. “In the 50 years after emancipation,” Gutman wrote, “most African-American families were headed by a husband and wife, most eventually married, and most children lived with both parents.”39
However, social scientists from the University of Pennsylvania seriously challenged Gutman’s thesis in two major studies: one by Samuel H. Preston and his colleagues, the other by S. Philip Morgan and several of his colleagues.40 Each study is based on public use samples from the US Census Bureau, which were released after the publication of Gutman’s book. These new data sets allow for a finer-grained analysis of the “consistency of various census items and of the link among marital status, marital histories, current fertility and fertility history.”41
Using data from the public use samples, Preston and his colleagues revealed that the straightforward census tabulations that Gutman had relied on had serious flaws. They show that widowhood was overreported for both younger and older black women, and that some of the overreporting reflected attempts to account for births outside of marriage. “Furthermore, when compared to reconstruction based on women’s ages at marriage and on husbands’ mortality,” state the authors, “census reports contained far too many first marriages of short duration. This latter evidence suggests that previous unions were often omitted and that marital turnover was faster than implied even by the high percentages of women reported as married.”42 Preston and his colleagues therefore conclude that Gutman’s portrait of stable African American families in the rural South prior to their mass migration to the urban North is overstated.
Following this study, Morgan and his colleagues found distinct differences in living arrangements between native-born white and black Americans at the start of the twentieth century that “were geographically pervasive—they are unmistakable in the North and South and in both rural and urban areas.”43 Socioeconomic factors such as poverty, women’s employment, and the lower earnings of African American males accounted for some of these racial differences. But it is clear from this study that these factors, although clearly necessary in any explanatory framework, were hardly sufficient to explain the differences. Indeed, both studies argued that more attention should be given to cultural/historical factors. For example, Morgan and colleagues point out that despite studies showing cultural/historical continuity in the linguistic and religious behaviors of African Americans and despite studies of Caribbean societies that take historical and cultural influences on family patterns seriously, “most historians of the African-American family have gone to great lengths to discount the possibility of cultural continuity between African and African-American family systems.”44
Morgan and his colleagues note that some contemporary historians argue that antebellum slavery reinforced the sub-Saharan African pattern of strong ties and obligations to extended kin. “Despite the absence of any legal standing for slave ‘marriage,’ slaves were able to maintain strong familial bonds, especially kin bonds. These traditions could make spouse absence and separation more acceptable among African Americans than among whites,”45 and that persistent residential segregation and the lack of racial interaction in the social, economic, and cultural spheres could maintain or reinforce such differences. From a comparative perspective, however, it is difficult to follow this reasoning. For example, as we shall soon see, Mexican Americans also value extended family and yet do not have a high tolerance for paternal absence.46 Morgan and his colleagues do not address such issues, but they do conclude that an adequate explanation of contemporary African American family patterns requires carefully “synthesized arguments that weave together the influence of demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural/historical factors.”47
Orlando Patterson later made the same point in his provocative book Rituals of Blood.48 In his zeal to demonstrate the importance of cultural continuity, however, Patterson downplays the importance of social/economic factors such as male joblessness in accounting for family fragmentation among African Americans, leaving unexplored the puzzle pointed out by David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks: “why these cultural legacies should suddenly have become more important in the last half of the twentieth century.”49 Patterson argues that the economic problems experienced by inner-city residents do not sufficiently explain current trends in the formation of the black family.
Following Patterson’s logic, if historical research suggests cultural/historical continuity in the linguistic and religious behaviors of African Americans, we should not dismiss cultural continuity in trying to fully explain family patterns in the African American community. However, cultural continuities are difficult to substantiate. What mechanisms transmit weak family structure across generations? With linguistic and religious traditions it is pretty clear how intergenerational continuity is maintained, especially when families are segregated by race and class and have limited contacts with other groups. However, how does one separate factors influenced by cultural continuities from factors derived from situational and contextual factors such as joblessness and persistent poverty?
Concerns about cultural continuity are even raised by scholars who urge that more attention be given to the role of culture in the study of human behavior. Their major concern is that the proponents of cultural/historical continuity tend to define culture as a specific set of orientations and practices characteristic of a particular group. In their perceptive paper on how culture matters for the understanding of poverty, Michèle Lamont and Mario Small, two prominent cultural sociologists, question the idea that racial or ethnic groups “have” a culture “in the sense of sets of values or attitudes that all or most members of a racial or ethnic (or class) group share.”50
Pointing out that the differences within a group are often larger than the differences between distinct groups (e.g., differences between the black middle class and the black lower class on a range of cultural attributes may be greater than differences between blacks and whites per se), Lamont and Small maintain that it is not helpful to speak of an African American culture that differs from an Asian culture or a Euro-American culture in the study of racial differences in poverty. “Instead of imputing a shared culture to groups,” they argue, it is better to examine empirically “the range of frames through which people make sense of their reality and how they use them to orient their action.”51 Lamont and Small further argue that cultural “frames do not cause behavior so much as make it possible or likely.”52 In other words, cultural frames are necessary but not sufficient explanations for behavior. For the purpose of pursuing a cultural analysis of life in poverty, I fully agree.
The cultural continuity thesis may have merit, but there is not enough evidence to corroborate or confirm it at this time. In other words, the relative importance of the combination of cultural continuity and contemporary socioeconomic factors in accounting for black family patterns remains an open question that can be best answered through careful empirical research.
The decline in the rate of marriage among inner-city black parents in the last several decades is a function not simply of deepening scarcity of jobs for low-skilled workers or of changing attitudes toward sex and marriage in society at large, but of, as Testa emphasizes, “the interaction between material and cultural constraints.”53 The important point is that “variation in the moral evaluations that different sociocultural groups attach to premarital sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and nonmarital parenthood affects the importance of economic considerations in a person’s decision to marry.”54 That is, discouraging economic conditions tend to reinforce any tolerance for having children without marriage or even partnering. The weaker the norms are against premarital sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and nonmarital parenthood, the more economic considerations affect decisions to marry.
The data we collected in the late 1980s in our random survey of nearly 2,500 poor and nonpoor African American, Latino, and white residents in Chicago’s inner-city neighborhoods shed light on this relationship.55 Only 28 percent of the African American parents aged eighteen to forty-four were married when they were interviewed in 1987 and 1988, compared with 75 percent of the Mexican American parents, 61 percent of the white parents, and 45 percent of the Puerto Rican parents. African Americans in these neighborhoods suffered from higher levels of joblessness and higher rates of concentrated poverty (the percentage of poor families in a neighborhood), which accounted for some of the differences. But even when ethnic-group variations in work activity, poverty concentration, education, and family structure were taken into account, significant differences between inner-city blacks and the other groups, especially the Mexican Americans, remained.56 Accordingly, it is reasonable to consider the influence of cultural variables in accounting for some of these differences.
A brief comparison between inner-city blacks and inner-city Mexican Americans (many of whom are immigrants) in terms of family perspectives provides some evidence of cultural differences. Marriage and family ties are subjects of “frequent and intense discourse” among Mexican American immigrants.57 Mexicans come to the United States with a clear conception of a traditional family unit that features men as breadwinners. Although extramarital affairs by men are tolerated, “a pregnant, unmarried woman is a source of opprobrium, anguish, or great concern.”58 Pressure is applied by the kin of both parents for the couple to enter into marriage. Religion undoubtedly plays a role in Mexican American marital sanctions. Mexicans have been strongly influenced by Roman Catholicism, a religion that discourages divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the Mexican cultural framing of marriage is significantly influenced by religious beliefs and other traditional conceptions of what constitutes an appropriate family unit.
The intensity of the commitment to the marital bond among Mexican immigrants will very likely decline, the longer they remain in the United States and are exposed to US norms and the changing opportunity structures for men and women. Indeed, Mexican American women born in the United States are significantly more likely to experience a marital disruption (i.e., divorce or separation) compared to Mexican American women born in Mexico (40.9 percent compared to 13.1 percent, respectively).59
Nonetheless, cultural arrangements reflect structural realities. In comparison with inner-city blacks, inner-city Mexican immigrants have a stronger attachment to the labor force—they have come, after all, a very long way to find work—as well as stronger households, networks, and neighborhoods. Therefore, as long as these differences exist, attitudes toward the family and family formation among inner-city blacks and Mexican immigrants will contrast noticeably.
Ethnographic data from our Chicago study revealed that the relationships between inner-city black men and women, whether in a marital or nonmarital situation, were often fractious and antagonistic. Inner-city black women routinely said they distrusted men and felt strongly that black men lacked dedication to their partners and children.60 They argued that black males are hopeless as either husbands or fathers and that more of their time is spent on the streets than at home. As one woman, an unmarried mother of three children from a high-poverty neighborhood on the South Side, put it, “and most of the men don’t have jobs…but if things were equal it really wouldn’t matter, would it? I mean OK if you’re together and everything, you split, whatever…The way it is, if they can get jobs then they go and get drunk or whatever.” When asked if that’s why she had not gotten married, she stated,
I don’t think I want to get married but then…see you’re supposed to stick to that one and that’s a fantasy. You know, stick with one for the rest of your life. I’ve never met many people like that, have you?…If they’re married and have kids. Them kids come in and it seems like the men get jealous ’cause you’re spending your time on them. OK they can get up and go anytime. A woman has to stick there all the time ’cause she got them kids behind their backs.
Women in the inner city tended to believe that black men got involved with women mainly to obtain sex or money, and that once these goals had been achieved, the women were usually discarded. For example, one woman from a poor neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago was asked if she still saw the father of her child. She stated, “He left before the baby was born, I was about two weeks pregnant and he said that he didn’t want to be bothered and I said ‘Fine—you go your way and I go mine.’” Another woman—a twenty-one-year-old, part-time–employed, unmarried mother of two children, and also a resident of a poor neighborhood on the West Side—voiced this general complaint about men:
Some mens can’t speak to one woman. Some man might try to force they self to do that, then again you really can’t believe it so a, a female have to be careful, really careful. She have to learn really if this man really care about her, if he gonna do what he really does, what he say he, what he plan on doing, you know. So, you know—’cause they be out to get one thing, nothing but sex from a female.
There was a widespread feeling among women in the inner city that black males had relationships with more than one female at a time. And since some young men left their girlfriends as soon as they became pregnant, it was not uncommon to find a black male who had fathered at least three children by three separate women. Despite the problematic state of these relationships, sex among inner-city black teenagers was widely practiced. In the ethnographic phase of our research, respondents reported that sex was an integral and expected aspect of their romantic relationships. Males especially felt peer pressure to be sexually active. They said that the members of their peer networks bragged about their sexual encounters and that they felt obligated to reveal their own sexual exploits. Little consideration was given to the implications or consequences of sexual matters for the longer-term relationship or for childbearing. These reports could be loosely construed as evidence for the cool-pose culture among young black men discussed in Chapter 3.
Whereas women blamed men for the poor gender relations, men maintained that it was the women who were troublesome. The men complained that it was not easy to deal with the women’s suspicions about their behavior and intentions. They also felt that material resources especially attracted women and that it was therefore difficult to find women who were supportive of partners with a low living standard.
These antagonistic relationships influenced the views of both men and women about marriage. The ethnographic data revealed especially weak support for the institution of marriage in the inner-city ghetto among black men. Many of the men viewed marriage as tying them down and resulting in a loss of freedom. “Marriage. You can’t have it, you can’t do the things you wanna do then,” stated an unemployed twenty-one-year-old unmarried father of one child from a poor neighborhood on the West Side.
She [the spouse] might want you in at a certain time and all, all this. You can’t hang out when you married, you know. You married to be with her…I like, you know, spending my time, half the time with my friends and then come in when I want to…In my book it [marriage] is something that is bad. Like, like fighting, divorce.
A twenty-seven-year-old unmarried, employed father of one child made a similar point: Marriage “cuts down a lot of things you used to do, like, staying out late, stuff like that, hanging with the fellows all day, like, now you can do what the hell you want to do, now, when you—when you married, got a family, it cuts a lot of that stuff off.”
The men in the inner city generally felt that it was much better for all parties to remain in a nonmarital relationship until the relationship dissolved rather than getting married and then having to get a divorce. A twenty-five-year-old unmarried West Side resident, the father of one child, expressed this view:
Well, most black men feel now, why get married when you got six to seven womens to one guy, really. You know, ’cause there’s more women out here mostly than men. ’Cause most dudes around here are killing each other like fools over drugs or all this other stuff. And if you’re not that bad looking of a guy, you know, and you know a lot of women like you, why get married when you can play the field the way they want to do, you know?
A twenty-five-year-old part-time worker with a seven-year-old daughter explained why he had avoided marriage following the child’s birth:
For years I have been observing other marriages. They all have been built on the wrong foundation. The husband misuses the family or neglects the family or the wife do the same, ah, they just missing a lot of important elements. I had made a commitment to marry her really out of people pleasing. My mom wanted me to do it; her parents wanted us to do it. Taking their suggestions and opinions about the situation over my own and [I] am a grown man. These decisions is for me to make and I realized that they were going to go to expect it to last for 20, 40 years so I evaluated my feelings and came to the honest conclusion that was not right for me, right. And I made the decision that the baby, that I could be a father without necessarily living there.
Others talk about avoiding or delaying marriage for economic reasons. “It made no sense to just get married because we have a baby like other people…do,” argued an eighteen-year-old unmarried father of a two-week-old son. “If I couldn’t take care of my family, why get married?”
These various responses show that marriage was “not in the forefront of the men’s minds.”61 The dominant attitude among the young, single black fathers in our Chicago study was, “I’ll get married in the future when I am no longer having fun and when I get a job or a better job.”62 Marriage would limit their ability to date other women or “hang out” with the boys. The ethnographic data clearly reveal that the birth of a child did not create a sense of obligation to marry, and that most young fathers felt little pressure, from either their family or their partner’s family, to marry. For young African American men in the inner city, having children and getting married were not usually connected.
There is very little research on changing norms and sanctions regarding the family in the inner city,63 but the norms do appear to have changed. In a study of fathering in the inner city based on a series of interviews with the same respondents over several years, Frank Furstenberg notes,
I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think that families now exert less pressure on men to remain involved than they once did. I found no instance, for example, of families urging their children to marry or even to live together as was common when I was studying the parents of my informants in the mid-1960s.64
The data from our Chicago study, however, indicate that the young men did “feel some obligation to contribute something to support their children.”65 The level of financial support was low and often erratic, however, varying from occasionally buying disposable diapers to regularly contributing several hundred dollars a month. As Frank Furstenberg points out,
When ill-timed pregnancies occur in unstable partnerships to men who have few material resources for managing unplanned parenthood, they challenge, to say the least, the commitment of young fathers. Fatherhood occurs to men who often have a personal biography that poorly equips them to act on their intentions, even when their intentions to do for their children are strongly felt. And fatherhood [in the inner city] takes place in a culture where the gap between good intentions and good performance is large and widely recognized.66
Black women in the inner city were more interested in marriage, but their expectations for matrimony were low and they did not hold the men they encountered in very high regard. The women felt that even if they did marry, the marriage was likely to be unsuccessful. They maintained that husbands were not as dedicated to their wives as in previous generations and that they would not be able to depend on their husbands even if they did get married.
A young welfare mother of three children from a high-poverty neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago made the following point:
Well, to my recollection, twenty years ago I was only seven years [old] but…twenty years ago, men, if they got a woman pregnant, that if they didn’t marry her, they stood by her and took care of the child. And nowadays, when a man makes you pregnant, they’re goin’ off and leave you and think nothing of it. And also…also, uh, twenty years ago, I find that there were more people getting married and when they got married they were staying together. I found that with a lot of couples nowadays, that when they get married they’re so quick to get a divorce. I’ve thought about marriage myself many times, uh, but nowadays, it seems to me that when it comes to marriage, it just doesn’t mean anything to people. At least the men that I talk to. And also, twenty years ago, I think families were closer [police siren]. I found now families are drifting apart, they’re not as loving as they were twenty years ago. I find with a lot of families now, they’re quicker to hurt you than to help you.
A thirty-one-year-old divorcée and welfare mother of four children from a South Side high-poverty neighborhood expressed the view that welfare enables some women to avoid marriage:
I still say I wouldn’t get married. You know, like some people say, there’s a lot of elderly people that say, “It’s best to get a child a father’s name, it’s best to do that.” But I think that by having public aid, and if you do happen to wind up with a lot of kids, until you’re able to get on your feet, it’s better not to get married. Because the actual status between an unmarried woman on welfare, and an unmarried man on welfare is a lot different when they have kids or have no kids. If you have kids, you say, “OK, he’s going to do it better for me anyway,” so we get married, change the names of the kids. And then, “I’m not working, them’s not my kids.” If you’re not married to the person you say, “They’re not yours? Hit the door then!” But if you’re married to them, you say, “Hit the door, please?” You know, you start nagging and they say, “I’m not going nowhere.” So you say, “Well, I’ll put you out.” But you can’t put them out, can’t do nothing. You’re stuck with them just like all the other people stuck with their marriage and stuff. I think it’s best, once you get a family started, and you’re not as educated as well as you wanted to be, it’s not good to get married. That’s one thing I would never do again is get married…I think it’s best not to get married. Unless you’re pretty sure that person’s going to take care of you.
Finally, a twenty-seven-year-old single woman (who was childless, had four years of college, worked as a customer service representative, and lived in a high-poverty neighborhood on the South Side) talked about changes in the family structure in relation to her own personal situation. She stated that there had been a definite change in the family structure as far as the mother and father being together.
The way things are going now you’ll find more single women having kids, but not totally dependent on the guy being there. I know there’s a change in friends of mine who have kids, the father isn’t there with them. They’re not so totally dependent on him any more. They’re out there doing for themselves…You have to make it one way or another, and you can’t depend on him to come through or him to be there. And a lot of them are searching for someone to be with, but if [he] comes he does and if he doesn’t he doesn’t. Because I always say by the time I’m thirty, if I’m not married, I know I’ll still have me a child. But I wouldn’t be so hung up on the idea of having somebody be there. I probably wouldn’t have a child by anyone I was seeing or anything. I’d probably go through a sperm bank. I think financially I could do it, but I would need help as far as babysitting and stuff.
The ethnographic data reveal that both inner-city black males and females believe that since most marriages will eventually break up and no longer represent meaningful relationships, it is better to avoid the entanglements of wedlock altogether. For many single mothers in the inner city, remaining single makes more sense as a family formation strategy than does marriage. Single mothers who perceive the fathers of their children as unreliable or as having limited financial means will often—rationally—choose single parenthood. From the point of view of day-to-day survival, single parenthood reduces the emotional burden and shields these women from the type of exploitation that often accompanies the sharing of both living arrangements and limited resources. Men and women are extremely suspicious of each other, and their concerns range from the degree of financial commitment to fidelity. For all these reasons, women in our study often stated they did not want to get married until they were sure it was going to work out—and by “work out” they meant that they wanted a spouse who would contribute financially and emotionally to them and to their children.
However, these ethnographic findings are based on research conducted in the late 1980s. Although it could be argued that relations between inner-city men and women, including marital relations, could have changed significantly since then, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas presented similar findings in a more recent study. In their book, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, Edin and Kefalas collected and analyzed data on low-income black, white, and Puerto Rican single mothers in Camden, New Jersey (one of America’s poorest cities), and in eight poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia.67
Edin and Kefalas found that the low-income, young mothers they interviewed valued motherhood highly. Indeed, their identity, emotional fulfillment, personal success, and hope for the future were tied to motherhood. The thought of not being a parent or of postponing parenting until their thirties—a common practice for middle-class women—was anathema to the women in this study. However, the respondents also valued marriage and hoped to be married some day. Edin and Kefalas forcefully argue that poor women postpone marriage not because they value it lightly, but because they feel that they cannot commit to marriage until they are confident of success.
The basic problem they face, as did the women in our earlier Chicago study, is that the men to whom they have access tend not to be marriageable because of a range of problems: poor education, chronic joblessness, low earning, criminal records, spells of incarceration, drug and alcohol abuse, intimate violence, and chronic infidelity. There is a short supply of good, decent, trustworthy men in their world. The better-off men go to the better-off women. It is not surprising that the relationships these women have with the fathers of their children are plagued with physical abuse, mistrust, and infidelity. The women therefore wait until they can find a man they can trust—a man who has, over time, proven himself to be a dependable and responsible partner and father. Their dreams include financial security and having a house before getting married. And because all of these conditions are so difficult to meet, they become mothers long before they become wives, and some never marry.
Edin and Kefalas point out that unlike many affluent women, the poor women they studied do not view having a child out of wedlock as ruining their lives, because they feel that their future would be even bleaker without children. For these women, motherhood is the most important social role they believe they will ever play, and it is the surest accomplishment they can attain. Many of the women told Edin and Kefalas that they had been headed for trouble until they got pregnant and turned their lives around because of a desire to be good mothers. Many of them said that having children had been a life-altering experience and that they could not imagine living without children.
Whereas middle-class women often put off marriage and childbearing to pursue economic goals, poor women have children in the absence of better opportunities. The mothers in this study expressed confidence in their ability to provide for their children. However, because these mothers frequently fail to recognize the disadvantages that will affect their children’s chances in life, this confidence is often unjustified. In this sense their cultural framing of marriage and motherhood not only shapes how they respond to poverty—it may also indirectly affect their children’s odds of escaping poverty. The implication here is that the decision to forgo or delay marriage increases the odds that the family will live in persistent poverty.
In 1978, sociologist Diana Pearce coined the term “feminization of poverty” to describe the increase of female-headed households among the poor.68 Since then, studies have repeatedly reported that married-couple families are far less likely to be in poverty than are households headed by a single mother. In one study, whereas only slightly more than 5 percent of married-couple families lived in poverty in 2004, nearly 30 percent of female-headed families were poor.69 According to another study, “children in single-female-headed households account for more than 60% of all children in families living in poverty.”70 This effect is not unique to any one group. The poverty rate of white children in households headed by single females was almost 5 times greater than the poverty rate for those in married-couple families; for black children the rate was 4.5 times greater, and for Hispanic children it was 2.4 times greater. The author states, “Because of the high rates of poverty experienced by children in families headed by single females, black children in single-female-headed families account for more than 85% of all poor black children.”71 Finally, a longitudinal study that tracked a national random sample of families over several years revealed that poverty tends to be chronic for children in single-mother families where the mother was either never married or was a teenager when the child was born.72
It has been argued that because married-couple families frequently have two potential (and often actual) breadwinners, their chances of preventing or escaping poverty are much greater than those of families headed by single females.73 Given the extremely high jobless rate among low-skilled black males, however, this argument—although generally true—is less applicable to poor black families in the inner city.
The Interaction of Culture and Social Structure
Edin and Kefalas’s study provides a compelling argument for examining the role of culture under conditions of chronic economic hardship and its impact on family life. And the finding of similar views on motherhood and marriage that they uncovered among poor women from different groups (African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and whites) reinforce Lamont and Small’s argument on meaning making—namely, that our focus for study should be on cultural frames that develop in different spatial and contextual circumstances, and how they orient action, rather than on the shared values of members of a particular racial or ethnic group.
Nonetheless, by one logic, every woman in Edin and Kefalas’s study—black, white, or Puerto Rican—was likely to respond to urban poverty by finding positive meaning in having out-of-wedlock children. By a different logic, the unique historical racial experiences of inner-city blacks may have also influenced their cultural framing of marriage and motherhood in ways not captured by Edin and Kefalas.74 I tend to think that both logics apply—that is, that all the women in this study could find meaning and purpose in child rearing in spite of serious financial hardship, and that black women would, on balance, have particular views on family formed through the unique circumstances tied to the racial segregation. However, I would place far more weight on the former because it reveals that not only blacks, but other ethnic groups, have responded to conditions of poverty in similar ways. How families are formed among America’s poorest citizens is an area that cries out for further research.
Changing patterns of family formation are not limited to the inner-city black community but are part of wider societal trends. The commitment to traditional husband–wife families and the stigma associated with out-of-wedlock births, separation, and divorce have waned significantly in the United States. “The labor market conditions which sustained the ‘male breadwinner’ family have all but vanished.”75 This shift has gradually led to the creation of a new set of orientations that place less value on marriage and reject the dominance of men as a standard for a successful nuclear family.76
Like all other groups, inner-city blacks are influenced by these norms. But they also have unique experiences that derive from decades of racial segregation and highly concentrated poverty that reinforce these norms. The same argument applies when I compare the findings in our Chicago study with those of Edin and Kefalas. More specifically, just as the white, Puerto Rican, and black mothers in their study emphasized the loss of personal freedom, fear about the lack of dedication a partner might feel toward them, and the importance of having secure jobs and financial security before seriously considering matrimony, so too did the inner-city blacks in our Chicago study. Moreover, just as the mothers in the Edin and Kefalas study saw little reason to contemplate seriously the consequences of single parenthood, because their prospects for social and economic mobility were severely limited whether they were married or not, so too did the inner-city blacks in our Chicago study. But the comparisons should not stop here.
My concern about the Edin and Kefalas study is that their emphasis on commonalities obscured any differences that might exist among poor black, Puerto Rican, and white mothers. In other words, they neglected to explore any differences that might stem from racial experiences. I am not referring to racial experiences that go back to slavery, as argued in the speculative cultural continuity thesis, but experiences in the context of living in racially segregated ghettos where problems of poverty, joblessness, and lack of opportunity are exacerbated by the cumulative problems of race.
Nonetheless, as suggested by the title of this book and in the material covered thus far, the experiences of poor, inner-city blacks represent the influences of more than just race. Their responses to marriage and childbearing also stem from the linkage between new structural realities, changing norms, and evolving cultural patterns. The new structural realities may be seen in the diminishing employment opportunities for low-skilled workers. The decline of the mass production system and the rise of new jobs in the highly technological global economy that require training and education have severely weakened the labor force attachment among inner-city workers. As employment prospects recede, the foundation for stable relationships becomes weaker over time. More permanent relationships such as marriage give way to temporary liaisons that result in broken relationships, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births, and, in the rare occurrence of marriage, to separation and divorce. The changing norms for marriage in the larger society also reinforce the movement toward temporary liaisons in the inner city, and therefore economic considerations in marital decisions take on even greater significance.
Conclusion
In previous chapters I argued that the available evidence suggests that structural factors are more important than cultural variables in accounting for concentrated poverty in the inner city and the economic and social position of poor black males. As revealed in this chapter, the structural evidence for the fragmentation of poor black families is not as compelling. Our study of family life and poverty in Chicago provided retrospective data revealing that marriage had declined much more sharply among young, jobless African American fathers than among young, employed black fathers. However, the findings from national research on the relationship of both employment and earnings to rates of marriage are mixed—showing a strong relationship at a single point in time, but a weak association over a period of time.
Nonetheless, the research on African American families discussed in this chapter provides little reason to conclude that cultural variables have played a greater role than structural factors in black family fragmentation. Indeed, the available data suggest the opposite conclusion. The evidence to corroborate the cultural continuity thesis is insufficient. Furthermore, research reveals that the cultural responses among poor women—black, white, and Puerto Rican—tend to be similar. In the absence of definitive evidence, we can only speculate whether the historic racial experiences of inner-city African American women have uniquely influenced their cultural framing of marriage and motherhood.
We can confidently state, however, that regardless of the relative significance of structural and cultural factors in black family fragmentation, they interact in ways far too important for social scientists and policy makers to ignore.