"There is a crisis of unprecedented magnitude in the black
community, one that goes to the very heart of its survival. The black
family is failing."
Quibble if you will about the "unprecedented magnitude" --
slavery wasn't exactly a high point of African American well-being.
But there's no quarreling with the essence of the alarm sounded here
last week by a gathering of Pentecostal clergy and the Seymour
Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. What is happening to the
black family in America is the sociological equivalent of global
warming: easier to document than to reverse, inconsistent in its
near-term effect -- and disastrous in the long run.
Father absence is the bane of the black community, predisposing
its children (boys especially, but increasingly girls as well) to
school failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship, and to an
intergenerational repetition of the grim cycle. The culprit, the
ministers (led by the Rev. Eugene Rivers III of Boston, president of
the Seymour Institute) agreed, is the decline of marriage.
Kenneth B. Johnson, a Seymour senior fellow who has worked in
youth programs, says he often sees teenagers "who've never seen a
wedding."
The concern is not new. As Rivers noted at last week's National
Press Club news conference, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded
the alarm 40 years ago, only to be "condemned and pilloried as
misinformed, malevolent and even racist."
What is new is the understanding of how deep and wide is the
reach of declining marriage -- and the still-forming determination to
do something about it.
When Moynihan issued his controversial study, roughly a quarter
of black babies were born out of wedlock; moreover, it was largely a
low-income phenomenon. The proportion now tops two-thirds, with little
prospect of significant decline, and has moved up the socioeconomic
scale.
There have been two main explanations. At the low-income end,
the disproportionate incarceration, unemployment and early death of
black men make them unavailable for marriage. At the upper-income
level, it is the fact that black women are far likelier than black men
to complete high school, attend college and earn the professional
credentials that would render them "eligible" for marriage.
Both explanations are true. But black men aren't born
incarcerated, crime-prone dropouts. What principally renders them
vulnerable to such a plight is the absence of fathers and their
stabilizing influence.
Fatherless boys (as a general rule) become ineligible to be
husbands -- though no less likely to become fathers -- and their
children fall into the patterns that render them ineligible to
be husbands.
The absence of fathers means, as well, that girls lack both a
pattern against which to measure the boys who pursue them and an
example of sacrificial love between a man and a woman. As the
ministers were at pains to say last week, it isn't the incompetence of
mothers that is at issue but the absence of half of the adult support
needed for families to be most effective.
Interestingly, they blamed the black church for abetting the
decline of the black family -- by moderating virtually out of
existence its once stern sanctions against extramarital sex and
childbirth and by accepting the present trends as more or less
inevitable.
They didn't say -- but might have -- that black America's almost
reflexive search for outside explanations for our internal problems
delayed the introspective examination that might have slowed the
trend. What we have now is a changed culture -- a culture whose
worst aspects are reinforced by oversexualized popular entertainment
and that places a reduced value on the things that produced nearly a
century of socioeconomic improvement. For the first time since
slavery, it is no longer possible to say with assurance that things
are getting better.
As the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a slightly different context,
"What began as a problem has deteriorated into a condition. Problems
require solving; conditions require healing."
How to start the healing? Rivers and his colleagues hope to use
their personal influence, a series of marriage forums and their
well-produced booklet, "God's Gift: A Christian Vision of Marriage and
the Black Family," to launch a serious, national discussion and action
program.
In truth, though, the situation is so critical -- and its
elements so interconnected and self-perpetuating -- that there is no
wrong place to begin. When you find yourself in this sort of a hole,
someone once said, the first thing to do is stop digging.
willrasp@washpost.com
