








ack people who can afford it. 
Who s right? Both sides are too busy pointing fingers to find out.  We re never going to get to where we need to be if we first have to settle whose fault it is,  says writer Nicholas Lemann, whose 1991 book,  The Promised Land,  chronicles the great migration of blacks from the rural south to the industrialized North. But if there is any optimism, it is that now, after more than two decades on the defensive and with a Democratic president in the White House for the first time m 12 years, the African-American community is beginning to talk a little more openly about its problems  Be cause of all the debate about morality' socia! programs, individual responsibility, it became very difficult to have an honest discussion,  says Angela Glover Blackwell, who heads the Children s De-forSCMdd S ^Ommunity Crusade for Children. I d like to think we ve
148
entered an era where we re willing to accept that there is a dual responsibility  between government and ordinary citizens.
Without question, government must do more to help. But increasingly, African-Americans are unwilling to wait for White America to step in.  During integration,  says Virginia Walden, who owns a day-care center in Washington, D.C.,  we kept saying that the white people did us wrong, and that they owed us. Well, white people did us wrong, but I tell my children,  Don t nobody owe you anything. You ve got to work for what you get .  In response, many African-American men and women have thrown themselves into a range of grassroots efforts from volunteer work in their communities to adopting children stopgap efforts, perhaps, but to many, also cathartic and energizing. In many neighborhoods, the black church has led the awakening. Ministers began chastising themselves for sidestepping some basic moral, issues.  We don t use  family values as an ax,  says Wallace Smith E  ^hU h Baptist Church in Washington. But if someone is shacked up t0  et carried   Sethis remarkably blunt about his own riaZ " n  P0rtance of a stable mar-right  QUayle   he says'  was . At,thleir kitchen * and in their lie^k to"16? Ty bIack fami-^Xf^ worries them i   part of what
y ack women are  Sapphires, 
37% prow aduh
35% lowtii pies pietl
THE NE
GUST It
trying to dominate,  exj psychologist Alvin Pouss to the wife of Kingfish Andy,  who epitomized th black woman. But Boston Liz Walker believes that m mistake self-reliance for ness.  I don t think blacl thrown black men out,  who sparked a controvei became pregnant out of years ago, long before   Brown knew what a home was.  I think black worn abandoned."
More commonly, though feel the fallout of the econ chological battering the A can male has taken in the 1; Of course black women i commitment. But not with chief qualification for ma he s, well, a man. The rei cess of Terry McMillan :  Waiting to Exhale,  un( passion. The book s main -four strong-minded black can t seem to find men wb They clearly struck a n Terry McMillan wrote tl reason it was so popular v was u.s." says Walker, night from too much bii pagne and pepperoni piz  quartet Robin, Gloria, B Savannah get to the esser what s happened to all the r Where are they hiding?
WSWEEK
 OLL (AT BLACK iULTS THINK
hich one n do ostto iprove the iuation r black milies to-ay?
41% Blade families themselves
25% Churches
14% Community organizations
14% Government
FOR THIS SPECIAL NEWSWEEK POLL, PRINCE* TON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES INTERVIEWED A NATIONAL SAMPLE OF 600 BLACK ADULTS RY TELEPHONE AVGUST lSt-15. THE MARCIN OF ERROR IS +A 5 PERCENTAGE POINTS.   DON T KNOW" AND OTHER RESPONSES NOT SHOWN. THE NEWSWEEK POLL   1993 BY NEWSWEEK, INC.
They re ugly.
Stupid.
In prison.
Unemployed.
Crackheads.
Short.
Liars.
Unreliable.
Irresponsible.
Too possessive . . .
Childish.
Too goddam old and set in their ways. The litany drives the women to tears, ta does marriage really matter? Or is a amily headed by a single mother just as Mod as the nuclear unit? The evidence Me down solidly on the side of mar- iage. By every measure economic, so-H educational the statistics conclude hat two parents living together are better han one. Children of single mothers are significantly more likely to live in pov- y than children living with both par- ts. In 1990, Census figures show, 65 Percent of children of black single pothers were poor, compared with only $ percent of children of black married touples. Educationally, children in one-homes are at greater risk across board for learning problems, for left back, for dropping out. Psychi-t   i^es P. Comer, who teaches at <~e University s Child Study Center, that the exploding population of Can-American children from single-** represents "the education
W is going to kill us. The crisis mvJ6 concerned about that Ameri-
^on t achieve as well as Euro-and some Asian kids won t ^orin [American students are] onetiA   enough to compete. The a will kill us is the large number of
bright kids who fall out of the mainstream because their families are not functioning. 
Statistics tell only part of the story. Equally important are the intangibles of belonging to an intact family.  Growing up in a married family is where you learn the value of the commitments you make to each other, rather than seeing broken promises,  says Roderick Harrison, chief of the Census Bureau s race division.  It deals with the very question of what kind of personal commitments people can take seriously. 
Boys in particular need male role models. Without a father, who will help them define what it means to be a man? Fathers do things for their children that mothers often don t. Though there are obviously exceptions, fathers typically encourage independence and a sense of adventure, while mothers are more nur
turing and protective. It is men who teach boys how to be fathers.  A woman can only nourish the black male child to a certain point,  says Bob Crowder, an Atlanta lawyer and father of four, who helped organize an informal support group for African-American lathers.  And then it takes a man to raise a boy into a man. I mean a real man.  Mothers often win the job by default, and struggle to meet the challenge. But sometimes, even a well-intentioned single mother can be smothering, especially if her son is the only man in her life. Down the road a few years, she hears erstwhile daughters-in-law lament how she  ruined  him for every other woman. Like the street-smart New Yorker she is, Bisi Ruckett, who is Dianne Caballero s daughter, says flat out that she can t  rule  her boyfriend. And just as quickly, she concedes she can't compete with his mom.  If he tells her he needs a zillion dollars, she ll get it,  says Ruckett, 23.
Without a father for a role model, many boys learn about relationships from their peers on the street. In the inner city in particular, that often means gangs; and the message they re selling is that women are whores and handmaidens, not equals. Having a father does not, of course, guarantee that the lessons a young male learns will be wholesome. But research shows that, with no father, no minister, no boss to help define responsibility, there s nothing to prevent a boy from treating relationships perversely. University of Pennsylvania professor Elijah Anderson, who authored a 1990 study on street life, says that,
33. Endangered Family
among the poor, boys view courting as a  game  in which the object is to perfect a rap that seduces girls. The goal: to add up one s sexual conquests, since that s the measure of  respect. 
Often, for a girl, Anderson says, life revolves around the  dream,  a variation of the TV soaps in which a man will whisk her away to a life of middle-class bliss even though everywhere she looks there are only single mothers abandoned by their boyfriends. Not surprisingly, the two sexes often collide. The girl dreams because she must.  It has to do with one s conception of oneself:  I will prevail ,  Anderson says. But the boy tramples that dream because he must his game is central to his vision of respect.  One of the reasons why, when a woman
Wallace Smith, pastor of Washington s Shiloh Church, puts it bluntly:  Dan Quayle was right. 
agrees to have a baby, these men think it s such a victory is that you have to get her to go against all the stuff that says he won t stick around. 
For teenage mothers not mature enough to cope, single parenthood is not the route to the dream, but entrapment. They have too many frustrations: the job, the lack of a job, the absence of a man, the feeling of being dependent on others for help, the urge to go out and dance instead of pacing with a crying child. Taken to its extreme, says Pous-saint, the results can be abuse or neglect.  They ll see a child as a piece of property or compete with the child calling them dumb or stupid, damaging their growth and education to maintain superiority,  he says. The middle class is not exempt from such pain. Even with all the cushions money could buy doctors and backup doctors, nannies and backup nannies Liz Walker says that trying to raise her son, Nicholas, alone was draining.  Certainly, the best situation is to have as many people in charge of a family as possible,  says Walker, who is now married to Harry Graham, a 41-year-old corporate-tax lawyer; together, they re raising her son and his two children from a previous marriage.  I can see that now,  she adds.  Physically, you need it. 
14 
6. AFRICAN AMERICANS
Not Just an Underclass Problem
In every economic group, black women are two to six times more likely to have a child before marriage than white women.
UNDER	*10,000-	*25,000-	*30,000-	*50.000-	OVK 
*10,000	20,000	30,000	35,000	75,000	*75 O O
SOtlBCK CENSUS BUREAU, 199* 
More and more, black men aren t there to build marriages or to stick around through the hard years of parenting. The question we re too afraid to confront is why. The biggest culprit is an economy that has locked them out of the mainstream through a pattern of bias and a history of glass ceilings.  The economic state of the African-American community is worse in 1993 than it was in 1963,  says NAACP head Benjamin Chavis Jr. He could be speaking, just as easily, about the black family, since the two fell in tandem.
A man can t commit to a family without economic security, but for many African-American men, there is none. The seeds of modern economic instability date back to the 1940s, when the first of 6V2 million blacks began migrating from the rural South to the urban North as farm mechanization replaced the need for their backs and hands. At first, black men built a solid economic niche by getting factory jobs. But just as the great migration ended in the  70s, the once limitless industrial base began to cave in. And as steel mills and factories swept offshore, the  last hired, first fired  seniority rules disproportionately pushed black men out. During that time, says Billingsley, unemployment for blacks became twice as high as it was for whites,  and it has rarely dropped below that [ratio] 
