








since.  Unarguably, economic restructuring hit whites as well as blacks, but the new service sector favored those with education and there were many more educated white men than blacks in the  70s as vast numbers of baby boomers streamed out of the nation s colleges looking for jobs.
Ironically, just as the job market col
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lapsed for black men, it opened for black women, who went to college while black men went to war. Armed with the college degrees that black males didn t have and pushed by the burgeoning women s movement, growing numbers of black women found spots in corporate America. As with white women in the  80s, that bought them greater independence. But the jobs of black women came at the expense of black men. Throughout the workplace, says Yale s Comer,  there was a trade-off. The one black woman was a two-fer: you got a black and a woman.  Since then, the gap between white women s income and black women s has disappeared black women s salaries are the same as whites .
But the chasm between black and white men has barely moved. In 1969, black men earned 61 cents for every dollar white men earned; by 1989, the number had increased to only 69 cents. And that s for black men who were working; more and more, they found themselves without jobs. During the same time, the number of black men with less than a high-school education who found jobs dropped from two thirds to barely half. And it s likely to worsen: in the last 25 years, the proportion of black men in college has steadily eroded. America has less use for black men today than it did during slavery,  says Eugene Rivers, who helps run computertraining programs as pastor of Boston s Azusa Christian Community.
Though he is scarcely 11, Lugman Kolade dreams of becoming an electrical engineer. But he already wears the grievous pain of a man who feels left out. Lugman is a small, studious, Roman Catholic schooler from Washington,
D.C., who will enter the six fall, a superb student who u diocese science fair with ; electric meter. Unlike most Male Youth Project he attem Baptist Church, his parents His mother works for the D Public Works; describing w' does doesn t come easy.  M to be a [construction] engii his job because they weren t right; they would give whit jobs who did less work. Nt an ice-cream truck. 
Black men were hurt, illegal economy. As the lej ketplace case them aside, tl took off, enlisting anyone promise of fast money. Ire Comer,  you had to make a extra effort to get into the and no effort to get into th tern.  For many on the fring no contest.  It overwheln structive forces in the stream,  he says. Disprt too, black men are in pri: While African-Americans n 12 percent of the populatio posed 44 percent of the inr prisons and local jails in 1 1990, homicide was the lea death for young black men
The economy explains on what happened. The sexual the  70s was the second g) changed the black family, social tide that erased taboos motherhood affected all w and blacks took different women delayed both marric bearing, confident that, do there would be a pool of men. Not so for black wor layed marriage but not chi they were less certain there' for them. In what they call* shift,  Census officials repor year that less than 75 per women are likely to ever ma with 90 percent of whites.
More dramatic is the chi! ture. Between 1960 and I1 portion of young white v birth out of wedlock rose percent, markedly faster tl blacks. The slower rate oi blacks was small comfort-42 percent was already so that if it had kept pace w race, ti would have topped by now. As things stand, it
33. Endangered Family
yecting Marriage
fore 1950, young black women were ually more likely to get married than lite women.
390 1900  10 '20  30  40  50 '60  70  80 '90
JUKE ANDREW CHEKUN, "MARRIAGE. DIVORCE. HFMARRIAGE". 91 HARVARD U,WERSm PRESS
Traditionally, the extended family has :rved as a safety net. But the terrible ony of history is that it has also hurt the lack family. While intended as a cush-m, the network, in effect, enabled more ingle women to have children. And that teips explain why not only poor black ramen, but middle- and upper-class 'lacks as well, have had children out of vedlock at higher rates than white ramen. Historically, white women have tad only themselves to rely on for child rearing, and so marriage became more of an imperative. For blacks, the network of extended kin is a tradition rooted in African customs that emphasize commu-over marriage. Although historians  y that most black children grew up in hvo-parent households during slavery, as We" as in the 19th and early 20th centu-nes, high rates of poverty, widowhood and urban migration reinforced the need or interdependence that continues today.
e oft-repeated African proverb  It a whole village to raise a child  ecnoes back to that.
Now the extended family is breaking down. Yet the black family s expectations for it haven t diminished. Both sides feel the strains. With the soaring number of teenage mothers, grandparents today are getting younger and more likely to be working themselves. A 32-year-old grandmother isn t necessarily eager, or able, to raise a grandchild, especially when that child becomes a teenager and the problems multiply. And, after generations of no fathers, there are no grandfathers, either. What s more, the tradition of a real neighborhood is disappearing.  It used to be that everyone looked out for everyone else,  said community activist Claudette Burroughs-White of Greensboro, N.C.  Now I think people are kind of estranged. They don t get involved. It s safer not to.  Many families left in the inner city the ones most in need of support are increasingly isolated from relatives able to flee to the suburbs.  Not every poor black mother is in a strong kinship network,  says Cherlin.  Many are living alone, hiding behind double-locked doors in housing projects. 
What s the solution? Nearly 30 years after Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty, experts on the black family return again and again to the same ideas better education, more jobs, discouraging teen pregnancy, more mentoring programs. But now the question is, who should deliver government or blacks themselves? Ever since the government started abandoning social programs in the  70s and early  80s, black families have been left on their own to find a way out. Those who would argue against funneling in more government dollars say we tried that, but  nothing works.  Lemann, who believes that most of the positive social changes in Black America were sparked by government
intervention, dismisses the conceit that spending on social welfare failed. The War on Poverty, he says  threw out some untested ideas, some of which worked   like Head Start, the Job Corps and Foster Grandparents  and some of which didn t.  Beyond the all-or-nothing extremes, there is room for solutions. Moynihan believes the nation has been in a collective  denial phase  about the black family for the last 25 years. But he says he s encouraged.  We re beginning to get a useful debate on this. 
Will self-help do it? Though few African-American leaders expect what they call  White America  to come to the rescue, they re equally skeptical that the thousands of programs filling church rec rooms and town-hall meeting rooms can, on their own, turn things around.  People who are trying to salvage a lot of the children are burnt out, they think it s like spitting into the ocean,  says Poussaint, who doesn t dispute the pessimism.  The problems are overwhelming. It s like treating lung cancer and knowing that people are still smoking. 
There aren t many places left to look for answers. When black leaders peak with one voice, it is about the deep crisis of faith and purpose that came with integration: the very promise that African-Americans would be brought into the American mainstream has left many by the wayside. What s the penalty for doing nothing?  We could revert to a caste society,  says Moynihan. Others are just as bleak. There are sparks of hope, says Comer, but he warns:  It s getting late, very late.  The problems of the black family have been apparent for decades. And so has our collective understanding that we must take them on. What we need to find now is a voice to start the dialogue.
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Article 34
M WHITE PATRIARCHAL SUPREMACY
The Politics of Family in Americ JEWELL HANDY GRESHAM
The past is not dead. It s not even past.
 William Faulkner
In April 1844, Secretary of State John Calhoun, the pre-eminent Southern philosopher of States  rights, directed a letter to the British ambassador in Washington attesting that where blacks and whites existed in the same society, slavery was the natural result. Wherever the states changed that providential relationship, the blacks invariably degenerated  into vice and pauperism accompanied by the bodily and mental afflictions incident thereto  deafness, blindness, insanity, and idiocy.  In the slave states, in contrast, the blacks improved greatly  in number, comfort, intelligence, and morals. 
To prove his point, Calhoun supplied statistics from the 1840 census. The data showed a shocking rate of black insanity in New England: one out of every fourteen in Maine, every twenty-eight in New Hampshire, every forty-three in Massachusetts, etc. The overall figure for the North was almost ten times the rate in the South, where only one  lunatic  for every 1,309 blacks was shown in Virginia, one in 2,447 in South Carolina, etc.
At the time Calhoun wrote that letter, one of the country s leading newspapers had just broken the scandal of the plot by President Tyler s Administration to annex Texas as slave territory a potential constitutional crisis certain to inflame the bitter North-South conflict. In that context, Calhoun s statistics were intended less for the British than for Congress, to which he forwarded copies.
There was only one flaw in his argument: The figures were false. Dr. Edward Jarvis of Massachusetts General Hospital, a leading specialist in the incidence of insanity, immediately challenged them. Joined by the prestigious American Statistical Association, Jarvis conducted an exhaustive study of every town and county in the free states in which black insanity had been reported by the Census Bureau In case after case, the number of  insane  blacks proved larger than the state s total black population!
The A.S.A. s comprehensive study forward President John Quincy Adams in the House o tives concluded that  it would have been far no census at all, than such a one as has been pi urged Congress either to correct the data or  c own  it  as the good of the country . . . and humanity shall demand.  But when Adams, t his diary, confronted Calhoun at the State De; latter  answered like a true slavemonger. .. like a trodden rattlesnake on the exposure of h to the House . . . and finally said that where many errors they balanced one another, and le conclusion as if they were all correct.  Th P rt blocked by the Speaker the and prosl
