h the students had.
At home, however, my mother often told me to look in the mirror to see just how ridiculous these assertions were. "It is obvious to everybody but you," she'd say, "just how beautiful you are. There are different
up,
i_., ThS  Washington
post. Reprinted by permission.
14'
U. ai-KICAN AMERICANS
shades of skin and different grades of hair, but they are all beautiful. Especially yours."
While 1 didn't understand it then, my mother knew firsthand how difficult it is to love yourself while concurrently changing yourself to meet society's standards for acceptance and beauty. She knew why I had suddenly become interested in over-the-counter bleaching creams; she knew why I begged her to let me permanently straighten my hair. In short, my mother understood my conflict the conflict that occurs when one strives for acceptance by rejecting everything that he or she is.
These feelings of conflict are foremost in my mind when I think of Kate's assertion that many women today refuse to reproduce what they perceive as their own ugliness. Because of my own experiences, I know where they are coming from, but at the same time, I have to wonder where we are going. To answer this question, I talked with several women about being dark-skinned in America. Not surprisingly, almost every person I spoke with told me of numerous painful experiences; in fact, many of them admitted their own desire to reproduce lighter children children who could easily assimilate in a white American society.
Statistics show that black women are less likely to marry white men than black men are to wed white women. Still, my women friends believe that their careful selection process-planning the exact skin tone and hair texture of one's children is practiced in households all over America. I have personally seen the anxiety some parents experience when their child is born a shade too dark; and I am fearful of what might
happen if that anxiety is transferred to the child. It has been suggested to me more than once that our jails are not only filled with more blacks, but more dark-skinned blacks: those who carry the double burden of blackness being black in a white society, and too black in all of society.
Washington Post reporter Leon Dash spoke of this phenomenon in his 1989 book, "When Children Want Children." Several teenagers he interviewed made a direct link between skin tone and self-worth. He quoted one teenaged girl as saying, "Dark-skinned men lie more than light-skinned men," and wrote of another girl rejecting dark men because dating someone lighter "gave her higher status in the neighborhood."
Dash argues that this prejudice, which goes back to the time of slavery, exists especially "among poor urban blacks those who were generally passed over by the internal self-evaluation {from] the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s." For them, he says, "color consciousness, or being 'color struck' continues as an overt social consideration." But 1 know that it goes far beyond the urban poor.
I have often wondered what ever happened to such dicta as, "Black Is Beautiful," a phrase to which I clung desperately in the late '60s and early '70s. It helped me begin to discover my inner, as well as outer beauty; even so, I was 21 years old before I ceased to define myself through other people's eyes.
Four years ago I married a man whose mother is Ethiopian and whose father is half white, half
Lebanese. He is light-skinned, but I did not fall for him because of his
child producing ability, } traded to me. But moreij he was attracted to my da thought me beautiful, ; refreshing to be loved bet darkness, rather than in As far as children are cor husband and 1 plan to ai will be someone who lot Maybe that's because I w a difference in a chil maybe, selfishly, Iwantti paradox in my own.
Perhaps the practice hold of a little piece of m one's children is in fact; to rectify this paradox self. Or perhaps it is at have control over one's Perhaps it is the final foi lation. Either way, I car and because of that, 1 re! these women.
What 1 do want is sin with them my own exp to tell them that there is to win that internal stru; assimilation and self h start by recognizing our beauty whether we are: one of the many beauti tween. We can say we v alter ourselves to meet t standards of beauty that black Americans sine brought to this countr now our home. We c< notion that to validate c tence, we must prod with hair and eyes diffei own.
Identity, I have learne can be a hard thing to fi searching for it in somei no longer bother. Inste the mirror to see who I beautiful I am. And, bel I have not been disapp
146
Article 33
ENDANGERED FAN
II
For many African-Americans, marriage and childbearing do not go together. After decades of denial and blame, a new candor is emerging as blacks struggle to save their families.
Late on a sultry summer morning, Dianne Caballero settles onto her porch in the New York suburb of Roosevelt, bemused by the scene playing out across the street. Behind electric clippers, a muscular black man is trimming hedges with the intensity of a barber sculpting a fade; nearby, his wife empties groceries from the car. In most quarters, they might elicit barely a nod. But in this largely black, working-class community, the couple is one of the few intact families on the block. All too common are the five young women who suddenly turn into view, every one of them pushing a baby stroller, not one of them married. Resigned, Caballero says with a sigh,  Where are the men? 
A black child has only one chance in five of growing up with two parents
It s a lament she knows too well. Like her mother before her and her daughter after, Caballero, who is black, had a child out of wedlock at 16. Twenty-three years later, even she is astounded at the gulf between motherhood and marriage.
her mother got pregnant in the she says, she was considered When Caballero had a baby in 0> no one ostracized her, though it   i wasn t something  nice" girls did.
the time her daughter had a baby T^^arsago, it was regarded as  nor-
  Now, Caballero says regretfully, s c ntntonplace, "And there doesn t
reported by Farai Chideya. 'We Ingrassia, Vern E. Smith and Pat !t Was wriuen Michele ln-
seem to be anything happening to reverse it. 
That prospect troubles black leaders and parents alike, those like Caballero, who worries that her granddaughter is destined to be the fourth generation in her family to raise a child without a man. The odds are perilously high:
 	For blacks, the institution of marriage has been devastated in the last generation: 2 out of 3 first births to black
women under 35 are now out of wed-
lock. In 1960, the number was 2 out of 5. And it s not likely to improve any time soon. A black child born today has only a l-in-5 chance of growing up with two parents until the age of 16, according to University of Wisconsin demographer Larry L. Bumpass. The impact, of course, is not only on black families but on all of society. Fatherless homes boost crime rates, lower educational attainment and add dramatically to the welfare rolls.
 	Many black leaders rush to portray out-of-wedlock births as solely a problem of an entrenched underclass. It s not. It cuts across economic lines. Among the poor, a staggering 65 percent of never-married black women have children, double the number for whites. But even among the well-to-do, the differences are striking: 22 percent of never-married black women with incomes above $75,000 have children, almost 10 times as many as
whites.
Nearly 30 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, caused a firestorm by declaring that fatherless homes were  the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro Community.  At the time, one quarter of black families were headed by women. Today the situation has only grown worse. A majority of black families with children 62 percent are now headed by one parent. The result is what
r 1993 bv Newsweek, Inc. AH rights
Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin calls  an almost complete separation of marriage and childbearing among African-Americans. 
It was not always so. Before 1950, black and white marriage patterns looked remarkably similar. And while black marriage rates have precipitously dipped since then, the desire to marry remains potent: a Newsweek Poll of single African-American adults showed that 88 percent said that they wanted to get married. But the dream of marriage has been hammered in the last 25 years. The economic dislocations that began in the  70s, when the nation shifted from an industrial to a service base, were particularly devastating to black men, who had migrated north in vast numbers to manufacturing jobs. The civil-rights movement may have ended legal segregation, but it hasn t erased discrimination in the work force and in everyday life.  When men lose their ability to earn bread, their sense of self declines dramatically. They lose rapport with their children,  says University of Oklahoma historian Robert Griswold, author of  Fatherhood in America. 
Some whites overlooked jobs and discrimination as factors in the breakdown of the black family. Back in the  60s, at the peak of the battle over civil rights, Moynihan infuriated blacks by describing a pattern of  pathology.  Understandably, blacks were not willing to tolerate a public discussion that implied they were different less deserving  than whites. The debate quickly turned bitter and polarized between black and white, liberal and conservative. Emboldened by a cultural sea change during the Reagan-Bush era, conservatives scolded,  It s all your fault.  Dismissively, this camp insisted that what blacks need art mainstream American values read: whitt values. Go to school, get a job, ge married, they exhorted, and the famib
reserved. Reprinted by permission.	14
6. AFRICAN AMERICANS
Steep Rise in Out-of-Wedlock Births
Since the sexual revolution, the rate has shot up for both races. But the numbers are much higher for black women than white women.
NEWSWEEK
POLL
WHAT BLACK ADULTS THINK
How important are the following reasons young, unmarried black people today are having children?
(Pere biqwr
53%
unde
blrtt
48% use I orh; for j relig
38% sotm own
will be just fine. Not so, liberals fired back. As neoliberal University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson argued in  The Declining Significance of Race,  the breakdown of the African-American family resulted from rising unemployment, not falling values. Liberals have regarded the conservative posture as  blaming the victim,  a phrase that, not coincidentally, white psychologist William Ryan coined in a 1965 assessment of Moynihan s study. To this camp, any family structure is good, as long as it s nurturing.  Marriage is important in the black community, just not the most important thing,  says Andrew Billingsley, the University of Maryland sociologist who wrote the pioneering  Black Families in White America.   It is not an imperative for bl