How the nuclear family was forced on black families

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I get from conservatives, especially American conservatives, the rugged individual vibe. The ideal man shouldn’t need any help whatsoever from anyone to support himself and his family. If he does, his manhood is called into question.
 
So Catholic teaching on the family is just an artifact not applicable across cultural lines?
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I’m not a Catholic, but no, I don’t believe that “Catholic social teaching” is applicable across cultural or historical lines. Honestly I don’t even believe in some kind of immutable Catholic social teaching that has existed as long as the church. The church today is a very different institution to the medieval church.
 
LeafByNiggle said:
Nor is polygamy an essential part of the article.
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It is so much easier to construct an idyllic past if you leave the troublesome parts out.

Neither the author nor due Bois give any sources for the information presented or logic for the conclusions drawn, as in this part:
He posits that the Black concepts of motherhood and femininity, and Black families’ historical system of rule by women and mothers, gave the world “not only the Iron Age, the cultivation of the soil . . . the domestication of animals, but also, in peculiar emphasis, the mother-idea.” That is, the conception of the mother as creator and sustainer, rather than the patriarchal builder with which the Western world is most familiar.
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Moreover, as already noted above, traditional African societies varied widely across the continent.
 
LeafByNiggle said:
The modern American model of the nuclear family is bad for whites too, but whites imposed it on themselves. We don’t know if blacks would have made the same choice if they were the fashion setters.
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“Fashion”? So, you think nuclear families are just a “fashion”? But if you think nuclear families are bad, then I guess you might well think they’re just “fashion”.
 
It’s simply romanticizing of tribal customs. As I said above it’s not worth reading and it’s laughable.
 
Ridgerunner said:
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LeafByNiggle:
The modern American model of the nuclear family is bad for whites too, but whites imposed it on themselves. We don’t know if blacks would have made the same choice if they were the fashion setters.
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“Fashion”? So, you think nuclear families are just a “fashion”? But if you think nuclear families are bad, then I guess you might well think they’re just “fashion”.
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In sense, they are. The modern American model of the nuclear family is that they strike out on their own, just the two of them, buy a big house in the suburbs. If grandpa is too much to manage, put him in a nursing home. If the family has to move to a new state because the company the breadwinner works for wants it, so be it. There is nothing of value they are leaving behind - like extended family - because every nuclear family is supposed to make it on their own. This is the fashionable way to behave in modern America. It coveys a very fragmented view of the family, which in many cultures is wider than just the mother and father. That is what has been lost by the glorification of the “nuclear family” in American culture.
 
Annie said:
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LeafByNiggle:
American black families prior to the Great Society programs:
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Seriously, Leafby? Seriously? Every black family from the 1890s when this picture was taken to the onset of the Great Society lived like this?
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Well, we know this. There was never ever ever a time when the wealth of black families was on a par with the wealth of white families. So saying that the nuclear family “served American blacks so well” really means it served them well enough to scrape by.
 
Give me a break. Read Zora Neale Hurston’s account of the community she grew up in.
 
I cannot like this enough.

Nuclear families are the seeds of extended family but they need support from extended family.

Unfortunately forces from the industrial revolution has caused the fragmentation of the extended family.
 
LeafByNiggle said:
There was never ever ever a time when the wealth of black families was on a par with the wealth of white families
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Like in Appalachia? I grew up in the Ozarks when it was pretty primitive. No running water. Outside privy. Heat by a fireplace and light by kerosene or gasoline lamps. Meanwhile, my wife, when she was a kid, lived in Indianapolis and had all utilities, paved streets, television, you name it.

I just don’t believe it when people say things like “all” white people lived better than “all” black people. My great grandfather worked in the deep mines in Kansas for a time. He was an immigrant, so he would do that work because he had to. Blacks in that same town wouldn’t work in them, and didn’t have to.
 
Are you contesting the statement that overall white families wealth was higher than black families? I don’t think for a minute that Leaf was saying no black family was wealthier than a white one. It’s a general statement and absolutely true.

It’s the legacy of earlier times that has resulted in black wealth consistently being below white wealth in general and a big reason all people of color are trying to bring it to everyone’s attention. To this day, drive through a very wealthy neighborhood. If you see a black family residing there, it catches your attention because it’s such an exception.

Whites have had at least 100 to 200 year advantage to build up the wealth that blacks were held back from. And they are slowly catching up but they aren’t there yet. This is just recognition of reality. The next question should be, how can we help?
 
Ridgerunner said:
here’s what you said. Using the word “all” does not make it a “straw man”.
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LeafByNiggle:
There was never ever ever a time when the wealth of black families was on a par with the wealth of white families
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When people say “the wealth of black families” without qualification, they mean statistically. Let me put this in terms a cattleman would understand far better than me. If someone said that Herefords and more docile and adaptable to rotational grazing than Angus, a cattleman would know exactly what that person meant. He would not in a million years think the person meant that every single Hereford is more docile than every single Angus. Now I don’t know if the general statement about cattle is true or not, and it is not the point anyway. The point is, whether you agreed with him or not, you would know what that person meant. So please do the same to my statement.
 
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Ridgerunner said:
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LeafByNiggle:
Let me put this in terms you will understand
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Your manners are usually better than this. If you’re having a bad day, I’ll discuss with you some other time.
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I thought you would be pleased I actually took the time to learn a little about cattle, and acknowledge you as an expert. But I have gone back and edited my posting to make it less personal. I should not have made it so personal in the first place.
 
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LeafByNiggle said:
Well, we know this. There was never ever ever a time when the wealth of black families was on a par with the wealth of white families. So saying that the nuclear family “served American blacks so well” really means it served them well enough to scrape by.
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Yeah, we do. I am still disappointed you did that 😔

And it is true that if one made a comparison between black families and white that one would see that the very richest families in the nation were white, and that at each level except for the very lowest, there was probably a higher percentage of white families.

However, 1) black families were not all “just scraping by,” and 2) having intact nuclear families allowed even black families to live better lives.

But many fatherless black families are suffering. Their children are recruited into gangs, their sons are killed or kill in the drug wars, their daughters suffering as well.

What the Brookings Institute said: "…at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

“Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class…”

The nuclear family may not be perfect, but it seems to work better than what is happening now among too many poor black communities.
 
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Annie said:
However, 1) black families were not all “just scraping by,”
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Another example of confusing a statistic with a universal claim. Of course there examples of black families doing very well. But statistically, black wealth per capita has never been equal to white wealth. And now the disparity is greater than at any time since the 1920’s.
 
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