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Black Men Must Learn Bottom Line Is Family
By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, June 3, 1998
Not long ago, researchers at the University of Illinois reported
the results of a study in which 199 black couples and 174 white couples were tracked
in their first years of marriage. After three years, 17 percent of the black couples
were divorced or separated. That was three times the percentage for whites.
A major factor in the breakup of the black couples was said
to be the "anxiety" felt by husbands about being able to provide adequately
for their families. Such a reason squares nicely with other studies of black family
life that cite "economic circumstances" as a major cause for marital discord.
But I would like to suggest another, more personal factor:
pride. It sure sounds to me like ego run amok when a man walks out on his wife and
children because he's feeling anxious about his ability to make enough money. And,
frankly, I don't see how giving a job to a man who is excessively prideful will help
his marriage at all. The same emotional immaturity that keeps him from working through
problems with a spouse will probably show up in the workplace, too, and probably
doom him there as well.
In the survey, not all of the men who bolted out of their marriages
were poor. In fact, the stress faced by black men did not always result from actual
financial strain but also from feelings that they were not doing as well as they
thought they should.
This would not be the first time that pride, one of the classic
seven deadly sins, has cropped up to ruin relationships among black men and women,
although it is rarely explained that way.
Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson speaks of "male
dominance ideology" in explaining why 71 percent of black men that he surveyed
believed that "husbands should have the final say in all matters."
Belinda Tucker, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, talks of
stress on black men caused by "provider role demands." Never mind that
such demands are all in their heads.
And yet, from such prideful thinking flow all sorts of other
character flaws. Like greed, for instance. The tendency of black men to divorce is
intensified by the fact that there are only 772 middle-class black men for every
1,000 middle-class black women, women who not only work full time but tend to make
more than white women.
"Where, for example, the typical middle-class white male
loses his home and all its comforts upon divorce and must start all over again, the
middle-class black male divorce can usually walk straight into the welcoming home
of his career-established second wife-to-be," Patterson says.
This may sound like a tough critique, but it's mild compared
with the consequences of such behavior:
Half of all black children now live in poverty, in part because of kinds of selfish
acts. The situation is so dire that, if allowed to go unchecked, it may result in
the undoing of virtually every major civil rights gain made by African Americans
in the 20th century.
How are our children supposed to protect themselves against,
say, the onslaught of AIDS when they are being crippled by poverty and the neglect
that flows from it? Even the children of the divorced black middle class are being
spiritually wounded by lack of involvement with their fathers, and this may be even
more true for the girls than the boys.
If public policy initiatives called for, say, greater economic
development in inner cities, who would be in a position of moral authority to argue
for them? Sadly, not much can be done for a people who so readily subject their own
children to wholesale degradation and abuse.
Professor Tucker has argued that family life among African
Americans always has been somewhat different from that of white Americans, owing
to a combination of factors including retentions from West African cultures and social
adaptations to harsh conditions of slavery and its aftermath.
Moreover, she notes, the divorce rate among African Americans,
which is now among the highest in the world, may be an indicator of what will happen
to the rest of America in the 21st century. Marriage as an institution, it is said,
has lost its bloom, and society at large -- black and white alike -- is more accepting
of nonmarital births, divorce and infidelity.
Having offered those caveats, let me hasten to repeat: Nobody
else is suffering from marital discord like black men. The number of two-parent African
American families continues its dramatic decline, so do our economic and political
fortunes.
It remains fashionable to focus on public policy remedies,
even as African Americans privately concede that the nation is in no mood to support
new initiatives aimed at improving their lives.
Among our wants: primary and secondary education that employs
fundamental life-skills programs to teach our children the responsibilities of parenthood.
But what better way to teach them than by acting responsibly ourselves? Judging from
the results of the divorce study, a lot of black men are putting stress on themselves
by thinking that providing adequately for their families means having a big house,
a luxury car and other nice things.
Lost in the equation is love for one another, with which a
can of Spam by candlelight can taste like caviar.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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