In this week’s podcast, Delano Squires joins me to discuss his new book The Vanishing Black Family. We discuss how slavery badly deformed but did not destroy the black family. And how until the Great Society welfare programs and the new ideologies of the 1960s, the black family had been remarkably stable. We also talk about the role of economic factors, and the so-called “marriageable men” problem. And Squires gives some of his ideas for what it would take to higher levels of family formation in the black community.
@4:05 As bad as DEI has been (particularly in academia), the idea that a Harvard sociologist would argue that since racial disparity still exists after controlling for family structure and therefore family structure doesn't matter is INSANE.
What’s missing from the conversation, but you broached at the end—community. Not the vague notion of community, but “thick” community: a broader network of consistent friendship, mentoring, emotional support, availability. Our true, embodied social networks have thinned substantially.
The Boomers may have gone to integrated schools, but they probably grew up knowing their grandparents and extended family. The A.M.E. and Missionary Baptist congregations are just as grey as the Mainline congregations. The same great sorting out into urban, suburban and exurban; out of traditional denominations and into unaffiliated and nondenominational Evangelical. Progressive Black Christianity often functions like nominal Catholicism: a keeper of a particular American cultural tradition.
Social atomization leaves people more vulnerable to the prevailing winds—cultural and economic shocks. That is intersectionality: an overlap between racial and nonracial factors. If one lives in a community where young, unwed motherhood has been the norm since the Eighties, how many generations of compounding dysfunction has manifested itself. Many Black, White, and mixed households are living their own permutation of Hillbilly Elegy.
@4:05 As bad as DEI has been (particularly in academia), the idea that a Harvard sociologist would argue that since racial disparity still exists after controlling for family structure and therefore family structure doesn't matter is INSANE.
What’s missing from the conversation, but you broached at the end—community. Not the vague notion of community, but “thick” community: a broader network of consistent friendship, mentoring, emotional support, availability. Our true, embodied social networks have thinned substantially.
The Boomers may have gone to integrated schools, but they probably grew up knowing their grandparents and extended family. The A.M.E. and Missionary Baptist congregations are just as grey as the Mainline congregations. The same great sorting out into urban, suburban and exurban; out of traditional denominations and into unaffiliated and nondenominational Evangelical. Progressive Black Christianity often functions like nominal Catholicism: a keeper of a particular American cultural tradition.
Social atomization leaves people more vulnerable to the prevailing winds—cultural and economic shocks. That is intersectionality: an overlap between racial and nonracial factors. If one lives in a community where young, unwed motherhood has been the norm since the Eighties, how many generations of compounding dysfunction has manifested itself. Many Black, White, and mixed households are living their own permutation of Hillbilly Elegy.