Economic Forces,Structural Discrimination and Black Family Instability

The social and economic gains achieved by black families during the 1960s were severely eroded during the seventies and eighties. Unemployment, poverty, single-parent families, out-of-wedlock births, and adolescent pregnancies soared to alarming levels. According to the thesis of the declining significance of race, this crisis is mainly concentrated among the black “underclass” and it is broad societal trends, not racism, that is mainly responsible for their increased deprivation. We contend that this thesis fails to assess the role of institutionalized racism as it is manifested in “unintended” or “structural” discrimination, i.e., the disproportionate adverse effects of economic trends and policies on the functioning of low-income and middle-income black families. Moreover, we argue that social forces or policies that have racially disparate adverse effects are “discriminatory” by result, whether intended or not. The major economic trends that affected black families adversely during the seventies and eighties were: back-to-back recessions, double-digit inflation, and industrial and population shifts. The key economic policies that undermined black family stability have been: anti-inflation fiscal and monetary policies, trade policies, plant closings, social welfare, block grants, and federal per capita formulas for allocating funds to states and local areas that have not been corrected for the census undercount.