Abstract
The new edition of Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family has been updated to incorporate a discussion of the changes in public policy and economic insecurity that have contributed to the existing challenges to African-American family formation. To accommodate the addition of focus on public policy in this edition, Donna L Franklin, the nationally recognized scholar on African-American families, decided to collaborate with Angela James, a sociologist and urban demographer, so that they could delve deeper when examining modern statistical and theoretical work in the book. In this edition, the authors explain to readers, in a way that is very accessible, how social forces influenced the evolution of African-American families from the time of slavery to the present day. Ensuring Inequality continues to be an important contribution to the study of the African-American family.
The book includes a foreword by William Julius Wilson, the renowned sociologist and author of The Declining Significance of Race, who notes the timeliness of the topic in light of the rising number of single-parent families and out-of-wedlock births for African-Americans in the United States. He also points out that public attitudes have changed in terms of beliefs about motherhood and paid employment in the country. In particular, there are no social policies that would make it possible for everyone to work while having a parent remain in the home to raise children, although many Americans claim that children would be better cared for if at least one parent stayed home. As Wilson states in the foreword, Franklin and James advocate for a combination of interventions to deal with the social factors that affect the formation of families in the African-American community.
Ensuring Inequality begins with discussion of the impact of slavery on the African-American family. In particular, the fact that slaves were not legally considered people with the same rights as others in American society meant that they could not depend upon legal marriage and children born outside of that institution were not stigmatized, given the context of the situation for slaves. The types of African-American families that came out of slavery included both two-parent and single-parent families, but a variety of cultural expectations and the interactions with societal institutions led to further changes in the family structure over time. An excellent example of the continuation of policies ensuring the racial inequality in economic well-being for families is illustrated in the discussion of sharecropping, which began soon after the Emancipation Proclamation. As the authors noted, this type of system was actually designed by Northern Republicans to accommodate the needs of Southern planters who had lost their free labor force after slaves were emancipated. Sharecropping had a significant impact on the lives of African-American families because the Freedman’s Bureau encouraged patriarchal authority structures in the newly freed African-American households despite the fact that slave families may have previously had more egalitarian relations. This was illustrated by the Bureau giving newly freed men the ability to sign contracts on behalf of their families. In essence, the policies put forth by the Freedman’s Bureau may have contributed to the decline of the two-parent African-American family. Many African-American families found themselves coming out of slavery only to become trapped in the rise of ‘debt peonage’ that gave Southern planters control over the sharecroppers’ lives and ensured that the norms from slavery would be reinforced by sharecropping.
Ensuring Inequality proceeds to discuss the social policies and other important eras in US history that have contributed to the changes in African-American family structure and have continued to do so over time. For instance, racial oppression and collapse of the Southern economic climate led to Northern migration by many African-Americans. This migration to the North, consequently, contributed to further weakening of the two-parent African-American family structure. In particular, African-American women were able to find domestic work in urban areas whereas it was more difficult for African-American men to find jobs there, therefore leading to single families led by mothers in urban areas. This shift in the economic experience of African-American families created problems and African-American women bore greater responsibility for supporting the family while being confined to domestic work and excluded from factory and clerical work. This problem for the economic well-being of the African-American family also affected the well-being of children in those homes because the long hours that African-American women spent working resulted in a chaotic family life in terms of their own children’s school truancy and arrests for petty crime. Moreover, the marital conflict resulting from African-American women working while men had difficulty finding stable work caused resentment and contributed to the further weakening of those familial bonds.
Ensuring Inequality offers important insights into the historical contexts of various eras in US history and their impact on the well-being of the African-American family. For instance, the New Deal policies that were created during President Franklin D Roosevelt’s administration affected the experiences of African-American families in a negative way despite the popularity of that president among African-Americans. In essence, New Deal policies failed to help poor African-American families and contributed to poverty for those in the rural South, where the erosion of sharecropping led to more Northern migration (where continued housing and lending discrimination awaited).
Another influential document that led to harmful social policies was the Moynihan Report, which was used as evidence by the Johnson administration to change the focus of federal policy from being one designed to combat the consequences of racial segregation to one that essentially faults the African-American family for its own problems by pointing to a pathological ‘culture’ rather than cumulative inequality and disadvantage as the underlying issue to be addressed.
Ensuring Inequality further notes that the media transformed the image of African-American women from the picture of the strong matriarch to that of a lazy welfare mother lacking morals. That image has undoubtedly helped fuel changes in social policy that are based on the belief that welfare causes dysfunctional family behaviors that encourage out-of-wedlock births and single-parenthood. In other words, the stereotypically negative images of African-American mothers on public assistance as immoral contribute to the overall views of African-American families as being unworthy of the help due to American citizens.
Franklin and James assert that the causes of the African-American family’s problems are complex and are not only connected to history but also to the current context of family life in America. The current edition of the book adds a discussion of the impact of mass incarceration on the African-American family and the poor marriage market for African-American women, before making suggestions for how these various problems might be addressed.
Finally, the authors provide recommendations for social policy as alternatives to the ones that have served to enervate the African-American family since the emancipation of the slaves in the United States. For instance, Franklin and James point out that jobs for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients are scarce, in addition to there being little affordable day care and transportation to make the current policy work. Although the policy makers may claim that the women whose families receive welfare lack morality and refuse to assume personal responsibility (a sentiment propagated by the media), the fact remains that most of those women lack skills and training, as well as support (in the form of reliable, affordable day care and transportation) in order to be successful in today’s workforce. In addition, the authors suggest that the policies created during the Clinton era, which impede the re-entry of former prisoners into their communities and make things more difficult for their families, need to be re-evaluated and revised. Franklin and James advocate for the government (which, ironically, is responsible for constructing such policies that have weakened the African-American family over time) to work on job creation and remedies for the other social problems associated with the poverty and isolation experienced by African-American families.
The authors’ analysis of the way social policies have contributed to the cumulative inequality experienced by African-American families over the past centuries (and the continued consequences with which they must currently contend) is bound to elicit a much-needed debate and, one hopes, will prompt more critical thinking by policy makers. Overall, the book is replete with well-developed explanations for the state of the African-American family’s current structure and resulting outcomes. A significant strength of this book is its review of historical explanations and contexts, as well as the empirical evidence related to the discussion of fertility, birthrates, marriage trends, abandonment, and other important issues associated with the changes for African-American families. The explanations provided also include analyses that will aid family researchers in better understanding perspectives that do not reduce the social problems faced by such families to a mere question of ‘culture.’ In closing, this book reveals the complex nature of the problems faced by the African-American family, and suggests that policies should take those intricacies into account (and actually address the factors underlying such cumulative poverty seen in so many of such families) if there is to be a chance at successfully mending the African-American family structure and improving the life chances of its members.