| Children per Woman | ||||
| White | Nonwhite | |||
Wives married at age 14 to 21
to husbands who are laborers and did not go to high school |
3.8 | 4.7 | ||
Wives married at age 22 or over
to husbands who are professional or technical workers and have completed 1 year or more of college |
2.4 | 1.9 | ||
| ||||
| ||||
in danger of being drawn into it. It is for this reason that the propositions put forth in this study may be thought of as having a more or less general application.
In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only: as things now are, their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the Negro.
Obviously, not every instance of social pathology afflicting the Negro community can be traced to the weakness of family structure. If, for example, organized crime in the Negro community were not largely controlled by whites, there would be more capital accumulation among Negroes, and therefore probably more Negro business enterprises. If it were not for the hostility and fear many whites exhibit towards Negroes, they in turn would be less afflicted by hostility and fear and so on. There is no one Negro community. There is no one Negro problem. There is no one solution. Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or anti-social behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.
It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people. Although that will has reasserted itself in our time, it is a resurgence doomed to frustration unless the viability of the Negro family is restored.
Matriarchy
A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife.
Robert O. Blood, Jr. and Donald M. Wolfe, in a study of Detroit families, note that "Negro husbands have unusually low power,"28 and while this is characteristic of all low income families, the pattern pervades the Negro social structure: "the cumulative result of discrimination in jobs…, the segregrated housing, and the poor schooling of Negro men."29 In 44 percent of the Negro families
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