Two Views of the Black Family, cont.
A letter from a reader and a response from Robert Woodson
My recent post featuring a debate from a meeting at the Woodson Center has generated a lot of commentary. And deservedly so. We’re talking about one of the thorniest American problems of the last half-century: How to get poor, black, urban families back on track. Anyone who thinks seriously about race matters in this country is going to have an opinion on the matter, usually a strong one.
So in the spirit of continuing the debate, I’m presenting below a response from our frequent correspondent Clifton Roscoe, who is quite critical of Robert Woodson’s approach to the problem. I thought Clifton’s critique was deserving of a response itself, so I sent it on to Robert Woodson himself, who obliged. You’ll find his message below Clifton’s. (Both have been very lightly edited.)
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Dear Professor Loury,
At the risk of being harsh, I was disappointed by what I heard from Robert Woodson. I really expected more of a blueprint for rebuilding Black America from a guy who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and has been doing this work for 40 years. Does he not have some well-developed hypotheses about how to build strong Black families by now? Is good parenting really a mystery? Can't he benchmark what successful Black parents are doing compared to those whose children are floundering and often don't become productive adults? Can't those deficits be laid out and plans to address them be developed? Is it really too much to ask that this problem be addressed in a structured, systematic way?
While I appreciate Robert Woodson's take on innovation and the importance of learning from outliers, it feels like he's looking for moon shots. If so, he's on a path with a low-probability of achieving meaningful results at scale. He might be able to change the life trajectory of a few people through heroic interventions, but that's not what's required to put Black America on a better path.
Let's start with the premise that there's no quick fix for Black America. It may take one or two generations to get Black America on a better path. Better parenting has to be a top priority. I could be wrong, but my sense is that most Black parents want to see their children achieve success as adults. Many of them don't know what to do and would be open to coaching. This is especially true of single mothers who are raising sons. They would respond well if somebody gave them a roadmap for raising their children and offered them support and resources to draw upon throughout their parenting journey. These are the kinds of things that families have done for generations, but it's less common among Black families today because so many or our family structures are fractured and our culture discounts the importance of strong nuclear families..
Speaking of culture, you may find this article interesting. Here's an excerpt:
BlazeTV host and sportswriter Jason Whitlock comments on rapper Lil Nas X likening the release of debut album to having a child. Blaze contributor Delano Squires said in the past he would have brushed this stuff off as coincidence or a disconnected person, now he feels "most of this stuff is being coordinated."
"I don't know by whom," Squires continued, "but it all fits way too nicely."
"This week we had the state of Texas that will prohibit doctors from performing an abortion after a heartbeat is detected. And in the same week, we have our cultural overlords pushing Lil Nas X as a pregnant man. Now I guarantee you, they wouldn't want to hear someone say he should abort his baby."Squires said they want to see black men pregnant while black women have abortions.
"As a Christian, I'm thinking how do the things that are being pushed in culture whether by, again, media or by the government, how are those things squaring with what I know to be true about human nature, about God as a creator and about the nature of his created beings," he said.
"This is a clash of worldviews," Squires said. "The question is is Caesar God or is God God? And ultimately the American public is going to have to answer that question because right now we're being pushed in the direction where the culture people, CNN, and our institutions, and our professional leagues - the NFL came out of the closet a couple of weeks ago."
"All the institutions of the culture are using their power, their might to tenderize our children," he said. "To soak them and marinate, to loosen those fibers, the things that parents try to put into them. They're trying to break that all down to get kids to accept things they would have never accepted 50 years ago."
While I'm not pushing for a culture war, it's way past time for Black folks to come to grips with the sorry state of Black culture and the toxic effect it has on young Black people and Black America overall.
Best regards,
Clifton Roscoe
Response from Robert Woodson
First of all, I appreciate the commenter’s questions, because they reflect a really common misunderstanding with what both Bob Hill’s research focused on and what I’ve found leads to both individual and community transformation under challenging circumstances. By saying we should focus on strength and capacity building in lower income communities, I am not saying we should ignore or dismiss weaknesses. I am saying that the path to success lies in building on existing strengths, and that we will never know what those strengths are (or that they exist) unless we look for them.
A fact that is underappreciated by many people who have strong opinions on these issues is that it takes a very different set of skills to raise middle-class children to do as well or better than their parents than it takes to raise lower-income children to survive their childhood and leap one or two income quintiles from the time of their birth to when they are established in adulthood. Middle-class children typically do not need to learn how to navigate unsafe neighborhoods, extract knowledge and skills from underperforming schools, or set goals and priorities for themselves that may not be shared by most of their peers.
The question isn’t whether there should be more and better support or “coaching” for lower-income black parents; the question is what form should that support take, who should design it, and who should offer it? Both conservative and progressive elites tend to favor interventions designed by and implemented by outside professionals. I would argue that such support should be designed by people who are intimately familiar with the challenges facing particular lower income parents and children (that can almost never be gained without living in the same neighborhood), that it should be designed in partnership with the parents themselves and that it should be delivered by people who have the trust and confidence of those parents being supported.
In my experience, going into low-income communities and lecturing the people there on how they are raising their children wrong will not get you any farther than going into a middle- or high-income community and telling them they are raising their children wrong.
Bob
Two Views of the Black Family, cont.
I've often thought that the seemingly intractable problems of the inner city could be broken by instituting boarding schools for the children. And, lo and behold, someone is doing just that in Albany, GA. King Randall has been working on the X School for Boys and I think his approach is very promising. It's just one piece in the puzzle but he's going against the black establishment mentality where you just go along with the system. He's forging a new direction and I hope he's successful.
Lets take a step back. Is parenting the problem for black kids? Would teaching the latest child-rearing techniques make a difference? On the face of it, it looks like it would. The book, Love Money and Parenting, written by Doepke and Zilibotti appears to show that the intensive parenting of the professional managerial class makes a huge difference to how their children do, and the economist, James Heckman has made a career off the apparent ROI of investing in early childhood education for low income kids. But looking from 30K feet only tells you so much. And the same if true of studies that looks at, for instance, the numbers of words that children hear. The thing that all these perspectives share is that there is something about the things that parents do that makes the difference.
But I think we would be better off looking at families from an institutional perspective. Why? Because institutions preserve cultural ways of doing things that go beyond the behavior of individual parents. This isn't just a question of family structure, though certain structures work better than others. It is a question of purpose.
Since the 1970s the family as an institution has gradually ceased to be about socializing the next generation and has become, to the extent that families are intentional, about emotion, and childrearing has become about the development of children's sense of self.
Instead of integrating kids into the world, we validate them and this expectation of being validated has produced at least two generations of people who possess an external locus of control, who despite their interest in self expression and identity, aren't terribly robust because they have come to rely on praise and recognition in an unhealthy way. And because of this, they are worryingly open to authoritarian controls on their behavior and that of others, (speech codes, for instance) as long as they don't feel personally disrespected.
This is what we don't talk about when we talk about the success of kids who have been intensively parented in the style of the professional and managerial elite. They have the material means to offset some of their fragility and the social weight to demand that colleges or other institutions adapt to their weaknesses, but are they alright? Not really. The crisis of children's mental health is testimony to this.
Well maybe, you might argue, but at least they are doing better than black kids. And perhaps they are -- but they are doing better not primarily because of the extra curricular activities or the numbers of words they hear. They are doing better because they are living in stable families --even when they are children of single parents.
Working class white kids are increasingly in the same boat as working class black children, but one interesting pattern I have noticed and that has been documented by PEW and others, is that many white working class families are blended families. Typically a man and a woman cohabit, they have a child and then they go their separate ways. Many of these people will move on from their "starter family" and go on form longterm, stable relationships when they are somewhat older. Life for the children of these starter families is the luck of the draw. If their parent (usually the mother) forms a stable permanent relationship they will usually be okay. But if, lIke JD Vance's mother, they are unable to form a stable relationship they do worse by every measure. This is true of black kids in the same situations
If a family is stable it can be disorganized and chaotic as still, amazingly, the children can still be okay. Contrast Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle with JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both families are poor and culturally Appalachian. Both are madly chaotic. But one family stays together and the other falls apart with JD's mother eventually falling into long series of tenuous partnerships. You might even make the case that the family in the Glass Castle is far poorer than JD's. And yet all the children manage to transcend their difficult upbringing.
The difference is generational. Within JD Van's family you can see that his mother's older siblings do okay but by the time his mother has him and his sister, families are about emotion and the personal fulfillment of adults. Given how long black families have been unstable (mainly because they were in the wrong places at the wrong time -- but that's a whole book) it's not surprising that kids aren't doing well. Put it another way, living in a poor, unstable home where the needs of adults take precedence, there is only so much early childhood education and parent coaching can do.
I am with Woodson on this but I have something to add. We can see that a lot of well intentioned attempts to "fix" black parents don't work and are probably just making things worse. I'm not saying that parents don't even need help, but parenting coaching can be a problem unless it is limited and really is only coaching.
Almost all parents have the capacity to be a good enough for their child, just as all parents need help now and then. But too much contemporary parenting advice isn't really advice. It is expertise masquerading as advice. It is often contradictory and far too general to really be of much use, except perhaps by superficially boosting parents' confidence for a short time. All too often it becomes a substitute for developing the instinct for caring for your child. And when you aren't confident, when your decisions are subject to expert's scrutiny, it undermines your authority with your kids. There really is no substitute for just doing it, but if you are being second guessed all the time, you just make it harder for people who are already having a hard time.
I recently was on a zoom with a woman who runs her own black mom's group in her Pittsburgh community. I was really struck by her tag line. "I know you are already a good momma, we're just here to help each other out". That, I think, is how it should be.