12.4.1: African American Families

 12.4.1: African American Families

 Note that the heading reads African American families, not the African American family. There is no such thing as the African American family any more than there is the white family or the Latino family. The primary distinction is not between African Americans and other groups but between social classes (Haynes and Solovitch 2017).

African Americans who are members of the upper class follow the class interests reviewed in Chapter 8—preservation of privilege and family fortune. Viewing marriage as a merger of family lines, they are concerned about the family background of those whom their children marry (Gatewood 1990; Haynes and Solovitch 2017). Children of this class marry later than children of other classes. Middle-class African American families focus on achievement and respectability. Both husband and wife are likely to work outside the home. A central concern is that their children go to college, get good jobs, and marry well—that is, marry people like themselves, respectable and hardworking, who want to get ahead in school and pursue a successful career. African American families in poverty face all the problems that cluster around poverty (Armstrong et al. 2019). Because the men have few marketable skills and few job prospects, it is difficult for them to fulfill the cultural roles of husband and father. Consequently, these families are likely to be headed by a woman and to have a high rate of births to single women. Divorce and desertion are also more common than among other classes. Sharing scarce resources and “stretching kinship” are primary survival mechanisms. People who have helped out in hard times are considered brothers, sisters, or cousins to whom one owes obligations as though they are blood relatives. Men who are not the biological fathers of their children are given fatherhood status (Nelson 2013; Hunter et al. 2019). Sociologists use the term fictive kin to refer to this stretching of kinship. From Figure 12.6, you can see that, compared with other groups, African American families are the least likely to be headed by married couples and the most likely to be headed by women. Because African American women tend to go farther in school than African American men, they face a marriage squeeze. That is, their pool of eligible partners with characteristics that match theirs has shrunk, and they are more likely than women in other racial–ethnic groups to marry men who are less educated than themselves (Lichter and Qian 2019). Figure 12.6 Family Structure: U.S. Families with Children under Age 18 Headed by Mothers, Fathers, and Both Parents