Looked at from any angle, from any discipline or perspective, the state of the black family today is a warning of impending peril to our entire society.
This may be symptomatic of America`s retreat from legal and social equality and economic justice. It may be evidence of the deep fault lines that have developed in the bedrock of conscience. But it is clear and convincing evidence that the President and the federal government are devoid of compassion and have turned their backs on relieving human suffering.
In his State of the Union address, President Reagan declared that he was concerned about the general welfare and well-being of American families. To illustrate the depth of his concern for poor families, Reagan ordered a study on what has already been confirmed by volumes of research and common sense. Another study is not the answer to the widespread epidemic of hopelessness that cries out for immediate action.
In the tradition of the Reagan presidency, the 1987 federal budget reads more like a sequel to ”Rambo.” In its wanton and reckless attack on those already wounded in the six-year struggle for survival, this budget is the moral and economic equivalent of a domestic nightmare. Thirty-three million Americans, most of them children, who rely upon the federal government for their nutrition and health, their education and their housing, will bear the burden of almost 30 percent of the budget cuts.
The key to getting our economy back on a track of solid recovery is to develop a framework–not for studying human services but for fostering human development. And this task must begin with addressing the plight of families. No family can thrive in an environment that distorts male roles into fathering but not parenting. The nuclear family of a married couple and children in one household does not exist for half of black children born in this decade. The absence of black males as heads of households has had a devastating effect on black families.
Here in Chicago, as in most of urban America, half of black households consist of a lone woman and her minor children. Though there is no denying the love and care many single mothers provide their children, the bottom line is that they are the poorest of the poor, with all the disadvantages this entails for their children`s future.
Eighty percent of those mothers have never been married. Many are children themselves, and lack the preparation for parenthood. Their education is incomplete and their personal potential underdeveloped and unfulfilled.
Long-standing racism and sustained economic hardship rendered their black male partners poor prospects as providers. In a society that measures men by their ability to earn, a man without work does not stand tall. Sometimes black children`s lasting image of an adult male is not that of a father who provides and protects but of someone who is transient and unstable.
This is the urban reality. This is the fractured environment in which children`s perceptions and impressions are shaped at a tender age–to become hardened into lifetime values, attitudes and behaviors of the underclass.
It is time for us to admit that a child born into an incubator of antisocial conduct and breeding ground for hopelessness and despair is forever scarred, and that such a child, instead of contributing to society, too often becomes its enemy.
One breeding ground for despair is the high-rise housing project. In the long term, the social and economic dividends would be much greater if high-rise slums were demolished and all their residents liberated to build lives of dignity in more conducive settings. We either pay the cost of addressing the destabilizing impact of high-rise public housing now, or we will continue to pay the price of social pathology as our schools, jails and human services providers expend resources on yet another generation caught in the web of dependency and deprivation.
It is not necessary to condone crime and youth gangs to condemn policies that perpetuate slums and structured social inequality. It is beyond debate that current government assistance programs are woefully inadequate, punitive and predicated upon an expectation that they will be permanent.
The goal of any program of assistance should be to assist families toward economic independence. Its dominant mission should be to provide the basic training, skills and supports that to enable families to graduate into jobs and not sink further and further into the quicksand of dependency.
Gov. James Thompson`s workfare plan–Project Chance–is worth a closer look. Some of its features appear to be good. It promises to offer private-sector jobs, and jobs in the government and nonprofit sector, to many on the welfare rolls. On balance, Project Chance represents an improvement over the present system; it is a welcome initiative, although it has shortcomings. (It links work to welfare instead of creating an employment program separate from an income-maintenance program.)
The best thinkers on the subject propose bolder measures that should be items on a long-overdue agenda:
— We should establish, by law, minimum family incomes based on a fair standard of living in health and decency for all minor members.
— The federal government should provide supplemental funds and tax exemptions to bring families to minimum income levels, without penalty for a father or contributing adult male being in the home. Government should schedule payments for each child through age 18.
— An enlightened family security program should raise the income ceilings permitted in publicly assisted housing, with fair rents set by graduated schedule. It also should expand the availability of counseling and family services, and extend loans for vocational training to high school graduates who do not qualify for college.
— The federal government should provide incentives to states to include fathers living with their families in assistance programs.
If these measures are undertaken, they will give black and poor men the role too few have been allowed to fulfill, by creating opportunities for them to share equal responsibility for caring and providing for their children.
But even as we admit that most of the resources and some of the will to restore the foundation of the black community will come from without, the black community–its institutions, churches, its fraternities and sororities, its every club and association–must realize that it constitutes the natural leadership for rooting out all destabilizing influences on the black family.
Still, the black community cannot provide the number of jobs it needs for revitalizing traditional two-parent households. All of our institutions have to be pressed into service to provide leadership in the search for plausible solutions.
We must lobby Congress to pass a national full-employment bill so that every able-bodied American citizen may be gainfully employed. We have to be involved in family counseling and family planning. We must help in devising programs to control the problem of adolescent pregnancy.
Sex education should not only be a part of the social curriculum, it should be on any agenda designed to redirect the lives of our youth. But in the meantime, let us educate those who picket family planning clinics of the bitter fact that babies are having babies.
Regardless of social conditions and economic pressures, we have an obligation to teach right from wrong and instill pride, excellence and purpose in our children.
