Unknown Speaker 00:01 Now children are in fact, the first adult generation of the 21st century. And they will give birth to the first generation that belongs proper, per se in the 21st century. So it seems to me that some discourse on where we are now and its implications for women's lives as women fashion questions of what are their options? What is the possible what can and can't be done, that that's a particularly relevant point of departure. So that's what I've come prepared to say a bit about. And then I thought we might have a discussion about how some of the specific kinds of issues that I'm going to raise up, have attached to them double levels of responsibility that are both on one level, involving the black community with inside of within itself, but on another level involving Americans who live outside of black communities. In many ways, much of what I'm going to talk about is essentially, the crisis in the American family, most, particularly as it is negatively, more dramatically impacted black families. But much of what I'm going to go into discuss is, in fact, adversely affecting white families as well. So many of you have no doubt seen this issue of Newsweek, I'll pass it around, it's a, for the most part an issue devoted to the situation of black fatherhood, to title brothers, put together by a Newsweek, reporter staff and some of his old old buddies from Chicago. In many ways, given the recent fervor over the black family, it's one of the few insightful visions we have of the world through the eyes of black males. Okay. Much of my preoccupation as I think about the situation of black families, stems from to two levels of concern, as a historian I'm obviously concerned with, where what appears to be contemporary issues and problems, where they stemmed from, that is my sense that every situation hasn't passed. Everything has a background, everything has a story to tell, much of what comes into the present has already been shaped, at least by more than a set of historical forces, much of what we see has been shaped by a set of historical decisions, and choices. And I choose to be much more specific about talking about the force of history, then making it almost personalis. It seems to me that we are constantly looking at the consequences of choices and decisions. When I think about families, I think about adults, but I think principally about children. So it seems to me that in my as a black woman, as I think about the situation of black families, the first question that comes to my mind is, is childhood endangered, in what ways his child would be again in danger. And that has led me as a historian, or at least to use the tools of the historian to ask one for a set of questions, which is, how have we come to a point where the sense of priority and scale is such that children are dramatically undervalued? Unknown Speaker 03:41 Is that simply something that's gone wrong in our thinking for four or five years? Or is that itself an older way of making choices and making decisions? Does it have its own past? Is that part of our history? And who has who has made those decisions in the past? And who's made those choices? And it seems to me that, as I think about the question of his childhood, endangered, my response would be, yes, childhood is seriously endangered. Now, obviously, not the level of childhood by which anyone was could assert that so long as there are a critical mass of women who can continue to have children, then obviously, childhood goes on, that simply takes us to a very numerically reductionist way of thinking about the nature of childhood. I'm talking more so and I suspect a lot of people are thinking more so about a more central question, which is not what is the incidence of life or birth, or or death, but more centrally, what is the issue of the quality of life for children? And it seems to me that the question and the issue of the quality of life of children is central, in a society that is post industrial. Now, if I were if we were standing in Nairobi, if we were sitting in Indonesia Are they Parag? Well, we would have a different level of conversation about the possible levels of options, and the possible decisions and choices we could make around what is the central question surrounding childhood? But the central question isn't really whether or not children should be born and should die. The central question for us is in an affluent society, why is childhood endangered? It is in that context, then, that I think about the endangerment of childhood. And it seems to me that ever increasing numbers of children are at risk. It seems to me that 20 years ago, indeed, 40 years ago, large numbers of children of color were at risk, many of us knew that. But it did not assume the kind of visibility that we now see evident now that we are looking at larger populations of children who are at risk. And by at risk, I mean, a number of different things. I mean, children who are increasingly for, and children who are poor, live with adults who are poor. There is a one on one on one correlation between dependent children and the adults they live with poor children are living with impoverished adults, there are more of them now than there was than there was before. The racial and ethnic spread of that population of adults is widening. And indeed, we can talk more and more and more of a crisis in the American family. Now I choose not to see families as autonomous entities separate from economies anywhere in the world, whether it's capitalist economy, or socialist economy, I see it is inextricably bound up with the rules of the marketplace, the demands of the economy, and policy. And by policy, I mean, the kinds of decisions that people make sitting in rooms that have to do with spending, but that also have to do with valuing, and whether or not all children are equally valued, some are more valued, some are valued at one point in time for their, for the perception of them as little adults, as opposed to another point in time when they are perhaps valued as children away away from being little adults. And I think that there are a couple of things that bear contemplating one has to do with where we've come in the perception of children. The central question is our children miniature adults Unknown Speaker 07:25 are children the property of adults, are, are and because of that are adults responsible for not only the nurturance and shelter of children, but for having power over the very life force that surrounds children? Now, obviously, I am beginning to hedge towards something other than simply the question of what are the external forces that bear on families? In my previous comments about policy, I'm now talking more about a phenomenon in which we talk about what are the internal dynamics of families, what is the process by which adults expropriate children's rights. And here we are talking most pointedly about the issue, obviously, of child abuse, domestic violence and the treatment of children is property. The abrogation in other words of children's rights, and children are least amongst us prepared to defend their rights, or to enforce whatever we have evolved in this country, along a liberal and democratic sensibility. In terms of constitutional and legal amendments, children are not capable and able to enforce their own civil rights. And so it's probably fair to say that children another reason why childhood is endangered, is because children are the most abused people in America, because they are least able to effectively use the mechanisms of democracy, to resist being abused. All of that adds up to all of that plus much, much more, adds up to be a very pressing issue for all of us. It adds up to be a pressing issue today in my comments specifically, as it focuses as they focus on the black family. Though, I want to be very clear that I see much of this concern is extending beyond black families, but that due to a particular set of historical circumstances, I am most at this point in my own research and thinking concerned about black and Native American families. Most often the whole issue of the plight of Native American families doesn't even enter our thinking or discourse. And yet, I have my own thinking in the past 10 years, have forced myself to recognize and amend one previously unqualified statement I used to make, which was that the most oppressed people in America were black people. I have now learn to think and to understand that the most depressed people in America are the people we don't even ever see. They are in fact treated as Ward's of the state. And we have have lived decades, along with them somewhere in this country, occupying a totally invisible situation, at the very least black Americans, for better or for worse can be seen, can be seen if one chooses to, there is a small and dwindling Native American nation that is invisible. So I've learned to place things again, in a much more historically accurate context, who might exist to be around in 2050. And cool if we're not careful, will become a historical anomaly by the 22nd century. And I'm speaking of the Native American nation, which is down to about 100, about 330,000. People at this point, living mostly again away from us, reducing the likelihood that we keep them ever present in our consciousness. So it seems to me that alongside a rhetoric by which we gauge our greatness, and our potential in terms of how we say we take care of our children, alongside the rhetoric of the extension of democracy to children, is the reality of selective democracy for some children. Now, this selective democracy is a very, I think, touchy issue. I mean, you could one could be the selected, one could be selected for democracy and one century and fall from grace. And the next seems to me that, for several centuries now, it has been the disadvantage and misfortune of black children to not be selected. But it also seems to me that with a movement away from some of the very same ideals and values, and with a movement in reality away from the rhetoric of democracy, that we could easily support see a period in time in which the even those who have previously been sheltered could find their rights and the rights of their grandchildren abridged. So, and this is an old, this particular Harbinger, this voice that cautions. So when we allow something to happen to one, it sets the precedent and the stage would happening to many. Unknown Speaker 12:08 So it seems to me that that's the point of departure for what I think about both how the history of the black situation and black families has come into the 20th century, but also what I think are its connections with other families. And some of that is being borne out now. Because poverty is expanding. And more, more and more families are less and less able to see themselves as entitled, and to therefore teach their children a way of seeing themselves it's so affluence, poverty in the midst of affluence, the devaluing of some children in the midst of affluence. I'm reminded that I'm reminded reminded of the difference between traditional societies and the family construct, so traditional societies, and the ones that we have at least encouraged ourselves to use as the basis for thinking about families in this century. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that so long as we think we are looking at traditional societies, we allow in our thinking, and in our scholarship, and in our work, and our labeling, we allow for alternative family structures. So that if we were in fact having a conversation about the Caribbean, the colored family or the black family in the Caribbean, or the African family, we would build into our conversation, extended kinship networks, we would build into our conversation, certain alternatives to our perception of what constitutes a good healthy family. Because we are often encapsulated in a way of moving our own subjective values that come out of our class experience here into our language and our scholarship, we have evolved a way of even thinking about the black American family that basically hypothesizes that the nuclear family is a positive norm. And that is not to argue that it may not be a positive norm for some people, in some situations, it is to raise an issue which I think bears raising alongside the issue of black poverty, which is, what's the model that we use to look at black families? Unknown Speaker 14:18 And how do we insist upon some alternatives to those models that are consistent with people's reality? It is tantamount to Belle's comments this morning calling for a synthesis, a marriage, a reconciliation or responsibility between the world of theory and the world of practice. It is essentially my asking the question, whereas what is the labeling? What are the assumptions that undergird the labeling? How does it permit us at times to see deviance or difficulty where it may indeed exist, but sometimes where it does not exist? Because what we're looking at is an alternative that may not necessarily be a response to poverty. Now this becomes is very complex and for no other reason than the culture of poverty, people have told us. And we have heard them over time, say again and again and again that the poor are undifferentiated visa vie culture, and that the poor and Nicaragua have in common with the poor and Brownsville have in common with the poor in Singapore, that they are poor, and that that is their culture. And that their poverty once a race, moves them out of that situation and moves them into a middle income or middle class category. What that thoroughly obliterates is any need on our part, or anyone's poor to discuss the consequence of traditional culture as they move across economic lines. Now, obviously, the baseline assumption for the cup, the poverty, the culture of poverty, people who make that argument is that there is no culture that moves across an economic baseline. And so you basically have the idea that all you have to do for black American families, is provide them with some more money, and they will resemble in look like middle class white American families. Well, some of them will, but some of them won't. And that's where some of our own labeling as scholars and researchers gets in the way, even before we can perceive the real dimensions of the issue. And far be it from the perhaps single parent mother, who, if we visit her and talk with her and were to perhaps stay in her community for a day or two or three days, we would learn that she is part of a rather extensive network where in her household does not constitute her family, but far be it from her to be able to so impact and shape, the labelings and the words and theories and models that we use to study and construct a social analysis of her situation. Understanding as we do all too clearly, the numbers of times that our social analysis becomes public policy. I think Moynihan will one of the, at least for one of the reasons that he will be that he will go down in history is a clear example of where a relatively small report, I won't say obscure, but a relatively small report that was intended as an in house document ended up becoming the basis for national legislation. So there is ever this relationship between those who we support those who are deeply concerned about, tell ourselves, we want to help purport to be serving and helping, but we bring with us a way of seeing them that in fact, sometimes can contribute to some of the difficulty and seeing their real needs where it clearly. And it seems to me that this this brings me to this issue of one of many issues, but this issue of households headed by single women, black, white, green or otherwise. Because this issue of what is the what is the convergence between culture, between class between race, how does tradition and culture, whether or not it has been documented in ways that permit us to understand it? ahead of time, how does tradition and culture influenced the experience of in the case of most female headed single parent households? How does culture and tradition influenced this experience of poverty? And I would argue that it influences it in some interesting ways, I would argue, and I would also argue that even if you take this very same group and lift them out of impoverishment, that there will still be some ways of behaving, and some valuing mechanisms that don't obey white middle class norms. And that it is perhaps in that group that we can identify most clearly, culture and that we can use that group to argue most forcibly with a culture of poverty people. And of course, the litmus test, for instance, is the black middle class question becomes how much of the black middle class in fact lifted out of poverty behaves just like their white middle class Class counterparts? And how much of the black middle class having moved across the economic threshold of impoverishment have been moved into relative at least material comfort? How much of the black middle class does not in fact, behave in significant ways? Like a white middle class counterparts? For instance, how many how much how much of that group keeps elders? Unknown Speaker 19:20 How much of that group despite having the economic wherewithal to put elders in nursing homes refused to do some? How many of that group despite the economic wherewithal and often the apparatus at hand to place retarded or learning disabled children and institutions who refuse to do so? Now clearly, there are large numbers of white Americans who also make these kinds of choices in decisions. The point I'm making simply is that the social science literature has given us a way of understanding and affording white Americans the ability to do that, but that this culture of poverty argument has stripped us away from stripped down and pulled us away from a way of understanding black upward social mobility that permits us to also see culture. Now, and not not a culture that static a culture that obviously changes and undergoes real modifications, but which is nonetheless there. And so we are beginning to have a series of case studies and small studies that by which scholars are beginning to report on behavior, and valuing of the black middle class, for instance, by way of raising up the central question of, is there evidence of cultural transformation and residual culture? What forms does it take? Can one, close your eyes? And are these people exactly like the white middle class counterparts? Or are there some ways of valuing for some of them that are particularly in peculiarly very much like, or resembling their working class or poor counterparts. And they must then be some other way to explain that other than simply economics. So, part of that issue with culture becomes my concern around what we see, which I think some of the time reflects a set of conscious decisions about alternative lifestyles and alternative families. Now, this is a perhaps very loaded and dangerous thing to say, because I never want to take the responsibility off either the black community or the largest society for poverty, I never want to say that poor people worse in their situation, particularly women with children, by choosing to live alone, choosing not to have the economic, the additional economic support of someone else, I never really want to set that up in a way that permits us to look at this poor woman as choosing her poverty, choosing to build on and choosing those set of situations. And yet I know that there are some powerful forces at work in the black community that are in fact, setting up for young black women decisions, which are perhaps not ideal decisions, which mean choosing between, for instance, and ever expanding and pernicious patriarchy amongst young black males, the incidence and increase of either abuse of women domestic violence or abuse of children, in such a context with the increasing and expanded sense of violence and real violence against all women, including women of color in this case, what kinds of other decisions then is a young woman? In fact, does she feel compelled to me? And could we in fact and fine? Could we in fact, look at a situation where her behavior does not obey rational economic rules such as Why would she choose to have this child out of wedlock? Why would she choose not to marry him? Why would she choose to live with her mother? Or her older sister? Why would she choose that that doesn't make economic sense, that may be very true, but it may make another kind of sense. It may make the kind of sense by which her mother says to her, that not being hassled, sexually or not being treated violently in a in a domestic situation, or having control and being able to protect her children at all times is more important than having extra money. And that if that means living with one's mother, or one sister, or in a community of with other women, one or more, perhaps that choice or that decision is made. We are seeing all around us black white men or otherwise families, the impact of increased domestic violence and violence towards women rape, child abuse and violence towards women. There is no reason to believe that some numbers of the young women that we now to talk of as single parent headed households are not in fact making what are no doubt very difficult decisions that that amount to being caught between a rock and a hard spot. Unknown Speaker 23:48 But again, it seems to me that it's more that's deeper than simply the question often deeper than the question of what are the rational economic decisions that are being made? Now, obviously, and later on, I hope we get to talk about the impact. Such a set of decisions will invariably and of necessity have, for instance, on our welfare system, or our system of our systems of maintenance and public support to people making those kinds of decisions about whether or not how we view those kinds of decisions is complex enough to be able to support the woman's decision on one hand to avoid violence or to avoid a hassling situation or to avoid what she perceives as being controlled. Remembering that this is also a generation behind us that though they are being exposed to lots of different mixed messages, one of the messages is presumably that women should have a right to more place in the world. Now whether or not they internalize that the message is out there. And it often takes some interesting guises. Sometimes having more places in the world means taking your clothes off. Sometimes having more place in the world means being able to do more drugs or have more sex. I mean it's the media is taking it taking some of These ideas and package them in some quite distorted and not so interesting ways at times. But the point is, it's out there, one could not see the exposure to some of these concepts and ideas 30 years ago. So there is a generation now that has to sift through these messages, many of which are visual, and, and very attractive and very forceful in their color presentation or in their media presentation. But it's all there for them to deal with. And so certainly, I'd like us to think some about how complex is this issue of choice in the context of poverty, because that's really what we're talking about. And again, one has to be ever so careful. I even had this in my notes to talk about and I even even over lunch, contemplated not opening this up. And I even I sat at a table with other black women who were at this conference, and we talked about what was going to have what might happen, what was the possible scenario, if I came out and wanted to talk about black on black violence, at the same time as being thoroughly rigorous with our national economy at the same time as talking about the crisis in American families. And clearly seeing this larger picture? What would happen if I spoke almost the unspeakable, because one wants to see the bottom line of the oppression is racial. And yet, I know all too well, that I'm always at risk on the streets of Harlem. Alright, so somehow, as a black woman, I have to reconcile those those different kinds of issues. And I think it is incumbent on black women in the next 20 to 30 years to bring those kinds of issues to the surface. Regardless of the censorship or the criticism, I think much of the reaction to Alice's book is exactly that situation, I find. And I know Ishmael, and I find it and abominable, that of all of the ways in which he could comment and respond to the book, that instead of in fact, talking about the numbers of cases or incidents out there that the book speaks to, that there's often this very defensive response and cynical approach to black women criticizing or being part of, presumably, the the oppression of black men. So it seems, it seems to pull us away from even being able to open the discourse about it. And I think that one of the challenges before Black women the next in the years to come, as as many are doing now is to insist on some agenda setting that rings as a central question not only the issues of racial oppression, and racial disadvantage, but also the very particular set of issues that are tearing us asunder from within. It may be very true that much of the stress and the pressure that generates that anger and violence comes from elsewhere in America, that may be very true. But women and children are victims, okay. And there is such a thing as being a primary victim, and bring the secondary but there is such a thing as having the bones in your face crushed and beaten up, and also listening to someone say, Well, you have to understand he's very angry. Yes. And he's knew something you said trigger them off. Both those things are very true. It's also true that it is a woman's body and a child's body. And smaller, weaker men who are who are absorbing this physical violence, physical violence is not being given back to its source is being vented on new victims. So it seems to me that historically, the black community has placed black women in charge of the children. Unknown Speaker 28:40 I don't know any black women myself who shrink from that role or that responsibility. It seems necessary indeed. And very often, we in fact, not only end up with the children but but prefer to have the children and to keep at least the power over shaping the children close to us. It seems to me that it is also incumbent upon us to take the level of discourse to a point where it is more than dismissed or summarily discussed on the staircase on the way down after the conference, but not talked about during the conference because it is such a politically loaded issue. That the double anguish too though, because so many mothers of black male teenagers Unknown Speaker 29:26 experienced so much extraordinary pain when the kids are so frustrated and so angry and lash out often that the teenagers who are part of their schools are on the streets. It's not a great learning in common but it just strikes me so clearly. Mothers of black teenage boys are working on putting intervene in the right way or whatever number lashing out at my friend's daughter? Unknown Speaker 30:07 I think it is. But I also think it's important for her to place his anger and his victimization in the context that also understands that he begins to contribute to someone else's oppression, he becomes for a young black woman part of the problem. And I think that that's some somehow involved with what we see going on with the black family, and that the mother knows that. Unknown Speaker 30:34 That's true. That's right. That's right. But Unknown Speaker 30:37 often, there is the sense of having somehow gone wrong or having made the error. But it stops that for me, what is a very dysfunctional level, which is for me, guilt, and or silencing anger are both very dysfunctional, they both shut you down, they stop you, you can spend years working through them, but you don't act creatively. And you don't intervene in price and create a crisis situation in a way that helps move it forward. You in some ways, become part of the crisis, just not an active instigator, but you are part of it in that your creative energies had been blunted, because you're working through and being stuck in this very dysfunctional feeling of either guilt or being overwhelmed by the anxiety of it. What I also think, needs to be said, and not so much to point blame, but it's also to remind, many black mothers have teenage sons, that there is a ritual socialization process that often goes on, I have two brothers who are three and four years younger than myself, I remember some of it. The ritual socialization, somewhere from about eight on that begins to differentiate the sense of possible, particularly around physical expressiveness for them. And for us. Who takes responsibility for helping him with anger when he seven and eight? Is it perceived to be the man's responsibility? How is that anger appeased? Is it a piece? Is it confronted? Does she make him a pie? Does that do crisis intervention? Is that how she learned that when not always deals with anger? But But do you try to nurture? In other words, the anger away? Do you try to love it more? What kinds of expectations does that set up in him about the behavior of adolescent girls? Does he either have to be loved or clearly at some point someone does have to love on its own? Because otherwise, it just gets more and more intense. But is that an expectation? Or is it a gift? Right? And how do young adolescent girls understand that? Who have largely been taught almost at no time, so you've entered except perhaps at other girls, and then you have to be a bigger girl. Nor to pull it off? Well, sometimes in Washington, sometimes, I mean, I was bullied on because I was smaller when I was in grade school. And invariably, the bully, the few bully girls will always they had, by the time they were 12, or 13, they had grown this big height, so they could pull it off, because they were physically bigger, and their bodies were bigger. So they were at least more willing to try to use their size to intimidate. And they may or may not have had mothers that did that. I mean, some of it was just watching the bigger kids beat other kids up and the issue of girls wanting power. Also, I don't think it's something that just adolescent males want. Unknown Speaker 33:51 Oh. So what else have I been thinking about? So I think there are sometimes some set of decisions that are made about who to live with and who not to live with. And, and sometimes that takes the form of what can you control? And what can you have that you call your own. And a concern I have is that there is a generation of young adolescent women now, who are extending two major concepts. One is the idea that you are most worthy when you are a mother. So they're willing to babysit 1314 As a matter of fact, they think it's wonderful. They're willing to stop going to school, that babies that seems to be not new, the scale has increased, but that seems to me to be feeding into this idea that we are most womanly when we're having children, right. Now, it just may be that the other things by which the other ways by which some of the rest of us are validated in a woman and a woman then is that if those other forms of validation are not there strongly, that having the role as mother assumes a very important ascendancy. So Though that one is willing to pursue that status, which is a very high, highly esteemed status in almost every every group right across the board, right across class right across race, it's a cornerstone of patriarchy, motherhood is one's primary and indeed, perhaps perceived to be only role. So one of the things that seems to me that has feminists standing on their head about this has us really concerned is the question of how do we make horizons a little bit bigger? You see, we know that motherhood is not the only thing you can do, or B, it's one of many things that you can do a B. And it's a wonderful thing that you can do a bit, but it's not the only thing that you can do or be. And so we get very concerned that after all of the work that feminists have done, particularly in the past 20 years, that there's now a generally a generation of young women who are in fact, acting through some of the very same old stuff about valuing only mother but then it also seems to me that there is that somehow, some real lines got crossed about sexual messages. Not the sexual message is being given to young male children, black white men or otherwise about so your oats, explore who you are, find the fast girls, sleep with them, but marry the good girls, not those sexual messages. But the ones that were given mother to daughter, or shall we say the ones that are not being given the mothers that are talking with their daughters about propriety, and moral upbringing and being good and the child and all this stuff, but they're not talking to them about one essential issue, which is how to get it on to protect yourself. And this is a major issue inside the black community, there are black mothers not talking to their daughters about two things, having sex and surviving, having sex, surviving it as and being able to have more of it without carrying the bag. And that, and I'm not prepared to try to figure out what that's all about. I think that's very complex has to do with some of its generational has, obviously to do with the fact that a number of these women themselves came out of situations where it was trial and error. They figured it out. And older sister, perhaps at some point explained some of it, they often got married and had to work it out themselves wasn't so easy, just because there was a good a women's movement and a gay movement in the black movement and of anti war movement. It wasn't simply a matter of they had learned how to talk to this upcoming daughter, there's who was soon going to men straight and into the world of young womanhood. Well, the question becomes, how do you go talk to her a challenge certainly is how do you go talk to her about being sexual, while at the same time try to oppose some of the very same values that were very important when you were being raised about prolonging the period of time that you spent out of having out of being pregnant. And perhaps by doing so prolonging at least the options you have to choose certain men, and not the least of which is a second issue, which is for want of a better way to talk about it being a good girl, being a good girl in a in a rather old fashioned sense of the word, the perhaps naked and perhaps having these feelings but not becoming real sexually free. As Victorian as I think in many ways, it is still has a residual. It is not as Victorian as where we've been, but I think it's still there. Unknown Speaker 38:33 And the reality is quite different. The reality is that the youth now are being programmed as consumers from a very early age on sex is increasingly a commodity. It is located inside their bodies, the challenge to figure out where the commodity ends, and where their persona or their, their ambience as a human being begins is an enormous challenge for this generation. It is not even that much of that same challenge for you. And we just got bought. That is we got through on the tail end of the way in which some of these Victorian values anchored the sense of sex as being somehow something that was within you was important you were to either save it, if you saved it to a ceremonious point in time when you got married, that was valued. If you didn't save it, well, you could still be on it provided you didn't become very, very fast. And you didn't tell anybody about it and neighbors didn't find out about it. But you see how at least there was still the sense that there was something shall we say sacred about it and what the media is now doing is shaking them down. I mean, that's kind of in the street, when goes with the media shaping them down. The media is turning them in on their own bodies and telling them this is a this is a thing. We can market it with cars. We can market it with cigarettes. We can exploit it on sitcom, we can To develop intrigue about it in the evening so that we are in raptured for two, two consecutive hours, on on evening serial programming, we can do all these things with it. And somehow there's not the corporate and media responsibility that this level of projection and programming is impacting young minds who are formulating, what is my sexuality, it's inside of me, but how am I going to relate to it isn't really a thing? Do I just go after it and enjoy it, but not really take responsibility for the consequences that it may have on my personality, how I feel about myself, what I think about myself how boys or girls see me, etc, etc, etc. So I think the programming is all out there that says go do it go intelligence, sensibilities, all of them. It's in the music. It's really everywhere. And so they aren't going to a lot of them are going to do that the pressure on teams to say no, in the high schools and middle schools. I mean, I do volunteer work. When I'm in Boston, I do volunteer work in high schools, and they talk all the time about how difficult it is to say no to drugs, no to sex, just to say no, whether it means you're not ready, whether I mean, but it's a hustle. So they've been really kind of shaken down. And somewhere, it's getting better. But somewhere mothers are not saying, Look, before it gets to the point at which you have to make that decision that afternoon or that evening. Let's have this let's talk about this because I want you to protect your seat. It sounds very simple. And yet, I'm sure it's fraught with all kinds of very complex psychosocial implications. So that seems to be one of the main main incentive stage issues with this particular issue in black families. That is the issue of the increase in teen pregnancy. And I know it is, I've got the statistics here that say, well, the rate is falling for black teens, it's still increasing for white teens. But black teens relative to the white population, it is staggeringly high. And either way we look at it, it is across the board a teen issue. Therefore, it is a generational issue that we're looking at, we actually see a decrease in fertility for women who are most economically able to, in fact, have children, women in the age group from 25, to 34, are having fun are decreasing decreasing numbers of children. And it is precisely not so much for me the issue that they are simply young, but they are poor. It is that combination for me that they're black and white is less of an issue. I care about that issue. But I see it going on and the combination of being young and relatively under educated and poor. That says to me that by the year 2000. There is a generation of adults coming into their young adulthood, who have learned a very different experience, and a profoundly disturbing one in my thinking than much of what our either national rhetoric is, or what our best intentions are, or even what we say some of our policies are designed to do. Unknown Speaker 43:13 And I think that some while we while we've seen a real erosion of federal support for social spending for families, that we can we do have these we do have an experience whereby in the past 20 years there have has been public policy, and social declaration, in fact, and spending aimed at improving the situation of families, it is just often done. So in ways that don't adequately impact or don't adequately gauge the impact of programs, once they get down to the grassroots level, for instance, saying that there is a program that is to strengthen families, but having it be a program in which in 22 states, the man cannot stay in the home in order for the woman to get assistance that does not strengthen families. So there is this real real issue of the difference between the rhetoric or the intention, and how it actually gets played out? How the how once the policy is implemented, what effect does it actually have? Does it strengthen families? No, in fact, it at the very least it begins to structurally alter the likelihood of nuclear family patterns amongst black Americans. Now, I don't particularly have a vested interest in defending nuclear family constructs. I think they work well in certain situations. I also think there are alternatives elsewhere in the world. And here that also worked very well. That's what I meant earlier about the force of culture and or kinship. And much of that, it seems to me is residual traditional societies, though. I mean, one of the things that I think has happened is that we in the social sciences and the humanities have lost out on a certain Development Language. People doing developed that people doing research on developing societies have an arsenal of words and terms that permit them to Link social valuing social behavior with modernization. And so they have a repertoire of words like traditional societies. But in our lingo in the academy, we've left off using a set of words that permit us to talk about the front to experience that, that the Prime Minister talk about what in fact, American families look like, in the early 19th century, that was not that long ago, were those not in very many real ways resembling resembling traditional societies, you see, but by removing that terminology, from the ways in which we can talk about early American families and their interest, familial constructs, whereby social needs, the social needs, the economic needs, and the life sustaining needs of whatever communities they were in, were met, not by an industrial magnate, but they were meant by those, intra intra development within those communities, seems to me a very new way that was very much small scale development and very much traditional society. But by not having the words to talk about it in ways that would permit us to ask, how does how do the cultural values passed through the early 20th century? Which of them remain, which of them are eroded or absorbed or, or diverted? And obviously, the central question becomes, how does industrialization and the full blown emergence of monopoly capitalism, how does that reach into the family in the 20th century and start removing functions from it, like what to do with the old aged, what to do with the disabled, how how to have goods and services, how to how to get access to soap, how to get access to things that you would have formally, in fact, made for yourself in the family, but that as time goes on one industry after another reaches into the family, and you service that from you draws it out here and makes it an industry makes money off it. But But So doing it alters the American family. So it seems to me by the time we come to that point, we are not talking about the traditional family. or newly arriving immigrants, not static in uniform, but traditional to the extent that you don't yet have an industrial process reaching and redefining the family, not nearly in the same way that you do. Well, I have a lot more stuff down here. But I'm thinking that I'll stop here and we can have a conversation. And when we touch on things that I perhaps have some more information about that I'll be glad to, to talk about, oh, perhaps one thing I do want to do is give you some price statistics. So that when you're having conversations with people when there's this qualitative data we're talking about and it helps to marshal some hard evidence, some of which is let me see, I'm going to pretty much read this to you because I wrote it out as narrative. Unknown Speaker 48:02 So I have your poverty amongst black families, which shouldn't be of concern to all Americans is dramatically worsening. And poverty is engulfing greater numbers of white families. For instance, 21% of all families with children are now headed by a woman in 1960, this was true of non white families. This is what I meant by 20 years ago or 25 years ago, you had the same kind of scenario developing but it was only true for the most part of non white families, then amongst poor families, and this is for blacks, whites and Hispanics. These statistics 35% of these families are headed by women. The racial breakdown of households headed by women is 27% of poor white families are headed by women. 53% of poor black families are headed by women. And 53% of for Hispanic families are headed by women. And by poor I mean living below the official poverty index. There are 8.1 million poor white children in the US. And 4.3 million poor black children there are half as many poor black children as poor white children. But of course, black children are not 50% of the population of the country. And so they are disproportionately represented in this in their poverty. A two to one ratio. That's a higher proportion of black children live in single parent female, single parent families. Curiously enough, the generation which is increasingly responsible for the birth rate associated with children who are being born into poverty or themselves, barely above childhood, they're young and poor. You heard someone talking this morning 1011 up 217 eating. Indeed for me and my thinking very much still children. Indeed, the most prevailing characteristic that surrounds the lives of almost 14 million children is that the people who are primarily for primary care providers for them are impoverished, underemployed or unemployed, lacking educational and employment opportunities. Then as we said earlier, the situation is not in itself new. Then I have to note here. Yes. Tech Stops subsidies for employer pay health insurance. There are ways that is at some point in this talk, I have some suggestions for how to make things different. And ways in which women and men can make a difference in their own communities and beyond in lobbying for legislation annual policy redirect is one of the ways to help the poor. And I'm distinguishing the point the two routes, they're the poor, who either are marginally underemployed or seasonally employed, therefore, they have access to some wages some of the time. And then there are the poor who have no wages. None of the tax reform in this country helps the poor who have no wages. As a matter of fact, one of the things that characterizes all tax reform since 1972, is that it has been redistributing income upwards, and only upwards. So that tax subsidy away I'm in fact, subsidizing poor families, whether they are seasonally or marginally employed or abjectly poor, would be to initiate tax subsidies, which in fact, do for the poor families, what a number of specific tax subsidies due for the middle class. And I mean, specifically, the tax write offs for employer paid health insurance, the parts of the health insurance premium that are in fact not paid by employers that are in fact absorbed and paid by us. Now, in many cases, the whole the entire premium is paid for by employers, but that again amounts to a benefit that only affects you and benefits you if you are employed. And if you are employed at a level sufficient for those fringe benefits to be appropriate to your level of employment. Then, of course, there is the tax subsidy for housing, which is in the form of mortgage interest, write off so again, a middle class tax reform, not at all for that matter, dear to or beneficial to poor families who often cannot muster the necessary credit to become homeowners, much less sustain the sustain, and secure employment necessary to make long term commitments to paying mortgage notes by which you'll know that you'll be able to keep the house and not have been foreclosed on. So it seems to me that improvements in the Earned Income Tax Credit, that is Unknown Speaker 53:01 expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, expanding the standard deduction, and the personal deduction would be ways of helping poor families. Since those are the major vehicles in in the tax provisions that impact poor families. This has the effect though, in terms of the choices that we make and the decisions that we make of beginning to redirect the redistribution of income in quite legally. And this one could easily argue very reformist not at all revolutionary way but very actually somewhat simplistically performance with but it will nonetheless be relatively painless when one considers that the the component parts to keep up the B one bombers that the Defense Department would like to phase out, but which wants to refurbish some good ones anyway that the contingency fund is $2.1 million. When one considers that that is simply a contingency to buy spare parts to refurbish some of the ones. There's little question that the cost of implementing some of these programs is negotiable. Then of course, I've talked about child abuse. I've not mentioned incarceration, much of the impetus behind this Newsweek article and I suspect other treatments of black men has been this recurring question that has now been shouted from the rafters since Bill Moyers special on black families, which is where the missing black fathers Marian Adelman, Ed E L. Ma N in a wonderful book called families in crisis. I want to make sure I have a title. Please look for it. It's just recently been published. Yes. It's called families in peril, calm colon and agenda for social change. Many of you know Marian to be the former civil rights activist. She's a lawyer mother of three sons. She is The executive director of the Children's Defense Fund, easily responsible for much of the lobbying on behalf of children and poor families and on Capitol Hill. Not to mention obviously working in cooperation with other groups of teen watch programs and Marion Gables series of lectures at Harvard last year under the famous Dubois Lecture Series, which is hosted once a year, every other year, I'm sorry, every other year. The lectures have been published as this book, which has just come out in January Harvard University. But also families in parallel an agenda for social change. Much at least much of the statistical information I have comes from that book, her book, and this working paper report, which is called a dream deferred, which is a working paper out of a Washington think tank, and is I wrote for it and they sent it to me for your charge. It's a compilation of a vast amount of census material and tables, and they've added some text to it. It's very, very, very informative. It's right, the addresses it's coming to. One of Marion's arguments is that there are a complex set of reasons for the missing fathers. The one that she does not provide is the one that we talked about a little while ago, that is the process by which young women might be making decisions based on other kinds of values. But clearly, some of the reasons that Marian gives are also important, and one of them is incarceration. Of some figures on incarceration. Well, what I remember Yes, according to the US Census report, 27.3%. Of All right, wait, no. All right, we'll do a cost ration in a moment I started giving you this, I'll give you the rest of this information. According to the US Census report, 27.3% of white males, aged 20 to 24. Of married only 11.9% of black males of the same age as married, roughly less than half among white males aged 25 to 29 64.9% of married. among black males are the same age only 44.3% of married. In other words, young black men between 20 and 24 are not married. Unknown Speaker 57:33 Now, again, we have to ask is this choice is this the pressure of poverty, we have our traditional ideas and values about what is a good father, and what prerequisites are necessary to marry that is having a stable income, being able to care for family have our ideals about what constitutes family and fatherhood, collided with the chronic and debilitating teenage unemployment that we see. And Edelman argues that without any doubt that that's a major contributing factor to the absence of first marriages, amongst black males in this age range. So her initial argument is that they are not missing per se, they are not married, is her first argument. And so she goes on to say, and I quote, failure, first marriages to form among young black male black men and women is the cause of the high proportion of young black families that are fatherless. And I would agree that that's the single most pronounced reason. Then in 19 85%, of black men versus 1% of white men in their 20s were institutionalized incarcerated. In 19 85%, of black men, versus 1% of white men, five to one ratio in their 20s were incarcerated. So there are a fair number of black men incarcerated. Military rates for residence in barracks is high for young black men, meaning that there are more unmarried AND, and OR if married, residing in barracks, young black men then proportionate to their population of white men. So that's all that also and given the given the the extent to which the military is an employer of increasing numbers of young black men and black women, that's an important thing for us to think about. Black males die at nearly twice the rate of young white men. We're talking about street homicide. And then missing we have a we have an issue that is not a new issue for the Census Bureau. It's actually a very old issue, but one in which they are increasingly taking more and more responsibility and at least acknowledging the serious process of undercounting. We know from census to census from the 19 century, that there has been a serious problem all along with intricate undercount of the entire black population in many places. But CDF hypothesizes or argues that there are at least 200,000 Black men that are missing from the census. That they're not necessarily underground, but that they are simply undercounted. And we might want to think about this figure, it sounds as reasonable as 250,000, or 150,000. That is, she doesn't they don't footnote this figure. So I don't know how they've arrived at it. But that's their estimation, on a around a figure for their estimation of how many black men are sent are present and are under are simply not counted. And there are any number of ways that I can at least think of that happening. One is, for instance, now that they male census question is rescheduled, if, in fact, we see the process whereby in order to be eligible for state benefits, if one of the criteria is that a man is at the man not be present, and in fact required, so Tim to become transitory, it could easily mean that male that would come to that residence address to his name could be forwarded, it could be returned, it could simply not be given to him. So there are any number of ways in which at a very important level, the connection between him and his male actually becomes superfluous. So that is very easily one very easy mechanism and easy way to simply stop counting those men, then there are some other ways, but we know that to be a serious issue, particularly in undercounting poor and marginally employed. Okay. One last time. I'm gonna leave the tape running, though, because I think there's like one thing that Unknown Speaker 1:01:48 really struck me that Unknown Speaker 1:01:49 I'm struck by the Unknown Speaker 1:01:50 fact that a lot of these teen girls didn't have babies, because they want to have somebody, they're missing some kind of real basic love relationship, even with the man that they're involved with, or their mother, maybe either too busy or too young, to be able to give enough emotional success. And so they have babies who make love in the love family. And I think that that's, that's sort of terrible. But that's an issue which should be addressed. Because one girl said, finally had somebody to talk to five, you just had somebody to sit down and talk to me, none of this. Unknown Speaker 1:02:34 So I think there were a couple of things going on. One is I think that, that she's saying that she can have something of her own, something that she can have control over. Remember that increasingly, around her people always talk about things, in terms of the control you have over things, even children? That's what I meant earlier by art, do we see children's having their own will? Or do we really see ourselves as instilling our will in children? At what point do we give children their own space? And how recent is this whole language by which we even talk about children as having their own space? That's all very, very recent, and reflect some of the best of the developmental psychology on this on this scale? This The second issue, it seems to me is around this question of wanting this, wanting a child and wanting something abroad, seems to me that perhaps the ways in which she the ways in which young girls are telling us they need to be they need to feel cared about are not the ways in which the people who are seeing themselves as their providers are not that there's a misconnection that there's a there's a gap between the mother and father or the mother or father, who is a working parent, who is marginally cooler, who has to work very hard to in fact, be able to serve as a provider, it is very, very likely that how they see their role as provider does not extend this much more romantic idea of being loved. When we ask what are the possible what are the what are the situations in which people are encouraged? And perhaps even more able to experience or express emotional loving? What are the times in our own life when we can do that better? Or worse? Is it times of high stress? Is it during the time being freaked out or stress? I mean, are we at our most loving or best? Are we likely to be able to communicate feelings in ways that give somebody else a good feeling about us or about themselves? When we are the most stressed out or it doesn't have to be those times when we're in a better space? Do we do we have to be reasonably secure about our findings? into situations, how many people are even sexually dysfunctional? When they're not sure their financial situation? I mean, I mean, I mean, how Yeah, I mean, people really shut down when they think that they're looking the likelihood of not surviving. Unknown Speaker 1:05:15 Not only noticing that a lot of the women who had gone through the one man or two men and gotten pregnant, and they were like, they will put up with a kind of transitory situation, and whatever he would give for a while, it'll become very bitter. And then I'd see that it's if you're having teenagers having teenagers, that your mother become very emotionally bitter, you know, by her own experience with men, her own experience with people with the welfare department, and employer with the people on the streets. And, and that would create a barrier between her and a daughter, who was sort of the cause because when my mother was unwell for mother and I know that she can't help resenting me and my sister sometimes for being for, for getting in the way of what she really didn't want to do, what services you have. And I think that there's that kind of stress that perhaps relief women to one of us have some kind of a problematic relationship with nurturing, Unknown Speaker 1:06:19 such as the baby. Yeah, so Unknown Speaker 1:06:21 she's a baby. Unknown Speaker 1:06:22 Also, you know, there is the saying that men give love to get sex, and women give sex to get love. And that's real different. But that very much sounds like wanting to be loved more. And so you give something you give yourself in exchange for wanting to be loved. But the young men are being given black white men or otherwise, they're being given very different messages about what giving yourself means. Giving yourself means having sex, which does not necessarily mean you have to love this person. So if that isn't a winning situation for a young girl, I mean, then just keeping the baby but not keeping the man is. I mean, I mean, it's not rational, as we said before, but it does reflect the what she thinks she may get out of it is the nurturing, loving connection that she wants, and having already now headsets and sense that he's in a different place in his head in his understanding about this, actually not wanting to keep him. Yeah. Over a long period of time for that reason. I mean, especially with Unknown Speaker 1:07:21 some of these guys that you see the words, you're trying to tell this guy who had killed shot a man because it was Unknown Speaker 1:07:28 spit at him. Why did you get married to this woman? Unknown Speaker 1:07:32 I wonder? Are you nuts? Unknown Speaker 1:07:33 She doesn't need him just need to get a pit upside the head she'd much rather deal with the social worker. I mean, you know, I that was one thing that really, I mean, these men are really violent, somebody to just say, well, you fathered a child, you guys should get married just seems insane to me. Unknown Speaker 1:07:54 To you know, just do Unknown Speaker 1:07:56 welfare and livelihood of a woman? I'm Unknown Speaker 1:07:59 sure you're gonna say something? Yeah, Unknown Speaker 1:08:01 well, I was, I was gonna jump in on slightly different tech and hardly a high level theory. So I was really reacting. And so we've almost been to kids. And they taught me a girl. And when you were talking about fathers, and teenagers, what really struck me and I'm sitting here thinking, the difference between having an infant and having a teenager, big difference. Because you can control an infant, mostly because they can't, you know, you put them down this video in February. Any photo all of their needs, on some level. Dealing with teenagers requires such a strong sense of Unknown Speaker 1:08:45 their skills, and rights. Unknown Speaker 1:08:49 Because in some way, simple There is to be pushing the boundaries, but they're not like two year olds, you can pick them up, you know, put a main equipment and get out again, or you can't physically control them anymore. And you don't have a very strong sense of self. And what love means, you know, that as a loving parent, you have a right to set some boundaries to have some standards, whatever. It's really good. And I was earlier in your talk, I was feeling so much empathy for parents. And I got this really nice kid who, you know, had been really hard, you know, had archives, but, but I find it very hard to remember how much rights I have as a favorite. And if I didn't have a lot of economic security and stability i guess i i read the piece in Newsweek, which is riveting, which I Unknown Speaker 1:09:56 recommend to everybody. And I was struck, I guess by two things that I'd like to talk about. When you talk about the nuclear family being only one way when it took clear from that article, though, I think those brothers who came out of strong nuclear family seem to be the ones who could go on Unknown Speaker 1:10:25 mushrooms that Unknown Speaker 1:10:27 somehow enable them to overcome the other thing that's extremely radical in the context of social, political and economic content. That makes me wonder how they survived at all. And I guess you've highlighted problems real well. But what what, what possibilities that could change that somehow make it possible for children? To have one. And not to become adults or 12? Unknown Speaker 1:11:14 Well, you know, to some extent, for a very long time glac childhood has been short. I guess if I am that I mean, that's not to say that I'm that's not important to me, making childhood longer, but black childhood has been short for very long time shorter for black female children than black males, but short 10 Eight. What it alarms me is that in the past childhood has been assured because one had to grow into a level of maturity, sufficient to enter adolescence, puberty, and then adolescence, accepting certain ideas about work, helping the family taking care of elders taking care of children, being surrogates and supporters of the family. What now is in place that alarms me much more is that the de munition of childhood is being abridge by disruptive forces, like access to drugs or violence, not just maturation, not not learning how to how to babysit and run errands and visit grandma and make groceries and help. I mean, that yes, that also began to abridge childhood. And I won't necessarily celebrate that, but that seems to be far less pernicious than the abridgement of childhood, by the intrusion of ways of impacting children that do not build character. May one could argue that, while we want to while we would have the length in childhood, in the early 20th century, for particularly the poor, black or white, that one could argue that there were qualities in some of that discipline and some of that austerity, that made for incredible character. Certainly, it made for perseverance, diligence, and often a finely fired sense of self in later adult life, a sense that you could not be destroyed. I mean, people had matured at 20 and 25, when people were not still coming to terms with themselves, it's 30 and 35. It was just whole, much earlier. Unknown Speaker 1:13:31 So I've always been a little bit ambiguous about that, because I think it had its abuses also, but there is now in place this abridgement that comes of anger and violence and the pariah effect the feeding of children. That is having 10 year old junkies means that the street hustlers are no longer willing to leave childhood alone, they're no longer willing to earn a market of adults. Therefore, they're no longer willing to entertain the issue of choice. It's no longer enough that you come to the junk to the to the pusher and ask for drugs to push it out, goes into the into the middle schools, into the high schools, maybe even the elementary school yards and hangs around and gives out free chocolate that's laced with it's laced with drugs. I mean, the pusher is now making a new market. Capitalism is here and is now being directed at seven year olds. So that that original childhood panics made a Unknown Speaker 1:14:30 lot more I want to ask you about Unknown Speaker 1:14:32 because people when we talk about programs and policies, even get a very high level of governmental I mean, the tax things you were talking about, were good because they put real money and resources. But what struck me lightweight into the greatness of people like yourself, we're talking now speaking the Unspeakable in ways that don't like the racism of society. I've talked about the necessity of working within the black community as well. And rebuilding, strengthening. So now I'm wondering if you know, whether it's through churches, what is the infrastructure is like, Oh, yeah. It seems to me is in a position to begin to address these things in a new way. Now anything can be spoken. Unknown Speaker 1:15:24 Okay, I've got some some things you made. Obviously, some media coverage, although I don't like to build noise, especially Oh, there are too many Unknown Speaker 1:15:36 problems with it. But if I'm looking for an example, to talk about my thoughts, that's the most recent thing. Unknown Speaker 1:15:42 In fact, the program that talks about an infrastructure that was pointed out as we were watching this, from other people watching with it, we saw what was that they introduced the people who were going to stay with the children. And what they did is they took boxing, or basketball, or in or a policeman who came in to the gym and just the burden to this jury to opens of options and choices. So it's all Unknown Speaker 1:16:18 focused towards Unknown Speaker 1:16:20 manifesting in the health segment for that program. That's the thing that I was so screamingly irate at that show, because it feels a little bit of heavy giant, when it heals itself in the pelvic commitment, it tends to show trend completely over to Ma'am, you Unknown Speaker 1:16:37 would get married on the latest routine where traditional Bible the ministers, they're not only I mean, you had a minister there they got the solution that they find is you have an individual solution. And the individual solution is you take guidance from above, and you work channeled into marriage as a marriage, you know, especially who, which combination of persons, you know, should be channeled this way. The incredible distortions that were exacerbating rather than the quiet. I thought there was a particular angle that disturbed me terribly. And that was the one of the the encouragement of a mother who had been pregnant three times. And is that what she's gonna do with her children? And she said, Well, I guess my voice will be freelancers, I want my daughter to marry. And they should be paired with her extended family. So this is another built in structure, how the extended family that can take care of the shaman newer, she doesn't have this. And there are questions right then and there, how certain values even within that extent, second, came out with the counter facts for building an off the wall. These are parents who are so proud of their sons to make babies. You know, how exactly she's blaming the welfare system for it. And at the same time, she gives the evidence that counteract some of that, and I can't be sorted out, I think the first avenue of finding some kind of solution. This is getting out of things that we've been built into, like the culture of poverty, which started life inside, you're blaming the victim, which I know I call the tools over that mother said, you know, and then I had this third child, how many times can you get trapped this way? And the month when I come down on that parent, and I don't know how to deal with because I'm still in the way I was raised, you know, goddamnit, don't get pregnant don't whether you have to be celibate, or whatever it was. And I think we tend to look at situations that that so that it's very difficult for me to trying to study and see how to intervene in some way, or listen to the standard way of intervening to get over that. blaming the victim and yet not go the other route and just say fine. birth controls out. Why can I be learned? Unknown Speaker 1:19:29 So yeah, and I'm going to say something that I think, because Mary, I'm pretty good friends with Marian and we and I admire her work a lot. But I'm real clear that what the purpose of CDF and Marion's work is to fit within an acceptable context that's acceptable in America and that means to talk about marriage. That means to talk about traditional marriage, it means to talk about the nuclear family that means to hypothesize that the first order of business is to create jobs, raise the minimum wage, insist upon salaries and wages. Would ceiling N some form of health care for those who are not eligible for these elaborate fringe benefit programs, that that being first order of business that then equips larger numbers of young black men and young white black women to entertain a set of options about nuclear marriage that they don't presently have access to I agree, however, however, and that now that's what Mary intends, in the end the discussion she says, let's put this up as a national priority. That's a major issue. And I agree, because clearly, this group is hurting and hurting real bad. I would go one step further, though, and I'm not sure I'm prepared to say it nationally now. But at some point, it needs to be said, which is, if all of the eligible young black men in the country, and all of the eligible black women in the country wanted to marry one another, there still wouldn't be enough men, that there are going to be some number of black and white women who have to look around and confront the reality that they are not enough men. And that doesn't even say that they're not mad, they're choosing, which is a different choice. Simply the number Unknown Speaker 1:21:04 of middle class people with, you know, plenty of resources are getting divorced. I mean, they may have married, but that doesn't somehow that doesn't end the story. People forget that. Unknown Speaker 1:21:17 They get divorced. They were right, right. That's right. And often for the first time, sometimes that's right. And that's Unknown Speaker 1:21:25 right. Unknown Speaker 1:21:26 It also seems to me very important to recognize that the the nuclear family is not the norm anywhere in America, Unknown Speaker 1:21:34 how it held up. It's just Unknown Speaker 1:21:38 not in that list. Unknown Speaker 1:21:42 And the other thing is that the nuclear family is the locus Unknown Speaker 1:21:45 for much of the most brutal kinds of domestic violence that you're talking about. Unknown Speaker 1:21:54 Blame it on the nuclear family patriarch. Okay. But that all that needs to be unpacked. I think if we're going to, if you live in a hold up the nuclear family is that to which we should his IRA, but I've no, we need to look at what's really going on. I'd Unknown Speaker 1:22:10 like to get back to hearing what you see as the communal resources in the black community. Unknown Speaker 1:22:16 Okay, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Coalition of 100, black women, another Association. The third one, the black Catholic women, of the Knights of Peter Klaver. The National Council of Negro Women, okay, Washington, the National Coalition of 100 black women, mostly professional women. The black Catholic women of the Knights of Peter Klaver. And Marian Edelman and her staff of attorneys at CDF Children's Defense Fund are jointly all four of these organizations are coordinating a national, adolescent pregnancy child watch project, it is at it is already they they are court coordinate and national, adolescent pregnancy child watch project. Now, in 30, states, it's already in place. They have two major objectives, one to if possible, prevent the first pregnancy. So some of these posters and billboards that you see in the subway, that's their work that's been funded in from within these groups, to the second objective is if you can't reach the women who have already, if there are women who will if they're young girls who already have gotten pregnant. The second point of outreach is to try to eliminate the likelihood of a second pregnancy and to try to reach her about nutritional and health counseling and assistance for where she is with this first child. Because the other problem we have with teen births is low birth weight, children, these little teeny premiums that are coming out, that obviously have a decreased risk their increased increased risk for disease. And this decrease birth weight tends to also be an indication of some other nutritional and perhaps developmental issues and problems, but that's already in place in 30 states. The Lynx li en que es the links have formally been thought of as a very bourgeois middle class black organization. I'm glad to say that the links are working. My because I've been critical the links for years. The links are working with poor women fourteens in Nashville, Tennessee, in the housing projects in Nashville. And when we say working the links are using their own money to send volunteers in who spend time counseling giving information providing contraceptive information and contraceptives to fourteens in Nashville housing projects. Then there's a male group concern black men of Washington, DC. These are mostly professional black men, some of them that are working class, but for the most part, they're professionals are working with black male teens, mostly on weekends, and attempting to transfer and translate self esteem and skill levels, and aspirations and goals that extend beyond what the male teens are being exposed to at home. Again, if your horizons if your sense of what makes you a bad man is the ability to make babies if that's your sense of what you can control. And that's an option if that's the edge of your world, because the rest of the world is so undetermined and out of control, then that sets up a world where studies is really important. If your world is bigger, if an education or going someplace else in the world is more of a possibility. It places your sexual energy in a different kind of place. So these black men are working with black male teens, the National Urban League, very old organization is at work mostly in cities through its national network of cities. To strengthen the black family. This takes mostly the form of lobbying for national legislation. Its leadership serving mostly as role models. Clearly, that's a black middle class leadership. Then there are two projects that I'm extremely excited about as excited as I am about the first that I set out for you, which are the black Catholics, the coalition of 100 black women. And this this next week I'm going to talk about is because I'm involved with it, and I know it's working very well is I'm very impressed. It's called the National Black Women's Health Project. Unknown Speaker 1:27:03 And there are a couple of us here at this meeting that really goshelf Tell based in Atlanta. There are a couple of us here who either sit on the board of this group or who have been involved in formation. This isn't present in Atlanta Bay selfhelp grassroots level group that is run by an energetic middle aged black woman named Billy Avery. MS is interviewed her a couple of times. I mean, if you look around, she's given essence. There are places where she talks about her philosophy about self help, and about women's self help, and about health care. The objectives of the National Black Women's Health project are to do several things one, and the first and foremost is community development. Billy's background is as a community activist and developer. She's originally from Gainesville, Florida. And she envisioned a self help program that would use and outreach to black women in the primarily in the south, though it has now become national, that would use the network of black communities in the south to outreach black women to do crisis intervention around nutrition help to help with housing, particularly to impact preventable diseases which are just raping the black community diseases like hypertension, high blood pressure, and nutrition based diseases, and to help impact non nutrition based diseases that are also ravaging the black community, but which would benefit from alternative dietary patterns diseases like lupus. So it's based in Atlanta, and its primary focus is to do community development. And it does that through a series of what are called self help chapters. Meaning that wherever you are in the country, if you bring 14 women together, you can become a chapter you become your own self generating chapter. You arrange to meet however often you would like to meet, but you meet around central issues of how to do information sharing, how to use the information and visits that are made by someone from the national field office in Atlanta, to begin to direct the two or three areas that your self health chapter might specialize in. Let us say you're in rural Alabama, where the incidents have preventable disorders like hypertension and high blood pressure is runaway people are on medication for hypertension, high blood. But it's also say you're in an area of rural Alabama, where the infant mortality rate is particularly high, and obviously seems to be linked to poor prenatal care. Your Self Help chapter in your area might decide to focus on these two issues in particular, and you would then Marshal your own resources but you would have the help of a staff of volunteer doctors and professionals from around the country who serve on the board of the National Black Women's Health Project which is all women. You will have that combined expertise at your disposal. Inside the city of Atlanta, the National Black Women's Health project is working in the housing projects on a team, both prevention project and prenatal care project that is avoiding the moralization that comes around the issue where obviously teams are either already pregnant or are going to be sexual if they're avoiding this whole moralization or judgmental dilemma of how do we, what are our morals about this? Or what are our feelings about it. So they're really they really made an attempt to go and get around that and get to the question of how to help. They have elicited quite a bit of funding support from private foundations a lily, firstly, 21st century fun. Even the city of Atlanta Fulton County Health Department is chimed in. So I know most about that group, because I've been involved. And they hold quarterly meetings. And they have a very unusual kind of construct in that every member of the self help chapters has one vote and that every vote, in fact, every issue at the national level is voted on by the entire rank and file, the whole organization is to empower. That's right. That's right, it is fully, they've really worked a lot on how to do serious empowerment, not just empower others out there, but how to build it into the very structure of the organization. So the second group that I'm excited about is the sisterhood of black single mothers, which is here in New York. In fact, it's in Brooklyn. Daphne Busby is the director. Unknown Speaker 1:31:30 Daphne was here earlier. This fact that as matter of fact, today, the first time I met her, I did not really matter. But this is the sisterhood of black single mothers. And as it is, as it sounds, this is a network of single of single women who are mothers, black single women who are mothers, who are who both meet with one another to do sharing, support, empowerment, consciousness raising, but also to establish what the best of Carroll stacks work talks about, which is this elaborate network of obligations and exchange of resources. That staff tried so much to document, a better band, which is the city that is talking about in a very old network, one, which though had as well springs in the southern rural black family, and which has undergone an enormous stress, with the relocation to northern areas where occupational start where geographical proximity for clustering is much more difficult. In my own research on rural black families, the process of clustering that by which I've looked at the means by which family is organized through a series of multiple households, that that process survives well and intact in the south and undergoes a tremendous stress once we're here. And to the extent that it survives and is feasible here, those are the networks and those are the women who, despite their poverty seem to get by and seeing even at times to prosper, where that network is not there, we are looking at when you are indeed cut off from any form of what I would call family support, I by no means regard household as family. Unknown Speaker 1:33:09 Actually, you know, that raises a question, I think we found that we've run into a lot when we talked about nuclear family, we mentioned isolated. And when we talk about single parent households, we also imagine them as isolated in neither case other guys. Do they work if they're isolated? Some of them all right, they don't work very well. In neither case really, but even more. So. Unknown Speaker 1:33:37 That's how I would impart answer your earlier concern about I mean, I would argue that though they say they've come out of nuclear families that that there is at least a sense of its nuclear in that if you walked in that house there, maybe there's a mother and a father and children there. But I would wage any amount of money that most of the men who were talking in here had another their them and their parents or the adults in their households had another line of extension of kinship, and not simply this romantic idea of kinship, not just people you like, who Latins you, but people who feed you. People who share making groceries with you. If there's one car that one car services two or three households