More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

The Moynihan Report, written in 1965 by an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Johnson, asserted that both racial inequality and the breakdown of the black family fostered poor racial relations. The backlash against the report shut down debate over structural contributors to the breakdown of the black family unit. Some blacks, especially those associated with the Black Power movement, were critical of the report’s emphasis on pathologies within the black family. This idea conflicted with the movement’s focus on the vitality of the black community. Vitriolic responses to Moynihan dissuaded academic research in this area until the mid-1980s. By 1996, the proportion of black children born outside of marriage had reached a high of 70%. These children were America’s poorest demographic and therefore, according to longitudinal studies, at a significant disadvantage. Such children are more likely to be school dropouts, become teenage parents, receive lower earnings, and experience cognitive, social, and emotional problems.

The decline in the proportion of married parents in the past 40 years was formerly offset by the number of parents who maintained a relationship. Increasingly, however, this is not the case. Black mothers in inner-city neighborhoods are eight times more likely than comparable Mexican American mothers to live in a single-parent household. Labor force attachment is more challenging for inner-city mothers. Despite the widespread belief that welfare payouts incentivize out-of-wedlock childbearing, there is no evidence to suggest this. The rate of out-of-wedlock teen childbearing nearly doubled between 1975 and 1996, though the real value of support fell during that period, adjusting for inflation. The numbers of parents marrying after the birth of their child has also fallen. Studies on the inner city link plummeting marriage rates with the joblessness of inner-city black men, discussed in the previous chapters. Young black males earning less than $35,000 per annum are less likely to be married than those earning more. Sharp increases in incarceration during the last 40 years have in turn led to joblessness.

Oscar Lewis’ work on the culture of poverty is attractive to those interested in the plight of poor black Americans. Lewis argues that poverty is passed from generation to generation. In contrast, Boston psychologist William Ryan wrote Blaming the Victim as a critique of the Moynihan Report (109). Although Moynihan devoted a chapter to the structural contributors to black poverty, his perspective included an implicit “culture of poverty” explanation as well (109). Pathology had become self-perpetuating, Moynihan showed, although he also implied that such patterns are mutable and part of a complex combination of structural and cultural factors. Patterson argued that in response to the Moynihan report, less emphasis has been laid on the historical impacts of slavery and the cultural contribution to the fragmentation of the poor black family. Herbert G. Gutman also challenged Moynihan’s view, arguing that black American families were highly resilient after emancipation (111). However, social scientists from the University of Pennsylvania seriously challenged Gutman in two major studies. Each study was based on public census data released after the publication of Gutman’s book and concluded that Gutman’s view was overstated.

Most historians of the African American family “have gone to great lengths to disconnect the possibility of cultural continuity between African and African-American family systems,” according to S. Philip Morgan (113). Patterson has also downplayed the impact of economic problems on the black family. It is difficult to distinguish factors derived from cultural continuities from situational factors such as joblessness. Lamont and Small maintain that class is more significant than culture in the study of racial differences (115). It is better, they argue, to empirically examine the range of frames that people use to make sense of their reality. As there is insufficient evidence for cultural continuity, it remains an open question.

The decline of black marriage is a function of the interaction between material and cultural constraints. For Mexican Americans, religion significantly influences the framing of marriage. In comparison with inner-city blacks, inner-city Mexicans have a greater attachment to the labor force. Ethnographic data from Wilson’s own Chicago study in the late 1980s revealed that black women had low levels of trust in black men. Males felt pressure to be sexually active, with little consideration for longer-term impacts. Whereas women blamed men, men blamed women, claiming it was difficult to find partners who were comfortable with a low living standard. Most young fathers in the inner city did not connect having children with getting married. Women were more interested in marriage but still had a low opinion of it. Overall, the study showed that men and women in inner-city communities are “extremely suspicious of each-other” (125).

A more recent study presented in Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas had similar results. Poor women felt they could not commit to marriage until they were confident in its potential to succeed. The basic problem they face is that the men in their milieu tend not to be marriageable due to chronic joblessness, low earnings, criminal records, and drug and alcohol abuse. It is not surprising, therefore, that these relationships are plagued with physical abuse, mistrust, and infidelity. Whereas middle-class women put off having children in pursuit of economic goals, poor women have children in the absence of other opportunities. Studies repeatedly report that single-mother households are more impoverished than married-couple families (128). Cultural frames may have been influenced by experiences of life in poor, inner-city neighborhoods.

The jobs that once sustained the male-breadwinner family have been outsourced to developing countries or disappeared altogether, leading to a new set of family orientations. Out-of-wedlock births no longer carry the stigma they once did, and inner-city blacks are influenced by these norms. The decline of employment opportunities for low-skilled workers represents new structural realities. Structural factors are therefore responsible for the fragmentation of poor black families in inner cities. Young, unemployed black fathers are less likely to marry than employed ones. The argument for cultural continuity has insufficient evidence, and Mexican and Puerto Rican experiences of the inner city are similar. Nonetheless, the interaction of structural and cultural factors in black family fragmentation is “too important for social scientists and policy makers to ignore” (132).