“1960: 78% of Black families were 2 parent families. Mothers only formed 20% of Black families. Father only, 2%. 1970: 2 parent family, 64%, mother only, 33%, father only 3%. 1975: 74% two parent, mother only 44%, and 3% for father only.
So it only began somewhere around 1980 that the family, as we talk about it today, begins to flip over in the Black community. 1980: 48% were 2 parent families, 49% mother family only. 1985: 2 parent family dropped to 40%, the mother only 57%. 1990: 37% as against 60%.
There’s a historical progression going on here. And we must ask the question: What is happening here? So the idea that Black women are not committed because they are Black, or there’s something inherently related to their Blackness-If you were measuring male/female relations in terms of marriage, then you got to deal with this issue. That certainly has not been the case. We started with nearly 80% married here in the 1960’s. What then should we ask has happened since that time?
What’s going on in American society that the Black family is dwindling the way it is? As late as the 1960’s, when uneducated Black men could still hold good paying jobs in the industrial sector, nearly 78% of Black families with children were headed by married couples. That gives us some kind of [idea] doesn’t it?
When I talk about the Black violent adolescent, I get people to understand that you must look at these adolescents within the context of America. You cannot look at them outside of their context. This is getting what European psychology likes to do. It likes to make you assume there’s nothing wrong with the society, there’s nothing wrong with the system; It’s something wrong with “them.” It’s something internal and somehow connected to their Africaness or their Blackness that this violence occurs. But we look at this context.
First of all, you must recognize that Black on Black violence flows from White on Black violence. That is the root of Black on Black violence. The historical, hundreds of years, and unrelenting violence of whites against Black folk. And Blacks folk’s reactionary response to that violence. That continues to this very moment. And continues in so many different forms until it’s hard to count. The obvious form of slavery, but that wasn’t the end of it. Reconstruction still was a violent period, Jim Crowism, racial and job discrimination, insult to Black and African histories, insult to our characters, the whole bit. Police brutality, legal lynchings in the court, questioning of our intelligence, questioning our natural beauty. All of this is one assault after another. One assault, unrelenting, unforgiving.”
— Dr Amos N. Wilson on the destruction of the Black family.
2087
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