Black Marriage

by La Shawn on 03.28.06

in Cultural Decline, Faith

rings[Note: Read this story about black couples renewing their vows.]

I’m no expert on marriage (its benefits or detriments) or children or women or black people; my impressions are based on almost four decades of interaction with and observation of marriage and children and women and black people.

This post addresses the well-linked article, Marriage Is for White People indirectly; I won’t go through it and comment on each paragraph. What I have to say encompasses more than one writer’s personal experience or the “marriage is for white people” meme. Besides the assiduous use of the term “African American,” the article rings true on many levels.

Fellow Christian and blogger Independent Conservative takes issue with the writer’s contentions in this must-read post.

Caveat on This post is based on generalities, not specifics or exceptions or anecdotes. This post is also a post, not a publishable article. Some of it is stream-of-consciousness, and I tried to organize and connect where possible. If I were to rewrite this post as an op-ed, the syllogisms would be clearer and supported with stats, but for our purposes, I think most readers will understand the connections I’m attempting to make. Caveat off

My parents were together until my senior year in college, so I had the benefit of a residential father. So many black children do not. When I came of age in the 1980s, I thought it was strange that several of my friends didn’t live with their fathers. Some were children of divorce; others’ parents hadn’t bothered to get married.

Before I start editorializing and theorizing, let’s look at some numbers. In 1963, more than 70 percent of black families were headed by married couples. In 2006, only 46 percent are headed by married couples. Forty-five percent of black men and 42 percent of black women have never been married. Fifty-two percent of black women will marry by age 30, compared to 81 percent of white women. (A Portrait of the Black Family – PDF) Scroll down to Addendum for more disturbing numbers.

Upon hearing those numbers, some people will say, “That’s because too many black men are in prison or trapped in low-wage jobs or subjected to racism or dead or homosexuals or married to white women.” Rather than looking up the statistics, I’ll concede that all of those factors may be relevant, but something else is going on.

In my admittedly biased, unscientific observations, it appears that black boys are not being socialized to marry and take care of families, and black girls are not being socialized to accept nothing less than an honorable man who will marry and care for them. Generally speaking, boys are not being groomed to be husbands and breadwinners, and girls are not being groomed to keep their legs closed until marriage.

Why are these things so, and why is “black marriage” in such a dismal state? I believe the reasons boil down to two factions: fatherless homes and the weakening of the social stigma against illegitimacy. These two things are interrelated, but I want to deal with them separately.

baby 1) Many black children grow up in fatherless homes. Mothers may love their children and may be the best parents in the world, but even the Greatest Mother of All Time (whoever she is) can’t take the place of a father. Fatherlessness correlates with juvenile crime, drug use, academic underachievement, premarital sex, and many other problems, I’m sure.

I’m one of these religious folks who believes that Adam and Eve existed and that God knew exactly what he was doing when he made them uniquely for his purposes. In the years I’ve spent on this planet, I clearly see that men and women are different and that it is good. Their God-given roles are different, and each role complements the other.

Generally, mothers feel an intense attachment to their children that men do not. That’s not to say fathers don’t have an attachment to their kids. Fathers may love them with all their hearts and minds, but “mother love” is different. Babies grow inside the mother. Mothers labor to give birth to their babies. Many mothers breastfeed their babies. Mothers tend to “baby” their children, but that’s OK because “father love” is there to balance it out.

Men have no idea what it’s like to have another human being feeding off their bodies, sharing the same nutrients. They have no clue what it means to give birth to another human being. This makes women profoundly different than men when it comes to raising children. Generally, fathers feel an urge to physically protect their children. Women also have this urge, but it’s not exactly the same. I believe a woman’s physical attachment to her child is of a different quality than the man’s. We’ve all heard that mothers nurture and fathers discipline. Both parents do these things, but in general, women are more emotional and “touchy-feely” than men. Both parents understand that children need nurturing and discipline, but each parent does more of one than the other.

At this point some of you may be saying, “Wait a second, you don’t know what it’s like to give birth, either.” True, and although I may never give birth, I was created with the capacity to give birth. I have the necessary biological system (including the hormones!). As such, I can speak about these things with more insight than someone not made to carry a human being inside his body.

Still with me? Remind yourselves as you read this post that I’m speaking in general terms. There will always be exceptions.

Back to God. There is harmony in the way he created the two sexes and the family unit. It’s as though they were meant to be joined together. And I came up with that all by myself! They are meant to be joined together, and you don’t have to be a Bible-believing Christian to understand that.

Without “father love,” children grow up missing an important part of their development. That’s not to say they grow up without men, but no brother or uncle or boyfriend or “friend” can ever take the place of a father. In fact, no man could ever take the place of a biological residential father. When children grow up with a mother and father living in the same house, whether family life is ideal or not, they see each role in action. Personalities differ, so in some cases, the mother will be a stronger disciplinarian than the father. The point is that children grow up observing how their parents interact and how they treat each other. A boy learns what it is to be a man by watching his father. There are lousy fathers out there who live with their kids, but there are many more who’re honorable and decent.

I believe that just as parents have biological urges directed toward their children, children have biological urges toward their parents. Even if a child has never known a father, there is something in him that needs a father, whether he realizes it or is able to articulate it. Some have speculated that fatherless boys join gangs to receive the “father love” they didn’t have at home.

This absence of “father love” continues to manifest itself once children reach puberty. Fatherless children, especially girls, are more likely to engage in premarital sex. They don’t get to observe their parents’ marriage and the role each parent assumes. Unless there are loving, strong, and involved men in a boy’s life, he’s cheated out of learning how women should be treated.

Without the benefit of seeing a man (who loves him) go to work to provide for him, come home, discipline him, interact with his mother and treat her well, a boy can’t emulate the behavior. He has to learn a “female version” of it and/or get it in bits and pieces from whichever male figure is handy. While he may frequently interact with related males (uncle, grandfather, etc.), without the chance to observe the marital relationship of his parents up close and personally, a large part of his father/husband training is missing.

I repeat, no matter how good a mother a woman is, she cannot make up for this missing part. A single mother can try — in fact, she must try — to socialize her son to be a good father and faithful husband, but she will fall far short of the goal because the father’s role is crucial in the boy’s development.

I repeat, I am speaking in general terms. Fatherless boys can and do grow up to be good fathers and faithful husbands, but with only a third of black children raised in two-parent families, many fatherless boys won’t experience life as a responsible father and committed husband, but only as a “baby’s daddy.”

2) Illegitimacy is no longer shameful or considered harmful to children. Long gone are the days when chastity meant something. In those days, there were clear lines between being a lady and being a slut. If you considered yourself a lady, you kept your legs closed until you were married. If you wanted to be a slut, you understood that society would shun you, and God forbid if you got knocked up.

family'' Even in the black community, once upon a time, the very idea of a big belly and no ring on your finger was appalling. The shame had a purpose whether people could articulate that purpose or not. It was not good for the community, the mother, or the baby to be raised in poverty and/or in a household with no man around to help raise the child. Most people understand that a marriage is supposed to be selfless. The compromises and sacrifices you make work to the benefit of the family unit.

That sounds like ancient history now. Today, a full 70 percent — and close to 80 percent in some cities — of black babies are born to unmarried women whose own mothers were unlikely not married to their fathers. The generational pattern of illegitimacy in the black community extends through all socioeconomic classes, not just in low-income areas. So what happened to the stigma against being knocked up?

In a review of Raising Boys Without Men, I lay some of the blame on feminism. Although I believe each of us is responsible for our own behavior, we are influenced by our surroundings. Feminism was in full swing in the late 60s and early 70s, and the message was simple: women should be able to screw around without being burdened with old-fashioned stigmas.

But as I stated above, women and men are biologically different, as God designed it. Fairly or unfairly, women have a disproportionate amount of responsibility to be extra careful when it comes to sex. In my unscientific observations, I’ve noticed that women, despite decades of feminist indoctrination, are less casual about sex. While they may try to be casual and act “like men,” it just doesn’t work out that way. Young women have been fed the lie that men and women are not different, but they know instinctively this is untrue. Generally speaking, women don’t want a series of casual sex partners; they want to get married to a strong, decent, and faithful man.

Men also want to marry a decent woman, but generally speaking, they’re more than willing to “entertain” a series of casual sex partners. Their biological urge to “conquer” and procreate has to be reigned in, and this is where marriage comes into play. I’ll have to hunt down the source or find others, but I’ve read about the consequences to a society with a large number of unattached young males. You can predict the crime rates of a neighborhood based on the number of unmarried young men in that neighborhood. While this is called “common sense,” it doesn’t hurt to have actual statistics in hand.

Generally, women have a stabilizing influence on men, more so back in the day when women insisted on marriage before sex. Sluts have always been and will always be around, so if a man wants sex, he can get plenty of it. At no charge. But there was a time — and it still exists in a weakened form — when men had to make compromises to have sex with the sort of women they could bring home to Mother: marriage. Instead of using this “power” to create a nest for their future children, these days young women try to play the game the way men do. When they’ve reached a certain age, they wonder why all those feminist promises fell flat. NYT columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a book that touched on this, and I’d planned to blog about her article, What’s a Modern Girl to Do?, but never got around to it.

OK, let’s get back on track. In general, a man’s biological, social, and economic investment in his children is stronger if he’s married to and living with their mother, and women know this. Ideally, it’s better to wait until you’ve built a nest before you start laying eggs. With feminism came the false notion that women could have a lot of sex, not be considered sluts, and not have to face the consequences. They gave it 100 percent effort, but casual sex costs women a whole lot more than it costs men.

Girls growing up without residential fathers are cheated out of living with committed men who love and protect them. I believe this early experience shapes, but doesn’t always determine, the rest of their lives. Except in movies or on TV or in books or through friends with residential fathers, these girls don’t know what it means to have a man love you uncompromisingly and without reservation, a man who will also teach you how you should expect to be treated.

Many girls in inner cities grow up this way, and poverty tends to exacerbate the effects. With shame no longer attached to a big belly and no ring, there is little incentive to be chaste until marriage. Without an intact family and a balance of “father love” and “mother love,” these girls grow up equating sex with love. Fatherless themselves, they see nothing wrong in sentencing their own babies to fatherless childhoods. And the circle game rolls on and on and on.

In conclusion (Whew!), I’ll tie points 1 and 2 together: fatherlessness is prevalent in the black community on all socioeconomic levels because on all socioeconomic levels, it is no longer shameful to be pregnant and unmarried. All people of all colors in this country have become more selfish. Our primary concern is for ourselves, not what’s best for our precious babies. We scarcely consider the long-term consequences of our actions or the well-being of our children. Women who believe they don’t need a husband and/or can raise their kids just as well alone are deluded, and it’s the subsequent generation that suffers for it.

Having babies with boyfriends is so acceptable in certain black communities, it’s hard to believe that intact black families exist at all. A black child with a residential father married to his mother is such a phenomenal thing. A group that defines deviancy down this far has no one to blame for the fallout but itself.

For unmarried black women who want to blame black men for their state, it just won’t wash. There’s a long list of “issues” at work, and women bear an equal share of the blame.

Other sources:

Addendum: More numbers from A Portrait of the Black Family (PDF):

  • 65% of never-married black women have children, double that for white women.
  • 22% of never-married black women with incomes over $75,000 have children, 10 times that of white women.
  • 62% of black families with children are headed by a single parent.

    • …

  • 85% of black children do not live in a home with their fathers.
    [!!!???? Do you understand the gravity of the situation yet?]
  • Only 15-20% of black children born today will grow up with 2 parents until age 16.
  • Over 80% of long-term child poverty occurs in broken or never-married homes.
  • 70% of African-American boys in the criminal justice system come from single-parent homes.
  • “The top three moral crises facing the Black family are rooted in sexual immorality.” – Star Parker, President, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (CURE).

(Emphases added)

Update: From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Without strong black marriages, we can’t have strong communities, schools and neighborhoods…

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