| | Understanding black family functioning: a holistic perspective
by Robert B. Hill As the twentieth century comes to a close, African American communities across this nation are in crisis. Unemployment, poverty, crime, drug abuse, and HIV/AIDS infection are at record rates in many low-income Black neighborhoods in both urban and rural areas. The undermining of the social and economic fabric of the Black community is reflected in the destabilization of African American families. Single-parent families, out of wedlock births, teenage pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, spousal abuse, and homelessness among Blacks are at alarming levels. On the other hand, the numbers of Blacks today who arc college-educated, middle-class and upper-class are unprecedented. While this is the best of times for many Black families, it is the worst of times for many other families. How do we explain this paradox in the status and functioning of African American families? Unfortunately, the conventional treatment of Black families has failed to enhance our understanding because it is fragmented, unbalanced, deficit-oriented, static and ahistorical. For example, the popular approach focuses on the minority (16 percent) of families who are female-headed, poor and on welfare, and depicts them as representing a majority of Black families. Moreover, this "deficit" perspective usually attributes the dysfunctioning of Black families to their internal structure or to the "underclass" values of family members, and de-emphasizes the impact of external factors, such as racism, sexism, economic forces, or social policies. In this article, we present a holistic perspective that provides a viable theoretical framework for enhancing our knowledge of the status, structure and functioning of African Americane families. We argue that this comprehensive approach provides new insights from various disciplines about the causes and solutions to the Black family crisis, and that it facilitates the identification of public policies and self-help initiatives that enhance the status and functioning of low-income and middle-income families. We now examine the following dimensions of our holistic perspective: (a) historical; (b) ecological; (c) cultural; (d) problems identification; and (c) solutions identification. A major shortcoming of most research studies on African American families is their ahistorical character. They often examine Black families over a short time span and fall to place contemporary family situations in a historical context. About a century ago, at the meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, W.E.B. Du Bois (1898) urged social scientists to use a holistic framework, with strong historical foundations, for studying Black people. Du Bois argued that a proper understanding of Blacks in America could not be achieved without systematically assessing the influence of historical, cultural, social, economic and political forces. Several recent works by historians and other social scientists have enhanced our understanding about black families by employing a historical perspective. Many other historians (Coontz, 1992; Katz, 1993; Trotter, 1993) contributes new historical insights about such issues as the origin of female-headed families, the persistence of the Black underclass, and the continuing influence of extended families. Our holistic framework also incorporates an ecological perspective, an approach that permits the examination of the effects of factors at the societal, community, family and individual levels on the structure and functioning of African American families. Thus, this is a multidisciplinary perspective including such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, philosophy, and economics. Although E. Franklin Frazier's studies (1939, 1957) are often depicted as focusing on the negative attributes of Black family life, a careful examination of his works reveals a more balanced treatment. For example, Frazier never succumbed to the conventional approach of treating symptoms (such as female-headed family structures) as the causes of the ills (such as unemployment, poverty, out-of-wedlock births) that afflict many African American families. More importantly, he always employed an ecological framework that identified the impact of external forces in the large society on the structure and functioning of Black families. In fact, contrary to the deficit perspective, Frazier's analyses (1939, 1957) usually attribute the primary sources of family instability to external forces (such as racism, urbanization, technological changes, recessionary cycles), and not to factors internal to the Black family. One of the most significant efforts to adopt Du Bois's holistic framework by incorporating an ecological approach for studying Black families was undertaken by Billingsley (1968). based on the structural-functional theory of the family posited by Parsons and Bales (1955), Billingsley employs an ecological framework that characterized Black families as a social subsystem mutually interacting with subsystems in the Black community and in the wider (White) society. Allen (1978) evaluates the relative merits ... | |
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