194 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Presenthundred years of injustice and culminating in high levels
of unemployment, welfare dependency, and high rates of
nonmarital births.
In contrast to the social-pathology paradigm, which
tends to see some of the family patterns as deeply embed-
ded in the history of African American families, the cul-
tural relative approach emerges out of the work of William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) and Melville J.
Herskovits (1895–1963) and sees patterns such as low mar-
riage rates, high rates of teen pregnancy, and single-parent,
female-headed households as evidence of the inherent
strength of African American families, especially women
who raised their children and kept their families together
during slavery, through Jim Crow and contemporary rac-
ism and discrimination. It argues, for example, that the high
rate of single mothers leading African American families
indicates a resistance, symbolic at times, to the oppressive
conditions of both racism and patriarchy. Robert B. Hill is
an articulate spokesperson for the strength approach, and
he has identifi ed fi ve strengths that had been culturally
transmitted through African ancestry to contemporary Af-
rican American families: strong kinship bond, strong work
orientation, strong achievement orientation, fl exible family
roles, and a strong religious orientation. In his monumental
study Th e Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1 750– 1925 ,
historian Herbert Gutman (1928–1985) argued that due to
highly adaptive and resilient family patterns, the African
American families survived the slave system and then legal
segregation, discrimination, and enforced poverty with re-
markable strength and solidarity.
From a more holistic approach, sociologist Andrew
Billingsley sees African American family patterns as in-
cluding both weaknesses and strengths. He has argued that
their strengths are far greater, and they are distinguished
by their adaptive and regenerative powers. He also has
identifi ed several distinctive African family patterns that
have survived the American experience: consanguinity or
blood ties taking precedence over all types of relationships;
extended family versus nuclear families; child-rearing con-
sidered as the responsibility of parents and the extended
family; respect and reverence shown to family elders and
others; reciprocity among family members; and coopera-
tion or shared responsibility for the well-being of others.
Th e survival and development of African American fami-
lies on American shores since 1619 is seen as a testament
to their adaptability, viability, and resilience derived from
these strengths.structures transmitted intergenerationally through social-
ization—in most cultural groups. In the case of African
Americans, family scholars have noted that, in spite of
their diversity stemming from immigration experiences,
regional residence, political views, income diff erences, and
phenotypic characteristics, one can identify several family
patterns based on African Americans’ shared history and
common cultural bonds. Two perspectives have dominated
the study of these characteristics, at times highlighting
diff erent patterns and generating intense debate and con-
troversy: a social pathological (or ethnocentric) approach
versus a strength (or culturally relative) paradigm.
In the social-defi cit tradition, African American fam-
ily life, from its beginning up to the present, has not ad-
hered to the norm or the ideal family structural model,
defi ned as a man and a woman with their children living in
the same home and endorsing a European American mid-
dle-class set of values and ways of being. Th e ethnocentric
approach, therefore, has highlighted what it considers to
be pathological and dysfunctional family patterns because
of their variation from the expected Eurocentric Christian
norm. It has criticized the African American family as a
unit lacking a consistent and cohesive structure that moves
in a constant state of turmoil. It argues that some of these
family defi cits existed originally in Africa prior to the cap-
ture and enslavement of Africans. It assumes that African
slaves brought with them these family defi ciencies to the
New World and have remained part of the family structure
to this day. Also, it maintains that African values, customs,
and cultural norms were destroyed during slavery and to
some extent by contemporary racism.
Th e family studies of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier
(1894–1962) are prototypical of the defi cit perspective and
he considers the African American family deeply patho-
logical, a condition stemming in part from the historical
legacy of racism and contemporary impact of racism and
discrimination. From a similar perspective, in his book
Dark Ghetto, social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark (1895–
1963) summarized what he considered some distinctive
family patterns: low aspirations, poor education, family
instability, illegitimacy, unemployment, crime, drug ad-
diction, alcoholism, frequent illness, and early death. Th is
approach entered mainstream popular discourse in 1965
with the publication of Th e Negro Family: Th e Case for Na-
tional Action, in which Daniel P. Moynihan (1927–2003)
described the disintegration of black families as part of
a “tangle of pathology” ultimately attributed to three