White Supremacy and The Black Family (Patreon)

 There are few people on this earth I despise more than Maury Povich. The 77-year-old talk show host shares a birthday with my half-sister, and ironically enough I’ve seen his face in my life more than I’ve seen hers. Free from schoolwork yet shackled to the home as a 12-year-old latchkey kid without cable, my after-school regimen included absorbing three hours of daytime television before cracking open a book. The line-up was Maury, Oprah, and the local news. I never really saw The Jerry Springer Show, except for in commercials. To me, Jerry Springer exuded creepy uncle vibes as he lorded over the mix of transsexual guests fighting with trailer trash white women or scandalous men. Maury, my after-school pill, looked sweet and harmless by comparison. Guests ran, yelled, and got frustrated but the weren’t expected to brawl at the sound of boxing bells. Though Maury did have a number of wildly popular segments like Is my boyfriend cheating on me and My 13 year old daughter has slept with over 200 men, he is known for his paternity tests. I watched his trash circus daily, and I have no shame in admitting to being highly entertained at the time by the plethora of screaming women who ran backstage when told that their suspected baby father was not actually the father. 

In my adolescent mind, the guests on his show were crazy, but Maury was the benign and accommodating host who spent his precious time helping women determine who their baby daddies were. He appeared to be an objective witness to the tomfoolery on the stage, not an actual participant. From my seat at home I called the women all sorts of tricks and skeezers, but Maury was innocent. At first I looked at the embarrassing black women and men and hated them for being so ghetto; then somewhere around 13 I began to think it was fake. This was like realizing Santa Claus was fake. Maury was just a nice host of a trashy talk show, while his guests were obviously scripted actors, I thought. Until a guy I went to high school with was on the show. We’ll call him Dutch Oven. He was a guy with whom I sometimes exchanged hellos, but never talked to, as he dated a girl I associated with. He cheated on her constantly and blamed it on his naivety to a relationship like a newbie reneging in a game of spades. Later during my sophomore year of college I saw pictures of Dutch Oven sitting alone on that infamous stage, plastered all over Facebook. Though I didn’t get to see the actual segment, I read all about it. He was bragging about the fact that he knew he wasn’t the bitches baby daddy (his words, not mine). I could only wonder if the mistaken baby mama had run backstage in a tearful rage, or if she just sat sitting in her seat rocking back in forth while Dutch Oven did the cabbage patch or dabbed or whatever us kids were into at that time. I stared in shock and disbelief at a picture of him whooping for joy, amazed that anyone would want a free trip to Connecticut so badly. As an adult, I see a completely different side to Maury. 

Povich has the number one tabloid talk show in the country, competing directly with Dr. Phil. He sits on stage instigating his raucous audience to judge and be entertained by the ludicrous stories told by his numerous guests; all while appearing to be grandfatherly and innocent of the exploitation at hand. He smirks as the audience ingest clips of screaming and angry black women declaring that such and such is their baby’s father. He surreptitiously encourages belligerent black men to berate the women, looking surprised during every episode at the language they spew, as if the name calling and slut-shaming is unexpected and uncalled for. The show regularly features two types of black people - the scandalously wanton black female and the carelessly sexual black male. Let me be clear: the Maury Show does regularly feature white guests. I don’t deny this. But I find it prudent to note that these are not the predominant depictions of white people on TV. While white reality show guests exist in Hollywood in a number of other capacities and occupations, the majority of black people on these shows fit a certain bill. From Maury to most of the shows currently on VH1, black women are depicted as ditzy and promiscuous whores with infinite men troubles. The men on these shows are hyper-masculine and trifling. This is just a routine part of how black families are represented and purported to be in American media. 

The Moynihan Report splashed onto the American landscape at a pivotal time. The year was 1965. Malcolm X was assassinated. The Civil Rights Movement was forging ahead, netting the victory of the Voting Rights Act being signed into law. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book that spoke to millions of white middle class women about their disillusion with being housewives, had been released just two years prior. The meager Equal Pay Act to combat gender payment disparities was also two years old. Enter Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the Department of Labor. In his paper, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, he revealed devastating information on the state of black families. “That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have…” he mused. He went on to describe how the black community had been forced into a matriarchal structure that coincided with rising crime and more poverty. Moynihan personally believed unemployment to be a major roadblock in the social mobility of the poor, particularly rates of unemployment among black men. In a memo sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Moynihan mentioned, “Men must have jobs, we must not rest until every able bodied negro is working. Even if we have to displace some females.” In his report he did not say this, instead centering black female-headed families as the core fracture of the black community. Initially meant to be an internal government document, the report was eventually leaked. 

The response was mixed. President Johnson (in a speech written by Moynihan), accurately yet demurely placed blamed on racial discrimination. “White America must accept responsibility… [Family breakdown] flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man.” Evidently negro women didn't exist. Meanwhile, scholars like Andrew Billingsley pointed to successful middle class black families as proof that the familial structure was still strong. Other intellectuals discussed matrilineal societies in pre-colonial Africa. There were also black feminists, some of whom claimed single parent homes to be less damaging than implied. So trigger-happy were some to point out misogyny that they didn’t discuss the disadvantages of single parent homes in a society that idealizes two-parent ones (but more on that later). However, the overwhelming response to the Moynihan Report was to condemn black failures instead of examining white responsibility. 

To the press and conservative politicians, struggles in the black community were obviously the result of families headed by black women drowning in a sea of American patriarchy. They easily sharpened Moynihan’s points like knives, wielding them like weapons without enough context. Wrote C. Eric Lincoln in the August 1966 issue of Ebony, 

“It happens that in our larger society the patriarchal family has been institutionalized to the degree that all of the major aspects of our total American social behavior are somehow influenced by it… it is precisely here that the Negro family suffers it’s greatest disadvantage. There is nothing inherently wrong with a woman heading a family, but when she tries to compete in a society which promotes, expects and rewards male leadership, she is unable to bring to her family the share of the social and economic rewards to which it entitles.”

 The author, willing to pit black women and men against each other, pressed on: 

“Despite the fact that the negro woman has done so much to bring the race so far, it has been done at the expense of the psychological health of the negro male, who has frequently been forced by circumstances into the position of a drone.” 

And then there were other writers, adamant that homosexuality was a direct result of female-led homes.

In the years that followed the Moynihan Report, high rates of crime and mass incarceration in the black community would be blamed not on discrimination based unemployment, housing discrimination, or the desire to bloat government budgets, but instead on the black family. Crappy single black mothers and absentee fathers were the perfect scapegoats for hundreds of years of malevolence. Their alleged shortcomings were used in arguments by politicians to defund welfare programs, strip community services, and to dissolve white guilt in an era that branded itself to be post-racial. In that vortex of so-called inadequacy of black parenting skills, black people were pitted against each other in a familiar fashion: with stereotypes and throwing salt in unhealed wounds from slavery. The black man was an undaunted and bestial criminal whose manhood were stomped on by the willful independence of black women. The black man is lazy and abandons his children. The black woman is a sexed up welfare fiend who expects too much from romance. She is also lazy, unless corralled into the high achieving category of women hell-bent on degrees and money over family… in that case she is impeding on the black man’s ability to get ahead. Recall Moynihan’s insistence that black male unemployment was the cause for familial despair. In this way, the onus of black familial failure was placed on black mothers who chose to survive by entering the workforce (at the alleged expense of a black man). 

To accurately examine the divisive discourse permeating the black family for the past 60 years, we have to look back further, to when parenthood for black Americans was less of a choice and more of an investment practice by slave owners. 

Initial slavery was exorbitantly harsh and brutal, but by 1830 the public image of slavery in the face of abolition was softened to be domestic and familial. In theory, the good, white, Christian patriarch traded protection and a spot in his extended family in return for loyalty and obedience from his human property. Of course, with other strings also attached. The child of an enslaved women was automatically a slave. Slaves could not legally marry and many masters did not recognize relationships cultivated among their human property. A man could be sold away from his wife with as much ease as a mother being sold away from her children. Just as black people themselves were dehumanized, their familial bonds were sullied and degraded, to be seen as irrelevant enough to be broken without consequence. So it’s no surprise that following the end of slavery, there was a flood of couples who sought out loved ones who had been sold down the river. Marriage, along with voting rights and proper schooling for their children, was one of the most desired privileges of former slaves. Don’t believe me? From 1890 to 1960, black women and men got married earlier and more often than whites. 

During this same time, fair employment was hard to come by. Convict leasing, lynching, rapes, and KKK nightrides became more numerous, rendering single parent homes in multiple cases. When the Nadir of American Race Relations kicked off (along with hardened Jim Crow policies that stayed in place for over half a century) the black family was placed under even more vicious pressure. Circumstances varied by class and region, but a common theme was the relative ease that black women could enter the workforce compared to black men. An unfortunate consequence? Domestic violence. Because many black men were boxed out of the provider role pertinent to patriarchal society, the craving for power and control over one’s life sometime manifested in the beating of one’s lover. Going to the police about abuse was never an option for most black women, many of whom had seen their fair share of black men murdered or carted off to prison. In recent years domestic violence is a problem that has decreased, but still remains alarmingly relevant because of it’s link to unemployment. Take the domestic homicide rate. Black men are two times more likely than white men to be unemployed, at around 13%. Unemployed white men are as likely to kill their partners as unemployed black men, but the higher unemployment rate among black men means more domestic homicides of black women. So much so that black women are three times more likely than their white peers to die at the hands of a partner, and more likely to experience physical abuse. 

In 2018, hardnosed black family advocates claim that the biggest obstacles facing the black family are racial intermarriage, feminism, single mothers who can’t keep men, deadbeat fathers, access to abortion and birth control, and homosexuality. Glossing over the fact that the “destruction of the black family” argument reeks of misogyny, respectability politics, and disregard for bodily autonomy, my biggest gripe is the fact that nobody is explaining what exactly makes the heterosexual nuclear family structure so desirable. Studies have shown that black people are more likely than their white peers to engage with extended family members. Black fathers are more likely to be engaged with their children than white ones. At the end of the day, how impactful are two parented heteronormative homes when mass incarceration and wealth inequality loom overhead? Shouldn’t community strength and resources be more important than that of individual families? Remember the marriage stats from the first half of the twentieth century, the last time that matrimony was vastly placed on a jeweled pedestal and seen as an expectation for happiness. Did those high marriage rates save us negroes from gerrymandering, mass incarceration, redlining, or police brutality? People who blame black community problems on the decaying black family (instead of the proliferation of white supremacy) offer no answers. 

Do whites succeed because of nuclear patriarchal families, or because they subjugate and exploit other races? What do we make of white declining marriage rates and climbing single mother homes? Have they been corrupted by the crumbling black family? Or more accurately, are they a reflection of a society moving away from patriarchy being the standard of American life? That was a rhetorical question, by the way. At what point do black people clutching onto the “heterosexual marriages will save us all” shtick admit that poverty, crime, and lack of success flourish even among black two parent nuclear homes? What about legitimate grievances of domestic violence or child abuse in two-parent homes? And on the flip side, can we approach these conversations while remaining reasonable? 

For instance, I am the child of a single mother (who identified as lesbian) who would have loved a two-parent home cemented by marriage- even if, for instance, that meant my mom married a woman or white man. My father rarely paid child support. My mom struggled to raise me, with little glory or fanfare. I’m sure her pride in raising me mostly alone does not mean that if she had to do it all over again, she’d choose being a single mother. That brings me to a weird place. There are some feminists who claim to not see the value of two parents over one, even while the cost of living in this country continues to climb. There is no avoiding the truth that our economy accommodates couples more than singles. But you and I both know that people are given to extremes. There are ideas among both pro-black “hotep” folks and feminists that make me raise an eyebrow. Can one detest dehumanizing stereotypes about black women while also critiquing a culture that spotlights baby mama drama in reality TV, film, and music (with very real consequences)? Despite my hatred for Maury’s divisive and damaging paternity segments can I be honest about my trepidation of the slew of women on my timeline who pride themselves on being single mothers and denounce their baby daddies as pieces of shit? Can I cringe when I see women with dizzying low self-esteem plop out multiple children for abusive or absentee men while also voicing my desire that these women be treated with as much respect as any other human being? Can I proudly point out that studies show black men are more involved in their children’s lives than other races, while also recognizing the real experiences thousands of black people (including my own) whose fathers were never there—not because of prison, or because of murder, but because of choice? The very obviously rhetorical point I’m making here is that multiple things can be true and righteous at once. 

But where is the happy medium that can serve as a true jumping off point for solutions to our economic and political struggles? The only true medium in sight is the blame and dissection of white supremacy as the root cause for strife in the black family. But when I’m talking about the black family, I’m not just talking about low marriage or high divorce rates, though. What about the rates of domestic violence or child abuse? Also, why is the detriment of the black family largely placed on ball busting feminists or trash toxic men? Or, a question destined to be answered in it’s own complex essay, why is blame placed on black gays? The brief answer is that gays are either falsely assumed to not pro-create (rendering them useless in the fight against white supremacy by way of population bolstering) or that they are considered not adequate caregivers for the next generation of black children. Imagine being so brainwashed by respectability politics to believe that black LGBT people are disposable or burdens of the race, and not members of the extended family. And it is in this thinking that crumbs exist from a racist, white-dominated patriarchal society that refuses to accept responsibility for centuries of oppression and division in the black community. 

In a world where women of all ethnicities are seeking social, political, and economic empowerment, the jumbled identities that make up the political right all see a burgeoning attack on white male culture. A scroll on various pages of 4chan, twitter, and vile sites like Return of Kings reveal angry white men upset that America no longer caters to them. The alt-rights, the conservatives, the “meninists”, the incels. All groups predominately made up of men who believe whiteness is being decimated in part by feminism, birth control, intermarriage, homosexuality, and abortion. All groups of men who believe their manhood is defined by submissive 2nd class women who desire nothing but motherhood and dependence on their husbands. Their manhood also depends on the subjugation of other races or those they see inferior- like homosexuals. These ideas have penetrated the black community and have been re-branded by well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning leaders as calls for keeping the black family together. One industry to emerge from this are the writers and speakers aligned with the Steve Harvey Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man strain of solutions, in which declining marriage rates are framed around black women’s unwillingness to accommodate the dating desires of black men. 

Wrote The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can't Find Good Black Men author Jimi Izrael:

[Black women…] “are not drawn to real men, but to the idea of the ideal man, to watered down Denzel Washington types who are long on charm and short on manliness. His on-screen macho seems seasoned with just enough of the kind of softness that makes women think that he might suddenly call in of patrol, lock up his gun, tie on an apron, wash the dishes, and cook up a casserole. Spend the rest of the evening with the tip of his chin embedded in her asshole as he licks the lining out of her pussy, only getting up to do her toes while he asks about her day… it’s the kind of wish-wash fantastical reworking of manhood that women embrace.” 

Steve Harvey’s discussions contain the same sort of rhetoric, that black women expect too much and that black men need to feel like men for a relationship to work. These kinds of ideas are the same ones being pushed in white male leftist circles, who are similarly dizzied by the increasing social, political, and economic power of women (and LGBT citizens). Because again, these groups define their manhood as the ability to be flanked by submissive women and beta males. 

So, many black men are trying to re-establish the nuclear, gender-hierarchized family as the community standard. Most sprinkle in arguments about promiscuous women, gays, feminism, and interracial relationships for extra flavor.  Heteronormative nuclear families become the focus rather than tackling prison reform, wealth inequality, domestic violence, sexual abuse, or trauma. Black homosexuals and transpeople become signs of failure in a community desperate to establish itself respectable enough for a white society that subjugates blacks whether they are in hoodies or suits, or on the street corner or in Starbucks. 

White society prefers that the black community blames it’s internal struggles on bad hoe mothers, trash deadbeat men, and homos— rather than white supremacy. It’s easier for them to play along, and more valuable too. There is sexist value in black men who seek to control and beat black women into submission. There is economic value in shepherding black men off to prison to be stripped of their dignity, opportunities, and freedom. There is racial value in the marketing of black families (whether nuclear or non-traditional) as crumbling shit shows, whose problems can then be placed on community failures, not the proliferation of white supremacy. Just like there was extreme value in Moynihan presenting his report on the black family without solutions that pinpointed government failures in extending equal social, political, and economic opportunities. And so white people will continue avoiding responsibility for their role in damages to the black community, appearing to be innocent of any wrongdoing, like the grandfatherly Maury Povich on his stage, a sly smile on his lips.   

References

• A Look Beyond the Matriarchy (C. Eric Lincoln) 
• Black Love Is Not a Fairytale (Rebecca Wanzo)
• Historical Marriage Trends From 1890-2010: A Focus on Race Differences (Diana B. Elliot, Kristy Krivickas, Matthew W. Brault, Rose M. Kreider)
• The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies (Kay S. Hymowitz)
• The Origin of Black Female-Headed Families (Erol Ricketts)
• African American Marriage Patterns (Douglas J. Besharov and Andrew West)
• The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
• Black Women at Greater Risk of Becoming Victims of Homicidal Domestic Violence (Selwyn Crawford) 
• Domestic Violence in the African American Community: An Analysis of Social and Structural Factors (Robert L. Hampton)
• Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman)
• African Descended Fathers: Historical Considerations (Michael E. Connor)
• Racism and Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood (Dorothy E. Roberts)
• How the Alt-Right's Sexism Lures Men Into White Supremacy (Aja Romano)