During the election cycle, in my seemingly never-ending quest to gather information, I heard ad naseum about Obama being post-racial. “Post” became the prefix du jour. Post-racial, post-partisan (seriously…google post-partisan and you’ll be amazed at how many post-partisan hits you get), post-feminist, post-political, post-American (thanks Fareed Zakaria), post-election, post-mortem, post-Bush, post-9/11, post-rational (thank you Rachel Maddow) post-this and post-that. Frankly, I got sick of it. (apparently, I’m not the only one…fun blog on the post issue here) Interestingly, for all the talk about Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin…I never did hear anyone suggest that we are now post-gender….but that’s a blog for a different day.
I know that “post” as a prefix means after…so some of those “posts”, like “post-9/11″ and “post-election” make sense to me. I understand what is being communicated. But, post-racial? I’m not really even sure what that is supposed to mean, let alone what it actually means. It certainly cannot mean that racism or consciousness of race has some how ceased to exist with Obama’s election. If it meant that, Obama’s election and inauguration would not be touted as the hisotircal events they are. Nor would Obama be identified as the first African-American president, particularly not when he’s bi-racial,…he would just be the 44th American president. If it meant that, there wouldn’t have been “cross burnings, schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama,” black figures hung from nooses, racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars” after Obama’s election
So, what does post-racial mean…what should it mean?
The Washington Post recently published an article by Kay Hymowitz, called An Enduring Crisis for the Black Family, in which she talks about some of the challenges facing black families…the statistics she quotes are troubling:
Since 1965, through economic recessions and booms, the black family has unraveled in ways that have little parallel in human cultures. By 1980, black fatherlessness had doubled; 56 percent of black births were to single mothers. In inner-city neighborhoods, the number was closer to 66 percent. By the 1990s, even as the overall fertility of American women, including African Americans, was falling, the majority of black women who did bear children were unmarried. Today, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. In some neighborhoods, two-parent families have vanished. In parts of Newark and Philadelphia, for example, it is common to find children who are not only growing up without their fathers but don’t know anyone who is living with his or her biological father.
But, Hymowitz also talks about The Negro Family: The Case for National Action , a report written in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, for the Johnson administration (later to become the Senator from New York). In his report, Moynihan identified “the deterioration of the Negro family” (attributed largely to the heritage of slavery) as “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time,” the report blamed the growing economic, educational, and social problems evident among blacks on a “family structure [that had become] highly unstable, and in many urban centers [was] approaching complete breakdown.” Moynihan warned of “clear indications that the situation may indeed have begun to feed on itself,” Moynihan declared that “the tangle of pathology is tightening.” The time had come, Moynihan asserted, for “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans … directed towards the question of family structure.”
Hymotiz summarizes the report:
In 1950, at the height of the Jim Crow era and despite the shattering legacy of slavery, the great majority of black children — an estimated 85 percent — were born to their two married parents. Just 15 years later, there seemed to be no obvious reason that that would change. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, legal barriers to equality were falling. The black middle class had grown substantially, and the first five years of the 1960s had produced 7 million new jobs. Yet 24 percent of black mothers were then bypassing marriage. Moynihan wrote later that he, like everyone else in the policy business, had assumed that “economic conditions determine social conditions.” Now it seemed, “what everyone knew was evidently not so.”
After Moynihan’s report, President Johnson spoke at a a commencement address at Howard University and discussed this breakdown of family.
Perhaps most important–its influence radiating to every part of life–is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility. It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.
This, too, is not pleasant to look upon. But it must be faced by those whose serious intent is to improve the life of all Americans.
Only a minority–less than half–of all Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents. At this moment, tonight, little less than two-thirds are at home with both of their parents. Probably a majority of all Negro children receive federally-aided public assistance sometime during their childhood.
The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.
So, unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions under which most parents will stay together–all the rest: schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation.
Moynihan’s report was, not suprisingly, controversial. It concluded that the instability of the black family and the absence of fathers in many families was a major cause of poverty, illiteracy, and hopelessness in black urban families. Liberals and African-American leaders protested and felt that Moynihan was ascribing the difficulties to an inherent defect in black people. The report was dismissed as racist propoganda. As Hymowitz describes:
Unfortunately, those warnings were as prescient as they were reviled. Civil rights leaders, worried about reviving racist myths about black promiscuity, objected to what they viewed as blaming the victim. Feminists were inclined to look on the “strong black women” raising their children without men as a symbol of female autonomy. By the fall of 1965, when a White House conference on the black family was scheduled, the Moynihan report and the subject had disappeared.
Interestingly, as Eric Dyson reported for Newsweek, Dr. King did not condemn the report, instead he said,
The shattering blows on the Negro family have made it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic. Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty and backwardness.” But King also insisted that Moynihan’s report offered both “dangers and opportunities.” The danger was that “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” The opportunity was the chance that the report would galvanize support and resources for the black family.
Under the heat of the criticism and claims of racism, the opportunity was missed.
In 2004, Bill Cosby spoke out on the same subject at a dinner commemorating Brown v. Bd. of Education.
In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.
I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?
. . .
You got to tell me that if there was parenting, help me, if there was parenting, he wouldn’t have picked up the Coca Cola bottle and walked out with it to get shot in the back of the head. He wouldn’t have. Not if he loved his parents. And not if they were parenting! Not if the father would come home. Not if the boy hadn’t dropped the sperm cell inside of the girl and the girl had said, “No, you have to come back here and be the father of this child.” Not ..“I don’t have to.”
The response in the African-American community to Cosby’s speech was mixed. “Some criticized Cosby for fueling negative racial stereotypes and giving credence to conservative beliefs that the problems facing African Americans are self-imposed. But others applauded him for talking about the importance of personal responsibility, and still others found themselves split on how they viewed his message.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates reported, on those some of those criticisms.
The playwright August Wilson commented, “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” One of the gala’s hosts, Ted Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, called his comments “a harsh attack on poor black people in particular.” Dubbing Cosby an “Afristocrat in Winter,” the Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson came out with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, that took issue with Cosby’s bleak assessment of black progress and belittled his transformation from vanilla humorist to social critic and moral arbiter. “While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle,” argued Dyson, “he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table.”
Then, on Father’s Day, 2008, Obama spoke on the issue of absent fathers….particularly in the African-American community.
Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation. They are teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models. They are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.
You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled – doubled – since we were children. We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.
. . .
How many times have our hearts stopped in the middle of the night with the sound of a gunshot or a siren? How many teenagers have we seen hanging around on street corners when they should be sitting in a classroom? How many are sitting in prison when they should be working, or at least looking for a job? How many in this generation are we willing to lose to poverty or violence or addiction? How many?
Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more afterschool programs for our children. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities.
But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one.
We need to help all the mothers out there who are raising these kids by themselves; the mothers who drop them off at school, go to work, pick up them up in the afternoon, work another shift, get dinner, make lunches, pay the bills, fix the house, and all the other things it takes both parents to do. So many of these women are doing a heroic job, but they need support. They need another parent. Their children need another parent. That’s what keeps their foundation strong. It’s what keeps the foundation of our country strong.
Of course, speeches like these made Jesse Jackson want to cut Obama’s nuts off, despite the fact that almost 30 years ago, Jackson himself voiced similar concerns, saying “You are not a man because you can make a baby. You’re only a man if you can raise a baby, protect a baby and provide for a baby.” In general, though, the criticisms of Obama’s speech were not directed at the message itself, nor did they castigate him for daring to discuss the issue. Rather, the criticisms were directed at points like Obama’s a lack of record on the issue, his painting all black fathers and families with the same too broad brush, or his failure to address and explicate the additional ills also contributing to the problem. But, the underlying message itself was not condemned and Obama was not condemned for delivering it….even by some of those who had previously excoriated Cosby for that same message.
Shortly after Obama’s election, Maryann Reid wrote in Newsweek about the changing expectations of black families upon Obama’s election,
“I have no more excuses” is what I’ve been hearing at holiday parties from people who believed the system was designed to prevent black progress. The discussion has gone from talk of race to talk about ourselves and our families. When the president is black, it means so much more than a color; it means a new national consciousness.
So, maybe that’s a piece of what post-racial can and should mean. Maybe it means we can start thinking about, talking about, and acting on, some of these racially charged messages…without also shooting the messenger in the process. We’ve been shooting the messenger on this subject for 40 years, both literally and figuratively. Or, maybe post-racial means we don’t think about these problems as “black” problems…maybe they’re just problems. Problems that effect all of us, and for which all of us need to be engaged in the solutions.
These kinds of subjects are not easy or comfortable. If they were, we would have done something about them already. We’re pretty good at the easy. But the hard…not always, at least not lately, anyway. Subjects like how to address broken family structures require us to get past our knee jerk reactions, our platitudes and prejudices and instead to sit, and listen and think and act. They require us to own our responsibilities… for ourselves, our neighbors and our communities. Maybe post-racial means we can finally do that. …40 years later, it’s long past time that we started.
