State of the Black Family
2006

Marriage and Family
Part 2 of a 4 part Series
Read Part 1| Part 2| Part 3 | Part 4

An interview with Lorraine C. Blackman, Ph.D.
by Anita S. Lane  

Lorraine C. Blackman is a tenured Associate Professor of Social Work at Indiana University and a nationally renown policy expert. Dr. Blackman has consulted on numerous projects advancing the family in both the private and government sectors, including the African American Family Structure Project, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and The President’s Marriage Initiative. She is also a consultant for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families’ African American Healthy Marriage Initiative.

Dr. Blackman is the founder of the African American Family Life Education Institute and the author of How to Make Your Good Thing Better—Marriage Enrichment Program, and Pulling Together to Rear Our Children—Parent Training Program.

In a very informative and inspirational interview, Dr. Blackman offers us profound insight into the issues related to marriage and family within the Black community. I am honored to have her share her knowledge and wisdom.

Dr. Blackman, I'm really excited to have you here.  You have been an advocate for marriage for a long time.  In fact, your dissertation was entitled "The Effect of a Marriage Enrichment Program on Marital Satisfaction and Gender Role Attitudes Among African-American Couples." 

You also served as a consultant to numerous projects advancing the family for both the foundation and government sectors including Annie E. Casey foundation and the president to plentiful to name and you've conducted a ton of research in this area.

Where did this passion for strengthening marriages originate?

A.   Well, I've been a marriage and family therapist in the field of social work since 1975.  So this has been a part of my career for a long time. But by about 1986-87, I really became disturbed by news media and especially the incident in Central Park where a group of African American boys assaulted a white female jogger.  It raised the question for me, “What's happening to our children?”  So I stopped mid-career and left my world of practice and went off to Florida State University with that question in mind.

Old schoolers will remember that African American families have been generally pretty conservative and authoritative with children. So we didn't see this kind of behavior on a large scale but nationally, African American children like many other children in the nation were absolutely out of control and I needed to understand why. 

As I conducted that initial research, I discovered that children haven't changed that much but the culture has changed tremendously and families have changed tremendously.  We haven't always had the luxury of marriage in our community.  Sometimes what we had was quasi-marriage.  It was called common-law marriage.  But what we did have were two parents in the home surrounded by a large network of extended kin and that helped to keep children on the pathway to healthy development. 

As those structures, the couples relationships as well as that extended kinship network have been challenged since the 1960s, we've seen marriage rates fall from about 80 percent from 1865 when we became free from slavery, to the 1970s.  So this phenomenon opened conflict between parents, divorce, multiple children by multiple parents, this is a new phenomenon number since 1970 and it's at the crux of what is trouble our children.

So that's essentially how I come to study the issue of marriage.  Marriage is at the center of family life and if we don't get that right, then mothers and fathers can't effectively lead their families.  So that became the focus--how to strengthen marriage so that adults can be happier, healthier leaders for their children.

Q.   Exactly.  That's wonderful.  You mentioned slavery--we've heard individuals talk about the lingering effects of the institution of slavery being one of the causes for family problems in the black community.  In his book published by the Harvard University Press, Andrew Cherlin states that, During the days of slavery a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents than he or she is today."  It sounds like you're reiterating that…

A.   Absolutely, and the data is solid.

Q.   So we can't blame our problems on slavery.
A.   Nor on poverty.  We have never been as poor as we were in slavery.

Q.   Well tell me, what is the state of the African American family today?
A.   The African American family is extraordinarily challenged.  We are challenged from within because we haven't figured out how to get along well with each other in spite of the pressures from the outside.  That's something that our forefathers did much better than we're doing now.  We assume that our problems are caused by our partners, not that our partners are as equally challenged as we are and that we both need to come together to deal with the environmental stresses.  That's a major problem for us.

We're also challenged by the economy, we have an economy now that has no place for uneducated low-skilled workers, and we have a great divide now between social classes.  You either have a great deal of education and access to high paying jobs or you're falling closer and closer to the bottom of this economic ladder.  That too is big different since the 1970s, 1980s when men in particular who had very little education could find jobs that at least allowed them to support their family.

Q.   I know about that, I'm from Detroit--My family, my husband's family--we all come from auto workers.
A.   Even prior to that, there really was a job category in most cities called "street sweeper."  You really could find African American men walking along the edges of sidewalk sweeping the streets and they were paying them to help sustain a family.  The husband usually held two jobs and perhaps there was a cottage industry sort of job by his wife, but the two were able to find enough employment to support themselves. 

Today you cannot get a job to support your family if you have a third grade education.  So we're challenged economically.  We're challenged educationally because so many of our children, particularly boys, are not prepared for school as it is, and schools have not transitioned to follow what the research says that African American boys need to succeed in large numbers in the schools.  So we have young boys by third grade who are already marked for failure. Yet as they grow up, they're going to become someone's husband and someone's father, and they're not prepared educationally for the workforce as it will be when they grow up.  So we have challenges on every hand.

We're also challenged by government--particularly as you look at military service.  One of the niches for poorly educated, poorly skilled males has always been military service.  Now we have a volunteer military so men without education or skill can't get into the military on a full-time basis, but in times of war we always scoop up the lowest educated, the most poorly skilled and those who have some encounters with the criminal justice system. So we need to understand the world in which we live and the nation in which we live, so that our families can do a better job of sustaining themselves.  We have so much to talk about. We need to be working on these issues within our community 24/7.

Q.   It's amazing that I hadn't even heard of the African American life education institute and I'm involved with families… This knowledge needs to be out here!   And there needs to be a larger more intense conversation about this whole topic and it doesn't seem to be happening on the level that it should.

A.   Well, we've been terribly distracted.  Since we've been allowed access to shopping and nice homes, those of us who have made it to the middle class are distracted by all of the beautiful things of this world and we have focused our attention on getting and maintaining things.  So there's very little time left for people to sit down and look at their own lives, much less contemplate what's going on in our community, or our nation and world.

When we were fighting the Civil Rights Movement, people were busy with work and church and family.  That was pretty much it.  The acquisition of stuff was not at the center of our lives, so we had time to fight the civil rights struggle.

Q.   Thank God.
A.   But people don't have time for civic involvement now.  They don't have time to vote. They don't have time to talk about issues and go to PTO meetings to ensure that their children are getting a good quality education.  It's frightening that our time commitments are the things that are killing us.  We don't have time for the things that can give us life.  And part of that is the economic challenge--most people don't have time because we're working so hard to make a living and in a lot of instances, if we're middle class or upper middle class we're working extremely hard just to sustain that way of life.  

It comes to a point where you do have the luxury of saying, “no” to some things but you just feel so compelled to keep on in the rat race.  And that compulsion is just a lie.  We are not compelled to buy larger and larger homes, more and more expensive cars, running up more and more debt, belonging to more and more organizations, driving our kids to more and more events.  We're really not compelled to do those things.  What we are compelled to do is get up every morning and make the best of each day.  And making the best of each day means taking care of the people that you love first. 

I love the title of your magazine, "Keeping Family First," and if that could be at the center of our priority then we would choose to disengage from things that are killing us and involve ourselves more in things that give us a high quality life.

Q.   In 2003 you were a consultant for a project by the Annie E. Casey Foundation entitled, “Building support for marriage in low income couples.”  What are the real or perceived impediments to low income couples marrying?

A.   First and foremost knowledge and values.  People at the bottom of the economic ladder don't necessarily have access to the same kinds of information that people at the middle class have about the importance of marriage and family and how to make that work.  That's one of the reasons that the public health associates at the national level have committed so much money to the marriage education of the poor the middle class.

The people at the bottom don't realize that they are not stuck at the bottom, but they don't know how to move from the bottom.  They don't know that poverty in and of itself, does not have to be in impediment to a high quality family life.  They  don't know that because you're a man who doesn't have a lot of money you don't have to express your manhood through baby-making.  You can be poor and a man of high integrity.  So there are value issues and knowledge issues among the poor that organizations like Casey are really trying to mount and it is exciting to work with that organization and the people who are invited around the table, to get the message out to poor people that life can be better even if you don't have a lot of money.

Q.   Now exactly how do we encourage more instances of marriage among low income couples and help them to sustain their marriages?

A.   Well there are initiatives going on all across the country already.  We simply put out a call in the community saying we're having a series of meetings here, we call them classes. They are going to be free and we'll have child care and transportation if you need it. We'll provide dinner. Just come and learn “How to make your good thing better….”  And it's like pouring water on a desert floor.  People are so thirsty for it.

A part of what I do with the organization is teach the organizers how to make the invitation effective, because we must understand that most of our couples now are not married. Only about a third of African American households are headed by married couples. 

We must welcome to these sessions couples that are cohabiting and already have children and couples who can't even afford to cohabit-- he lives with his family and she lives with her family--but they see themselves as a couple and they already have children.  We must make the invitation in a nonjudgmental way, setting up the structures to deal with all of the problems that come with it-- the relationships and parenting are among the problems they have and we offer educational curriculum materials that are ethnic and gender sensitive.

Much of what is out there is for women and for the middle class, so the research that I've done has built curriculum materials for people who are of African descent and with our particular gender struggle in mind. When you have a curriculum that makes sense to people they are eager to come.  Its exciting to watch that process.

Q.   That is exciting. I spent a lot of time in the community development field before I became a mommy of four and we were rebuilding communities but we didn't have the marriage piece fatored in.  We weren't addressing it.  So I'm glad to see that that's happening.

A.   Well in 1970, internationally the women's movement essentially said to women loudly and subtlely that,  “You don't really need marriage. You need to be self-actualized in your career. You need to find your purpose and pursue that.  You don't really need marriage and if you need sex or companionship you can get that outside of marriage.  If you want to have children you can have that outside of marriage..." 

So part of this is a generational issue from 1970s to the present which we're dealing with women's attempts to self-actualize and to move beyond the domestic violence that plagued our marriages. 

Although women were married at high rates generations ago, they were not necessarily happy.  Long term marriages were not necessarily satisfying, so the women's movement was an attempt to deal with the problems within families that really were quite damaging to women. 

But now the pendulum has swung so far that we've lost the emphasis on family stability and connectedness among family and we've lost a great deal as we've tried to solve that  problem, and it needs to swing back toward the middle now.

I'm not suggesting that the pendulum needs to swing back to the 1950s but it needs to swing back toward the middle so we have more balance in our lives.

Q.   You mentioned the 1950s.  What is your assessment of the impact of a significant rise of working parent household on children and child rearing?

A.   Again, that's a myth for African American family. For the poor of white or black families, women have always worked.  African American women have been working since we got off the boat.  We were brought here to work.  Women did not come here as tourists, yet we were able to raise healthy children in slavery and since slavery until about 1970.

Q.   So it wasn't because we've just begun working.

A.   No, we worked from the day we got off the boat.  What has been new in terms of workforce involvement is the white middle class women.  They are new to the workforce.  We are not new to the workforce as a race and as black women.

Q.   So is our challenge then the fact that we don't have those extended kinship networks, extended family around-- we don't have the community that helps to rear all of our children together? Is that the difference now?

A.  I think the change is that there were women in the community who were stay at home moms, but they had cottage industry jobs.  Women were at home with their children but white people brought their laundry to them--so they were doing laundry for white people in their homes while they supervised their own children.

Q.   Work at home moms…

A.   Yes.  But they were not simply at home making cookies. They were cottage industry moms, and I hope that we can get back to learning from those women. Motherhood and fatherhood was not about playing with children.  It was about supervising children, caring for children, and being affectionate with children, but moms were not trying to balance their cottage industry with playing with their children. 

So there was that reality of family life that we have to get back to.  There were older people--and around the 1940s-1950s, the average life expectancy for most people in the nation was 46.

Q.   What age?

A.   46.  So to be 50 was to be old then.  And if you were African American and in your late 40s, early 50s, you had lived a pretty hard life.  We didn't have automatic washing machines. We didn't have transportation so readily available. People had to walk long distances to work. They did the most menial backbreaking jobs.  We didn't have good health care for pregnant women. We didn't have good birth control. 

By the time a woman was in her 50s she had typically birthed several children with difficult labor.  Many women had lost babies in still birth and that sort of thing.  So being 50 and female was to be old sand tired and probably not working because the work we did was domestic generally for white people, or in restaurants.

So we had more women in their 40s and 50s at home as grandmothers who could provide some of the help with the cottage industry and with child supervision.  Men by 46 or 50 if they hadn't died in the war, been disabled or killed on their jobs, were around in the community to help with yard work or picking up odd jobs to help supplement the family.

So it was a very different kind of life that I don't think we remember much of, but we can learn from them how do you do this--how you work very hard and still provide a great home environment for your family.

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Read Part 2 of this Series on the "State of the Black Family"...

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