The 10 biggest myths about the Black family

Ebony, Nov, 1989 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

The 10 Biggest Myths About The Black Family

IN PROPAGANDA against the Negro since emancipation in this land," W.E.B. Du Bois said, "we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion."

Nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the pervasive and continuing effort to discredit Black fathers, mothers, and children. And it is scarcely possible to understand the problems and enduring strengths of the Black family if we do not at the least make an effort to understand and dispel the misconcepions, myths and outright lies men and women have invented to hide themselves from Black reality and American racism. There are of course, scores of misconceptions about Black sexuality abd Black kinship networks, but the vast propaganda campaign against the Black fmaily is generally organized around ten major myths.

1. Raw and uncontrolled sex, according to the biggest and most pervasive myth, is at the root of the Black family problem.

This is the most enduring of all lies about Blacks, and sociologists and historians froth at the mouth and strain at the leash of synonimity ("riotous debauchery," "unbridled passions," "wild and primitive emotions") in passionate attempts to express this academic and political voyeurism. For most, if not almost all, critics of the Black family, there is always at the back of the mind this myth, this image of Black America as Babylon, where the Studs and Sapphires are always making babies, where--in the words of the myth -- "They do it, honey, right out in the middle of the streets." And one of the most challenging problems we face is confronting scholars, journalists and politicians, who have repeatedly used the Black family to exorcise the demons of their own sexuality and the guilt of their complicity in oppression. What makes this so difficult is that we are dealing here with a magical idea that is impervious to "facts." There are, in fact, no facts in this area, for there has never been a systematic analysis of the sexual differences between American Blacks and American Whites. And the few facts we have (see Robert Staples, "Black Male Sexuality," EBONY, August 1983) contradict the super-sex theory of Black history and suggest that the differences between racial groups are relatively small especially when you correct for economic and historical differences. More to the point, Blacks, according to the statistics, are not even in the running in the areas of wife-swapping and other experiments of the Sexual Revolutions.

2. The root cause of the problem, according to the second most widely disseminated myth, is loose morals.

THIS myth has a thousand lives and has surface repeatedly in the last 300 years. It has even seduced some Black writers, male and female, who have created a new and curiously popular literature based on the idea that Black America is a vast emotional waseland populated by hustlin' men and maimed women.

In this instance, as in the preceding one, we are dealing with explosive emotions that exist in areas of the psyche that cannot be reached by the light of evidence. Some Blacks, for example, have children out of wedlock, but so do millions of Whites, including stars who are celebrated by the same media which browbeat and humiliate poor Blacks. The mythmakers know this, but they cannot be convinved by "facts," for their knowledge precedes the facts and makes the facts. And when they say that Blacks are immoral, they mean that there is a Black way and a White way of making babies and a Black way and a White way of being immoral.

A case in point is the controversy over illegitimacy. For a common impression to the contrary notwithstanding, Black America has always condemned unrestrained sexual expression and has insisted -- with a singular lack of support from the American government and White institutions -- on stable and responsible mating patterns between knowledgeable and economically qualified parents. But Black America has refused to follow White America in the barbarous practice of condemning infants. It has said, to its credit, that there are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents and, it mus be added, illegitimate societies which make it impossible for parents to find the work and wherewithal (the day-care centers and the network of supporting images and institutions) to become responsible parents.

Another important point is that there have been marked changes in the last 15 years in the marriage and childbearing patterns of both Black and White young women in the United States. In a letter to the New York Times, Constance a. Nathanson, a professor of population dynamics in the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, said: "These changes, however, have been more profound among Whites than among Blacks; in 1983 there were, for the first time, more births to single white than to single black teen-agers." She added: "The tradition of finding the causes of social ills in the victims of those ills, and particularly in their supposed inadequacies as spouses and parents, has a long history in America. The true causes, however, lie deeply imbedded in our social and economic structure."