The Black Family In The Age Of Mass Incarceration By Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Role Of The Negro Family Paper

The African American community has been tolerating for centuries the wrong treatment from the hands of the white society. No matter how many laws or acts that are passed the treatment still has not ended. When, the community suffers that means that the families are suffering as well. In a reading, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” it talks how Moynihan's “tangle of pathology in the Black community began, along with how the world treats the Black man after incarceration.

Moynihan is a white American politician and sociologist whose father left him at 10 years old in 1927. He went on with his life with his mother as the head of his household along with experiencing relocating, poverty and remarriage. With, his father gone it made him step up for his age, and he started working to help his mother out along with attending school. Moynihan attended London School of Economics where he began to do his research. When the civil-rights movement began, he focused in on the black family. While focusing on the family he felt like he needed to write a paper about them. The paper was called “The Negro Family”, this paper was undervaluing the damage that black families have gone through.

According the “The Negro Family” written by Moynihan, the issues regarding the black family comes from numerous things. He believed that the reason all the problems that black families go through comes from the “forced matriarchal structure… seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole”. Matriarchal structure is where the woman is the head of the family. He believes that the matriarchal structure takes away from the black male’s pride. Which means that a woman who was supposed to at home doing housework, is not and is in the place of a male going to work and making ends meet. This could intimidate males making them feel less of themselves. It then goes into discussing incarceration in America. Incarceration rates have been doubling since 1985 up until now. Half of the inmates that are inside the jail cells are males of the African American descent. When, President Nixon made drugs the main enemy it put even more African Americans and Latinos in jail with mandatory minimum sentences and sentences with or without parole. With these requirements the government were cutting services that could help inmates prepare for life outside of jail. Inmates that are in jail mostly have families at home. Most fathers when they got out of jail they could not receive jobs or anything to help them get out which is unfair. People are homeless when they come out of jail and have no idea how to start over. This causes the male to not be beneficial to his family or help them in anyway because they don’t know how. I believe that prison strips the black family and its members of their hope that things could get better. There was a study done that showed that “the job market in America regards black men who have never been criminals as though they were”.

The study had one black and white man without criminal record and another black and white male pose as if they had a criminal record go out and try to seek jobs. The black male without a record faced more than the white man with one. It just goes the say that the people are labeling all black males to be harmful or ignorant to the job world regardless of your record. The Moynihan report was a problem because it blamed the Black community for its own problems. It overlooked the things that the community has go through like social, political and economic inconsistency because of racism and treatment that they have received for centuries. There was not anything in the report that was factual, it was a report that was written that relied on stereotypes of the black family and man put on them by white people.

I believe that the report affected the Black family in different ways. I think that this report gave some families a push to try to not be what Moynihan was saying about the black family. Pushing them to not be put in that category of failure because of the father being missing or in jail. I also believe that this report affects the Black Families that were currently going through the situation at the time of the release, where the father was missing, and the woman was in charge. It affected them in the way of it not being completely factual, and it being bias. Moynihan is a white male that experienced life without his father, but he does not know what it is like to be a black male or be in a black family that has received any form of discrimination.

I don’t think that the government can change the family relation in the Black community. I think that they families in the black community need to practice more collectivism which is an African worldview we have discussed in class. Coming together as one would be helpful to all families no matter what parent is there or not. It would provide an extra support for families. If black communities heal from the past and come together and practice being their brother or sister’s keeper, the things that the government throw at them would not be harmful.