Lecture 2/5/03
This lecture will examine the implications for family life of the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the American population. Cherlin points out that the for the public family, the challenge is to socialize and educate a diverse generation of children so that they can be productive citizens. For the private family, the challenge is to understand the varying kinds of family relationships among the many racial-ethnic groups.
From the chapter and from the readings, we should develop an understanding that ethnicity/race and class impact on family structure.
Immigration
Though historically dominated by white European population, given current population projection rates, this will change by 2030. By 1997 one out of five children in the United States was either an immigrant or the child of immigrants. According to Census Bureau estimates, if immigration rates and birth rates remain at current levels by 2030, 50% of American children will be non-Hispanic whites. Hispanics will soon emerge as the nation's largest ethnic group. In the 2001, 37.7 million people identified either as black or as black and another race. 37 million Hispanic were counted. The reason is that Latinos accounted for nearly half of the nation's total population growth from 200 to 2001, which includes birth and immigration rates.
“For immigrants, the meaning of family stretches over the seas and persist through long absences.”
Cherlin refers to transnational families - families that maintain continual contact between members in the sending and receiving countries.
Definition of racial-ethnic groups - What constitutes a racial or ethnic group?
Racial groups – groups with a common set of physical features that distinguish them from other groups. But the boundaries of racial groups vary from country to country and from the past to the present.
Ethnic groups – groups that think of themselves as distinct from others by virtue of common ancestry and shared culture.
Racial-ethnic group – term reflecting elements of racial groups and ethnic groups. Often racial-ethnic group members' shared identity is reinforced by the way they are treated by outsiders.
Thus, racial-ethnic groups are largely social creations, reflecting cultural norms, social inequality, and political power.
Two such racial-ethnic groups created are Hispanics and Asian Americans. Terms such as Hispanic and Asian are umbrella terms for many different cultures and religions.
Great differences in family structure by racial-ethnic groups. - When we look at "Hispanics" we are really talking about many groups - Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, etc. The family structures within in these groups are very different.
Predominant U.S. racial-ethnic groups: African Americans, Hispanics,
Asian and Pacific Islanders and Native Americans
African-American families
African Americans have made impressive socioeconomic gains in this country, especially since WWII. Educational attainment has increased and performance has improved. Poverty rates have dropped. Blacks are visible in politics, business and entertainment.
Cherlin – In 1998 76% of African-American adults had graduated from high school, compared to 20% in 1960. During the same period, the percentage that had completed 4 or more years of college rose from 3 to 15%.
Comparing college-educated blacks with college-educated whites they found that blacks earned 76 cents for each dollar earned by the whites. Black had assets of just 23 cents for every dollar of white assets. And if homes and cars were excluded from assets leaving savings accounts, stocks, small businesses, black college graduates had one cent of assets for every dollar of white assets. Other differences: whites are more likely to inherit some wealth or borrow money for a down payment on a home or car from their parents 2. Whites can more easily obtain home mortgage loans from banks; homes in predominantly black neighborhoods don’t appreciate in value as much as homes in white neighborhoods.
The African-American middle class still faces "unique economic, socio-spatial and cultural perils." (Patillo) The experience of middle-class status is not uniform across groups. Instead, it is colored by the crosscutting reality of race.
The newness of the black middle class means that most of its members have working-class or lower class origins. Don’t have a lot of money. Their middle-class status can be precarious
In addition to being acutely affect by economic changes in production and the distribution of incomes, members of the black middle class are also unique in the kinds of neighborhoods in which they live. Racial segregation and disproportionate poverty operate to cordon off black communities with higher poverty rates than equally segregated white communities. As the geographic span of high-poverty areas has expanded since the 1970s, they continue to push into nearby black middle-class neighborhoods. Subsequently these black middle-class neighborhoods have more crime, fewer services and resources, less political clout and less adequate schools than most white neighborhoods.
Living with and near poverty exerts negative pressures on youth. Higher poverty rates mean that a sizable minority of the youth in black middle-class neighborhoods will be attracted to the financial perks of crime. With the opportunities in place, middle-class youth are also drawn to the fast money. White middle class families and their children, who generally live in much more class-homogeneous neighborhoods, do not experience these same pressures.
Race, Class, and Place.
The black middle class is disproportionately dependent on public-sector employment. This stratified labor-market arrangement makes middle-class black occupations particularly vulnerable to waning public support for affirmative action and the fiscal support of welfare and social services.
Middle-class blacks continue to face racial obstacles, and have yet to attain parity with whites.
The ecological context of black middle-class families is a basic feature of difference between the white and black middle class. The location of black middle-class neighborhoods dictates the experiences to which back middle-class youth will be exposed. Living near blighted, poor neighborhoods with substandard schools, crumbling institutions and few businesses presents an extra challenge to managing the negative influences on black middle-class children.
Mary Patillo points out that "Middle class is a loaded term. As an economic term it is the most straightforward. .... In casual or popular usage, the label "middle-class" is often closer to the non-economic notion of "mainstream." The answers to these question indicate that while "mainstream" and "middle class" may both be normative judgments in their lay use, the road to reaching middle-class status is structured by economic, political, and social forces that are larger than any one individual's efforts. If the spatial incarnation of "middle class" is actually "suburban," then African Americans and other ethnic-racial groups are less able to be middle class by virtue of a history and present of racist lending, rental, and selling practice.
Family patterns certainly do not sound like suburban America, or at least not the middle-class culture we would like to believe defines mainstream life. However, we should not assume that “irregular” household structures suggest a diminished regard for the importance of family life, for the closeness of kin.
Yet middle-class African families make do with what they have. The mix strong cultural traditions with their economic resources to come up with their own "mainstream" practices. The role of the extended family is perhaps the best illustration of how black middle-class families adapt to an increasingly precarious economic context, following in the tradition of how poor African American families have coped with poverty. The family is the basis for upward mobility. There were countless families in Groveland that flourished only because of the combined time and money resources and emotional help of many family members, sometimes all in one house and sometimes spread across the neighborhood and city. The extended family is also the unit that is supportive in times of financial crisis.
"Mainstream" might privilege the nuclear family model, but in reaction to their mostly lower-middle-class incomes, Groveland families keep alive a culturally based emphasis on the extended family in order to maintain an economically middle-class standard of living.
The black middle class challenges the definition of middle class and mainstream, which follows a kind of majority-rule logic. Middle class and mainstream are both based on a white American model, which does not allow for the structurally and culturally determined adjustments that nonwhite groups must make to being middle class. Patillo says that further research might show that even white families that are middle-class are not "mainstream."
Black churches have been a great source of social support to African Americans. The church as served as a mediating structure, a midlevel social institution (other examples are civic groups, neighborhood, and families themselves) through which individuals can negotiate with government and resist governmental abuses of power.
The Working Poor
Katherine Newman’s article also calls into question the “Culture of Poverty” perspective of the poor. She looks at the working poor in Harlem who are black or Hispanic.
Newman's study suggests that part - although by no means all- of the differences in the family lives of racial and ethnic groups is really a reflection of the class differences among them
Why do we assume that family values are a thing of the past in the ghetto? We confuse kinship structures with the moral culture of family life in the inner city. …Were we to look at the structure the household and focus only on the ways it deviates from the nuclear family norm, we would miss what is most important about it: the quality of the relationships inside and the links between them and the web of kin who live in nearby apartments.
She uses the term “family circles” but it is the same phenomena that Cherlin calls extended family networks or kinship networks. Whatever, it is called; the reality is that the working poor have to rely on extended kin (whether assigned or created) to deal with poverty.
Newman says “in pointing to the continuous importance of a family as a set of values expressed in practice, I do not mean to paint the households of the working poor as indistinguishable from the ‘mainstream model’” She notes that economic pressure cannot descent upon families without showing their effects, especially on young children. There are problems: the irregularity of the income the working poor receive, resources for children such as good daycare, crime in the neighborhood, inadequate education, etc. These all help to create a vulnerability in the family.
“The poor have no lock on the pitfalls of modern family life. Yet the consequences of family instability in poor neighborhoods are clearly more devastating because the whole institutional structure that surrounds folks at the bottom – the schools, the low-wage workplace. The overcrowded labor market, the potholed streets, the unsavory crack dealers on the front stoop – creates more vulnerability in families that have to deal with internal troubles. Support is more problematic, more likely to depend upon the resources of relatives and friends who are, in turn, also poor and troubled.”
These great economic changes had a significant impact on lower class and working class black families, one of which was the declining importance of marriage.
Indicators of the decline of marriage
The percentage of young women who will every marry - 64% -down from 88% in the 1950s vs. 93% for white
The percentage of children born to unmarried mothers - 69% in 1998 vs. 26% for whites.
The percentage of family households headed by one parent has risen for both African Americans and white Americans. 58% for blacks, 23% for whites (in 1998) To be sure, the decline of marriage has also occurred among whites, but it has not been as great.
Union formation - the process of beginning to live with a partner either through cohabitation or marriage. The first unions formed by blacks are almost twice as likely to be cohabitations (rather than marriages) than is the case for whites.
But Newman reminds us that men are not necessarily absent from the working poor families. They may not be married, but they play a significant role in the mother-child dyad. There are certainly men who do not accept their responsibility. However, William Julius Wilson has pointed out that men, who lack the wherewithal to be good fathers, often aren’t. There is an importance to steady, reasonably paid employment in encouraging responsibility.
The impact of economics - For every three black unmarried women in their twenties there is roughly one unmarried black man with earnings above the poverty line. In addition to job losses - or perhaps as a result of them - there are other reasons why young black women may face a difficult time finding a suitable spouse. Consider the terrible tool that violence and drugs are taking on young black men. Homicide rates for young African American males - if the rates in 1998 were to continue, about 2 of every 100 black 15 years boys would die violently before reaching ages 44. Rates of imprisonment and institutionalization of young black males are also strikingly high. On any given day, about 3 of every 100 black men in there twenties are behind bards.
Is the decline in marriage, then, due to the shortage of men who are "marriageable" as Wilson calls them, by virtue of steady employment? Recent studies suggest two conclusions 1 the employment problems of black men are indeed an important factor in the decline in marriage, but 2 the racial difference remains substantial even after employment problems are taken into account. Yet even after marriage market opportunities were taken into account, the rate of marriage among the young black women in the survey was still just 50 to 60% of the rate for comparable young white women.
Explaining the decline of marriage among African Americans and the sharp increase in the proportion of children born to unmarried mothers.
How then can we explain the great decline of marriage among
African Americans and the sharp increase in the proportion of children born to unmarried mothers? Although African Americans have had a higher proportion of single parent households than whites since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, the difference has become more pronounced over the last few decades. There is no consensus as to why. Without doubt changes in the economy are very important.
Society wide shift in values
The society wide shift was the weakening of the institution of marriage, which was in turn, rooted in the increasing economic independence of men and women. The decline of marriage also reflected a cultural drift throughout the West to a more individualistic ethos, one that emphasized self-fulfillment in personal relations. It de-emphasized the obligations people have to others – including their spouses and partners.
The Second development also affected the entire nation, but it hit blacks especially hard; the economic restructuring.
The expansion of government social welfare program may also have increased the economic independence of women and men.
Faced with difficult times economically, many blacks responded by drawing upon a model of social support that was in their cultural repertoire, a way of making it from day to day passed down by African Americans who came bore them. This response relied heavily on extended kinship networks and de-emphasized marriage.
Hispanic families
2000 Census 35.3 million Hispanic
Mexicans and Mexican Americans are the largest group constituting about 65 %
As much variation within the group as between Hispanics and other racial-ethnic groups.
Mexican Americans – largest Hispanic group.
Mexican-American families occupy an economic level that is, on average higher than that of Puerto Ricans and lower than that of Cubans.
According to Lomnitz, The grandfamily is the typical structure: parents, their children, their children’s spouses, and their grandchildren. Since census data is not collected this way, we cannot test the hypothesis.
Mexican Americans have higher birthrate than anyone other racial-ethnic group.
In part, the higher fertility of Mexican women can be explained by their lower levels of education relative to non-Hispanic white women. But another factor may be that Mexican Americans are predominanatly Catholic. Also Marry at young age than other Hispanic groups and other racial-ethnic groups.
Multi-generational family norm. 0The picture of a marriage-based, multigenerational Mexican-American family is tempered somewhat by statistics on childbearing outside marriage and on marital instability. But Mexican Americans seem centered on high-birthrates, multigenerational families more than any other major racial-ethnic group in the nation.
Perhaps the extensive communication and movement across the long, permeable U.s. -Mexican border keep the influence of the sending country stronger than is the case among some other immigrant groups
Between 1960 and 1990 the percentage of Mexican-origin women in the labor force increased from 28.8 to 52.8%
This change doesn't necessarily mean that the norms in Mexican-American and other Hispanic families have also changed greatly. --Moved toward more egalitarian gender behavior without altering their beliefs in a more traditional division of labor. Other studies of Hispanic families confirm that even when husbands and wives hold traditional views they often expect that wives will work outside the home because the family needs their income.
Puerto Ricans
U.S. citizens
44% live on mainland.
Most economically disadvantaged of major Hispanic groups. - 27% of all Puerto Rican family households had incomes below the poverty line compared with 24% of Mexican-American family households, 19% of Central and South American family households and 11% of Cuban American family households.
Puerto Ricans have the lowest labor force participation rates, the highest unemployment levels,
The highest incidence of poverty
The lowest average levels of education
Higher welfare utilization.
Possibility to explain is that most Puerto Ricans are concentrated in the New York City metropolitan area, which as undergone a loss of blue-collar jobs.
Consistent with their lower economic standing, Puerto Ricans are second only to African Americans in the percentage of children born to unmarried mothers. Yet many of the formally unmarried mothers are living a partnership that they consider being a marriage. This is called a consensual union. These are cohabiting relationships in which couples consider themselves to be married but have never had a religious or civil marriage ceremony. Whether or not a woman has borne a child in a union is a key factor in whether she defines it as an informal marriage or as cohabitation. The birth of a child seems to change the social meaning of a union, making it more like a marriage.
Cuban Americans
First wave political migration.
Second wave (Mariel Cubans) - not as successful.
Cuban Americans are the most prosperous Hispanic group, although recent immigrants have reduced the group's economic standing.
Most Cuban Americans settled in an immigrant enclave in the Miami. They are clustered in Cuban neighborhoods where they eat at Cuban restaurants, send their children to private Cuban schools, listen to Spanish-language radio states, buy their food at markets owned by Cubans-Americans.
and many started family-based businesses.
More likely to be headed by a marriage couples than other Hispanic groups.
Most prosperous of Hispanic groups. - The median income of Cuban-American families was higher than that of any other Hispanic group or of African Americans and by 1980 was 88% of the median income of non-Hispanic white families.
The enclave strategy has been a viable way for Cubans to achieve economic success.
Yet it must be remembered that these immigrants started out with a friendly reception fro their hosts, arrived with substantial education and skills, received government assistant, and had white skin.
The Mariel Cubans did not receive the same welcome from the US. Castro said that they were criminals - although 14% were professionals and another 24% had been skilled blue-collar workers . By 1998 the median income of Cuban-origin families had slipped to 77% of the median for non-Hispanic white families, reflecting the influx of Mariel refugees.
High rate of business ownership - the rate of business ownership among Cuban Americans in 1987 was three times higher than the rate among Mexican Americans and six times higher than among Puerto Ricans.
Many of the businesses were organized on a family basis. Married Cuban men were more likely to be self-employed, even after taking into account differences between married and unmarried men in education, work experience citizenship and English proficiency. If the men had children, they were even more likely to be self-employed.
Cuban immigrants appear to have used conjugal families as a means of pooling the labor and accumulating the capital necessary to start a business. Too may adults represented a drain on capital that could be used for the business; too few children or the absence of a spouse on the other hand, resulted in insufficient labor or outside income (as from a wife's job) for starting a firm.
Asian-American families - Influx since the 1965 immigration act.
Emphasize interdependence among kin more than Western culture .They emphasize individual less than Western culture. Asian families place a greater emphasis on children's loyalty and service to their parents than do Western families.
Immigrants' families frequently pool economic resources to start businesses or to buy home.
This is not to say that all Asian immigrants adjust well and prosper. For example the Hmong are extremely poor . as are the second wave of Vietnamese. Hawaiians have a low median family income.
Lower birthrates than other groups.
More married couples heading their households than any other racial-ethnic group (including non-Hispanic whites).
Although some Asian subgroups are poor, Asian-American families as a while have a higher median income than non-Hispanic white families.
A majority of young adult Asian Americans now marry non-Asians, meaning that in the future Asian-American families will increasingly be multiracial.
Social capital
Social capital is the resources that a person can access through his or her relationships with other people.
Example - Cubans lending money to other Cubans on the basis on "reputation and integrity."
Race, ethnicity, and kinship
Two forms of kin networks have different strengths and limitations. Women-centered networks are superior for easing the hardships of persistent poverty. They have allowed many poor individuals to subsist from day to day. Yet they make it difficult for network members to accumulate eh resources necessary to rise above poverty.
The marriage-based networks on the other hand are superior for allowing people to be upwardly mobile by accumulating enough resources to start a business or move to a better neighborhood. Yet they make it difficult for network members to provide assistance to all kin ho need it.
Some Hispanic immigrant groups, most notably the Cubans, and many Asian immigrant groups use ties to other in their ethnic community to achieve certain goals, such as starting a business. This use of social connections to advance one self is an example of what sociologists call social capital.
Importance of family ties and kinship in lives of member of racial-ethnic groups.
Female-centered networks ease hardship of persistent poverty.
Marriage-based networks allow people to be upwardly mobile.
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