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7.4: African American Families and the Aftermath of Slavery

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    324895
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    The foundational trauma for Black families was chattel slavery, which legally denied marriage, forcibly separated kin, and exploited Black women’s reproductive capacities. The infamous 1965 Moynihan Report, while well-intentioned, pathologized the resulting female-headed household structure as a “tangle of pathology,” blaming Black culture for inequalities rooted in centuries of oppression (Moynihan 1965). A conflict theory analysis corrects this view, highlighting how Black families demonstrated remarkable resilience by creating extensive fictive kin networks—where close friends are considered “play aunts” or “godmothers”—and flexible family roles (Stack 1974). The high rate of female-headed households among Blacks today is better explained by structural factors like mass incarceration, economic marginalization, and a skewed sex ratio than by cultural pathology (Western 2006).


    7.4: African American Families and the Aftermath of Slavery is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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