Download or read book The Hidden Cost of Being African American written by Thomas M. Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past three decades, racial prejudice in America has declined significantly and many African American families have seen a steady rise in employment and annual income. But alongside these encouraging signs, Thomas Shapiro argues in The Hidden Cost of Being African American, fundamental levels of racial inequality persist, particularly in the area of asset accumulation--inheritance, savings accounts, stocks, bonds, home equity, and other investments-. Shapiro reveals how the lack of these family assets along with continuing racial discrimination in crucial areas like homeownership dramatically impact the everyday lives of many black families, reversing gains earned in schools and on jobs, and perpetuating the cycle of poverty in which far too many find themselves trapped. Shapiro uses a combination of in-depth interviews with almost 200 families from Los Angeles, Boston, and St. Louis, and national survey data with 10,000 families to show how racial inequality is transmitted across generations. We see how those families with private wealth are able to move up from generation to generation, relocating to safer communities with better schools and passing along the accompanying advantages to their children. At the same time those without significant wealth remain trapped in communities that don't allow them to move up, no matter how hard they work. Shapiro challenges white middle class families to consider how the privileges that wealth brings not only improve their own chances but also hold back people who don't have them. This "wealthfare" is a legacy of inequality that, if unchanged, will project social injustice far into the future. Showing that over half of black families fall below the asset poverty line at the beginning of the new century, The Hidden Cost of Being African American will challenge all Americans to reconsider what must be done to end racial inequality.

Download or read book Coping With Poverty written by Sheldon Danziger and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conservatives often condemn the poor, particularly African-Americans, for having children out of wedlock, joblessness, dropping out of school, or tolerating crime. Liberals counter that, with more economic opportunity, the poor differ little from the nonpoor in these areas. In answer to both, Coping with Poverty points to the survival strategies of the poor and their multiple roles as parents, neighbors, relatives, and workers. Their attempts to balance multiple obligations occur within a context of limited information, social support, and resources. Their decisions may not always be the wisest, but they "make sense" in context. Contributors use qualitative research methods to explore the influence of community, workplace, and family upon strategies for dealing with poverty. Promising young scholars delve into poor black inner-city neighborhoods and suburbs and middle-income black urban communities, exploring experiences at all stages of life, including high-school students, young parents, employed older men, and unemployed mothers. Two chapters discuss the role of qualitative research in poverty studies, specifically examining how this research can be used to improve policymaking. The volume's contribution is in the diversity of experiences it highlights and in how the general themes it illustrates are similar across different age/gender groups. The book also suggests an approach to policymaking that seeks to incorporate the experiences and the needs of the poor themselves, in the hope of creating more successful and more relevant poverty policy. It is especially useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in sociology, public policy, urban studies, and African-American Studies, as its scope makes it THE basic reader of qualitative studies of poverty. Sheldon Danziger is Director of the Poverty Research and Tranining Center and Professor of Social Work and Public Policy, University of Michigan. Ann Chih Lin is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan.

Download or read book Growing Up with a Single Parent written by Sara McLanahan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonwhite and white, rich and poor, born to an unwed mother or weathering divorce, over half of all children in the current generation will live in a single-parent family--and these children simply will not fare as well as their peers who live with both parents. This is the clear and urgent message of this powerful book. Based on four national surveys and drawing on more than a decade of research, Growing Up with a Single Parent sharply demonstrates the connection between family structure and a child's prospects for success. What are the chances that the child of a single parent will graduate from high school, go on to college, find and keep a job? Will she become a teenage mother? Will he be out of school and out of work? These are the questions the authors pursue across the spectrum of race, gender, and class. Children whose parents live apart, the authors find, are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those in two-parent families, one and a half times as likely to be idle in young adulthood, twice as likely to become single parents themselves. This study shows how divorce--particularly an attendant drop in income, parental involvement, and access to community resources--diminishes children's chances for well-being. The authors provide answers to other practical questions that many single parents may ask: Does the gender of the child or the custodial parent affect these outcomes? Does having a stepparent, a grandmother, or a nonmarital partner in the household help or hurt? Do children who stay in the same community after divorce fare better? Their data reveal that some of the advantages often associated with being white are really a function of family structure, and that some of the advantages associated with having educated parents evaporate when those parents separate. In a concluding chapter, McLanahan and Sandefur offer clear recommendations for rethinking our current policies. Single parents are here to stay, and their worsening situation is tearing at the fabric of our society. It is imperative, the authors show, that we shift more of the costs of raising children from mothers to fathers and from parents to society at large. Likewise, we must develop universal assistance programs that benefit low-income two-parent families as well as single mothers. Startling in its findings and trenchant in its analysis, Growing Up with a Single Parent will serve to inform both the personal decisions and governmental policies that affect our children's--and our nation's--future.

Download or read book A New Look at Black Families written by Charles V. Willie and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Willie and Richard Reddick's A New Look at Black Families has introduced thousands of students to the intricacies of the Black family in American society since its publication in 1976. Using a case study approach, Willie and Reddick show the varieties of the Black family experience and how those experiences vary by socioeconomic status. In addition to examining families of low-income, working, and middle classes, the authors also look to the family experiences of highly successful African Americans to try to identify the elements of the family environment leading to success. The authors puncture the myth of the Black matriarchy prevalent in the popular imagination; and they explore a variety of family configurations, including a family with same-gender parents. The sixth edition has been reorganized and updated throughout. The new Part III—Cases Against and for Black Men and Women—unites two chapters from previous editions into a cohesive discussion of stereotypes and misunderstandings from both scholars and the mass media. Also, a new chapter on the Obama family offers support for cross-gender and cross-racial mentoring, and it demonstrates the value of extended family relations.

Download or read book Survival of the African American Family written by Karen S. Jewell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-11-30 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging widely held beliefs, this provocative book offers nothing less than a blueprint for enhancing the social and economic status of African American families. Despite the implementation of liberal social policies in the 1960s and '70s, successive U.S. administrations continue to dash the hopes and expectations of African Americans, who remain subject to racism and discrimination. Arguing that social policies—and their absence—have affected the stability of the African American family, Jewell refutes the myth of significant progress for African American families emanating from the civil rights era, exposing the myriad reasons why greater advancement toward equality has not occurred in major societal institutions. Attention is focused on the extent to which African American families have been adversely affected by a process of assimilation that was socio-psychological rather than economic. This new edition builds upon the first edition, and is revised and expanded to reflect new and persistent institutional policies and practices of race, gender and class inequality facing African American families. The revised edition explores such issues as racial profiling, capital punishment, police brutality, predatory lending, No Child Left Behind, welfare reform, affirmative action and racial disparities in healthcare, academic achievement and home ownership. Jewell proposes a variety of strategies and policies that are needed to ensure greater social and economic equality and justice for African American families.

Download or read book Ensuring Inequality written by Donna L. Franklin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a crisis today in the American family, and this crisis has been particularly severe in the African American community. Black women are more likely than ever to bear children as teenagers, to remain single, and to raise their children in poverty. As a result, a staggering number of African-American children are growing up without fathers and living in destitution. In this insightful new book, Donna L. Franklin offers an in depth account of the history and development of the African American family, revealing why the marriage and family experiences of African-Americans differs from those of white America, and highlighting the cultural and governmental forces that have combined to create this divide and to push the black family to the edge of catastrophe. In Ensuring Inequality, Franklin traces the evolution of the black family from slavery to the present, showing the cumulative effects of centuries of historical change. She begins with a richly researched account of the impact of slavery on the black family, finding that slavery not only caused extreme instability and suffering for families, but established a lasting pattern of poverty which made the economic advantages of marriage unattainable. She provides a sharp critique of the policies of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and demonstrates the mixed impact of the new pattern of sharecropping. On one hand, tenant farming allowed greater autonomy than the older gang labor system, and tended to consolidate two parent families; on the other hand, it reinforced male authority, and bound African Americans in debt peonage. The twentieth century brought a host of changes for black families, and Franklin incisively examines their effects. First, black women began to move to cities in search of jobs as domestic servants, while men stayed behind to work the fields, dividing the families. Then, two world wars sparked the great migration north, as African Americans pursued employment in booming factories. When the white soldiers returned home, however, many blacks found themselves out of work, shunted to the least desirable, lowest paying jobs. Roosevelt's New Deal offered limited help: in the North, it tolerated the red lining of urban neighborhoods, making it difficult for blacks to obtain home mortgages; in the South, blacks found that, as agricultural laborers, they were exempted from most labor laws, while agricultural subsidies were administered in favor of white farmers. And the distinction made between programs paid for by beneficiaries (such as social security) and those based on need (such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children) stigmatized the poor. Most blacks found themselves living an ever more tenuous, socially isolated existence. Franklin brings her comprehensive, nuanced study right up to the present, showing the impact on the urban poor of changes in the economy and society, from the dramatically shrinking pool of good jobs to the rise of the new right. "The increasing reliance on welfare by young black mothers," she writes, "corresponded to the erosion of opportunities for young black males." More important, she offers new approaches to solving the crisis. Not only does she recommend federal intervention to create new economic opportunity in urban ghettos, but she also stresses the importance of black self-help and proposes a plan of action. In addition, she outlines social interventions that can stabilize and strengthen poor, mother-only families living in ghetto neighborhoods. Exhaustively researched and insightfully written, Ensuring Inequality makes an important contribution to the central debate in American politics today.

Download or read book Research on African American Families written by Robert Bernard Hill and published by William Monroe Trotter Institute University of Massachusetts. This book was released on 1989 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Strengths of African American Families written by Hill and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1999-01-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning to his innovative work of twenty-five years ago, Robert Hill once more offers an incisive analysis of five key cultural strengths of African-American families. With compassion and eloquence, he argues that these existing strengths provide a solid foundation upon which to develop the kind of public policies and self-help initiatives that will truly promote the interests, not only of the African American community, but of our diverse nation as a whole.

Download or read book A New Look at Black Families written by Charles Vert Willie and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2003 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlie Willie's A New Look at Black Families has introduced thousands of students to the intricacies of the Black family in American society since its publication in 1976. Now, with Richard Reddick, Willie has produced a substantially-revised 5th edition of this standard text on the subject. Using a case study approach, Willie and Reddick show the varieties of the Black family experience and how those experiences vary by socioeconomic status. In addition to examining families of low-income, working, and middle classes, the authors also look to the family environment leading to success. The authors also puncture the myth of the Black matriarchy prevalent in the popular imagination. For a nuanced, readable, accurate picture of the state of the family in African America for scholars and their students, this New Look should be useful reading.

Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Download or read book African American Families written by Angela J. Hattery and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bravo to the authors! They have done an excellent job addressing the issues that are critical to community members, policy makers and interventionists concerned with Black families in the context of our nation." —Michael C. Lambert, University of Missouri, Colombia "African American Families is a timely work. The strength of this text lies in the depth of coverage, clarity, and the ability to combine secondary sources, statistics and qualitative data to reveal the plight of African Americans in society." —Edward Opoku-Dapaah, Winston-Salem State University "African American Families is both engaging and challenging and is perhaps one of the most important works I have read in many years. This book will most certainly move the discourse of the socio-economic conditions of black families forward, beyond the boundaries already set by other books in the market. African American Families is an excellent book whose time has come, and one that I would most definitely adopt." —Lateef O. Badru, University of Louisville African American Families provides a systematic sociological study of contemporary life for families of African descent living in the United States. Analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, authors Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith identify the structural barriers that African Americans face in their attempts to raise their children and create loving, healthy, and raise the children of the next generation. Key Features: Uses the lens provided by the race, class, and gender paradigm: Examples illustrate the ways in which multiple systems of oppression interact with patterns of self-defeating behavior to create barriers that deny many African Americans access to the American dream. Addresses issues not fully or adequately addressed in previous books on Black families: These issues include personal responsibility and disproportionately high rates of incarceration, family violence, and chronic illnesses like HIV/AIDS. Brings statistical data to life: The authors weave personal stories based on interviews they've conducted into the usual data from scholarly(?) literature and from U.S. Census Bureau reports. Provides several illustrations from Hurricane Katrina: A contemporary analysis of a recent disaster demonstrates many of the issues presented in the book such as housing segregation and predatory lending practices. Offers extensive data tables in the appendices: Assembled in easy-to-read tables, students are given access to the latest national agencies data from agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, Centers for Disease Control, and Bureau of Justice Statistics. Intended Audience: This is an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses such as African American Families, Sociology of the Family, Contemporary Families, and Race and Ethnicity in the departments of Human Development and Family Studies, Sociology, African American Studies, and Black Studies.

Download or read book Ensuring Inequality written by Donna L. Franklin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a crisis today in the American family, and this crisis has been particularly severe in the African American community. Black women are more likely than ever to bear children as teenagers, to remain single, and to raise their children in poverty. As a result, a staggering number of African-American children are growing up without fathers and living in destitution. In this insightful new book, Donna L. Franklin offers an in depth account of the history and development of the African American family, revealing why the marriage and family experiences of African-Americans differs from those of white America, and highlighting the cultural and governmental forces that have combined to create this divide and to push the black family to the edge of catastrophe. In Ensuring Inequality, Franklin traces the evolution of the black family from slavery to the present, showing the cumulative effects of centuries of historical change. She begins with a richly researched account of the impact of slavery on the black family, finding that slavery not only caused extreme instability and suffering for families, but established a lasting pattern of poverty which made the economic advantages of marriage unattainable. She provides a sharp critique of the policies of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and demonstrates the mixed impact of the new pattern of sharecropping. On one hand, tenant farming allowed greater autonomy than the older gang labor system, and tended to consolidate two parent families; on the other hand, it reinforced male authority, and bound African Americans in debt peonage. The twentieth century brought a host of changes for black families, and Franklin incisively examines their effects. First, black women began to move to cities in search of jobs as domestic servants, while men stayed behind to work the fields, dividing the families. Then, two world wars sparked the great migration north, as African Americans pursued employment in booming factories. When the white soldiers returned home, however, many blacks found themselves out of work, shunted to the least desirable, lowest paying jobs. Roosevelt's New Deal offered limited help: in the North, it tolerated the red lining of urban neighborhoods, making it difficult for blacks to obtain home mortgages; in the South, blacks found that, as agricultural laborers, they were exempted from most labor laws, while agricultural subsidies were administered in favor of white farmers. And the distinction made between programs paid for by beneficiaries (such as social security) and those based on need (such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children) stigmatized the poor. Most blacks found themselves living an ever more tenuous, socially isolated existence. Franklin brings her comprehensive, nuanced study right up to the present, showing the impact on the urban poor of changes in the economy and society, from the dramatically shrinking pool of good jobs to the rise of the new right. "The increasing reliance on welfare by young black mothers," she writes, "corresponded to the erosion of opportunities for young black males." More important, she offers new approaches to solving the crisis. Not only does she recommend federal intervention to create new economic opportunity in urban ghettos, but she also stresses the importance of black self-help and proposes a plan of action. In addition, she outlines social interventions that can stabilize and strengthen poor, mother-only families living in ghetto neighborhoods. Exhaustively researched and insightfully written, Ensuring Inequality makes an important contribution to the central debate in American politics today.

Download or read book Research on the African American Family written by Robert B. Hill and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1993-03-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black families in America face special and grave problems. Widespread unemployment, single parent circumstances, adolescent pregnancies, substance abuse, and violence are only some of the problems posing challenges. The authors, convinced that the conventional perspective used in the past to analyze black families is deficient, propose a holistic approach. That perspective takes into account the totality of black family life rather than measuring isolated factors. Using black families as the central unit of analysis, the authors identify fundamental issues requiring concentrated attention and policy changes. Both factors external to the black family and consideration internal to it are studied. The former include economic factors---racism, demographics, and governmental policies. The latter involve such aspects as black family structure, changes in the community, and widespread changes in values at the individual level. The authors provide practical recommendations for improving the conditions of black families through policy changes and revised priorities.

Download or read book Contemporary African American Families written by Dorothy Smith-Ruiz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades the black community has been perceived, both in the United States and around the world, as one which thinks alike, acts alike and lives alike - in poor and downtrodden environments. Following the persistent effects of the great recession and the American elections of 2008, now more than ever the political and socio-economic state of America is crying out for this deficient and prejudiced conception to be dispelled. Focusing primarily on black families in America, Contemporary African American Families updates empirical research by addressing various aspects including family formation, schooling, health and parenting. Exploring a wide class spectrum among African American families, this text also modernizes and subverts much of the research resulting from Moynihan’s 1965 report, which arguably misunderstood the lived experiences of black people during the movement from slavery to freedom in a Jim Crow society. A timely subversion of the myth that America is successfully in a post-racial era, this new anthology on the Black Family in America will appeal to advanced undergraduate students and research scholars interested in black studies, Africana studies, women and gender studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, criminal justice, education, psychology, public policy, healthy policy and social work.

Download or read book The Strengths of Black Families written by Robert Bernard Hill and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2003 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hill, a Black social scientist and research director of the National Urban League, discloses the weaknesses of previous biased studies on the Black family and looks at five traits which characterize thriving Black families: strong kinship bonds, strong work orientation, adaptability of family roles, strong achievement orientation, and strong religious orientation. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Download or read book African American Families Today written by Angela Hattery and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From teen pregnancy to athletics, myths about African American families abound. This provocative book debunks many common myths about black families in America, sharing stories and drawing on the latest research to show the realities. As the book shows, racial inequality persists--we're clearly not in a "postracial" society.

Download or read book Black Families written by Harold E. Cheatham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The condition and characteristics of the black family have been subjects of intense debate since at least the 1960s, when the Moynihan Report and the culture of poverty theses held sway. Since then a consistent theme has been that black families are pathological. Despite the fact that research has been inconclusive and contradictory, political debate and policy have been strongly influenced by the pathology theme. This volume presents alternative approaches toward understanding the special characteristics of black families. Extending a special issue of The Review of Black Political Economy, the book focuses on the economic circumstances and decision making of these families, employing Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. It examines the general responses of black families to various external factors such as economic systems, and to Internal factors such as interpersonal relationships. This compendium of current thinking and research will be of interest to professionals in a number of fields, Including family studies, counseling, social work, psychology, and sociology. It will be of practical use in training programs for service delivery systems Interested In Incorporating multicultural perspectives, as well as those specifically interested in black families today.