ABSTRACT
A. Billingsley suggests that American social science is more American than social and more social than science. That observation hearkens to the enduring notion that clear and substantial discrepancies exist in knowledge about black families. A preponderance of evidence argues that conceptual and contextual errors accompany the chronicles that describe non-white, non-Western phenomena. A similar conceptualization of the deficiencies that inhere in Western-oriented theory and research has been advanced by N. E. Awa. The framework necessary to instate black families as the critically important developmental units that they are has only begun. The enshrining observations together argue that black families are unlikely to be understood and appreciated as black families unless and until research paradigms account for blacks' cultural specificity. Rather, what exists in the literature regarding black families is stereotype and evolution of stereotype through successive theoretical formulations from pathological to culturally deficient to culturally different.
