ABSTRACT
Marriages, and Families How one understands African American relationships, marriages, and families depends upon the lens or framework through which they are studied. By far the two primary approaches that have been used are the deficit approach and the adaptable approach. Those using a deficit approach compare African American marriages and families to the nuclear model of the United States and find them to be deviant, and, in some cases “pathological.” A precursor to the deficit framework is E. Franklin Frazier’s (1966) The Negro Family in the U.S. Although this significant work documented the tremendous negative impact of slavery, emancipation, and urbanization on African American marriages and families, two major shortcomings of this work were Frazier’s argument that slavery had virtually wiped out any memory of an African past, and his matriarchal family thesis. Further was his argument that slavery was primarily responsible for shaping African American marriage and family life. Others (Stampp, 1956; Elkins, 1968) also argued that the African American family had been shaped primarily by the forces of slavery. The most notable of studies is Patrick Moynihan’s (1965) controversial work, The Negro Family in the U.S.: The Case for National Action. In this study Moynihan uses Frazier’s work to frame his, but shifted his argument to the “tangle of pathology” where he argued that under the matriarchal family structure, strong women dominate men, causing them to desert their families, subsequently leaving children without fathers. This along with historical factors of slavery, reconstruction, urbanization, the high unemployment rate of African American males, the wage structure, and the higher fertility rate of African Americans, according to Moynihan, results in disorganized families and disintegrating communities.
