There is renewed hope for the black family with the news of several high-profile celebrity marriages last month.
Here’s why: There is no question whatsoever that pop stars inspire pop culture trends, sometimes even tragically, as evidenced by how Michael Jackson inspired the messy, greasy jheri curl and how Tupac and other hip hop heads inspired the hideous sagging pants [that are still being exhibited to this day, almost 20 years later]. And we could go on for hours outlining their ability to influence the masses.
With that in mind, we hold out hope that the marriages of beloved stars T.I. and Tiny, Alcia Keys and Swizz Beatz and Martin Lawrence and Shamika Gibbs inspire the re-establishment of the collective black family.
The country was a helpless witness to the explosion of black single parenthood in the post civil rights era. The number of single-mother families, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, increased from three million in 1970 to 10 million in 2003, while the number of single-father families grew from less than 500,000 to 2 million. Of the 10 million single mothers, over 3.1 million are black single mothers, far out of proportion to black women’s relatively small U.S. population percentage.
Twenty percent of black single mothers in the study had been divorced, but 62 percent had never been married, suggesting that black single mothers — more than any ethnic group — were most likely to have never been married.
The numbers have all kinds of implications and ramifications, and none of them are good. We became a lost culture in the post civil rights years. Without the immediate and extended family (meaning authority figures on the block, in churches and respected adults in schools) we definitely abandoned intellectualism and the pursuit of excellence for the pursuit of instant gratification, glorification, gangsterism and morbid self-absorption. We treated educational excellence like it was poison. The concepts of the black family, parental responsibility and being a productive member of society circled the commode and were completely flushed out of our culture with impunity.
But with the seeming renewed interest in marriage, we believe the black family can be re-established, that strong parental guidance can be implemented, and that our children can once again be propelled toward the horizon because both of their parents were there to provide the launching pad. –terry shropshire
