Transcription
That the Negroamerican has survived at all is extraordinary. A lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. I believe he's referring to the Native Americans here. They had a very different obstacle to overcome than those who got turned into negroes. The natives had diseases that killed them. And a lot of that they got from the colonizers, or at least most of that they got from the colonizers who came over. Now, I wouldn't call them a lesser people, but besides that, Negroes were in fact very tough and were exceptionally good at surviving.
That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people. Yes, sir. But it may not be supposed that the Negroamerican community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries. They for sure paid a huge price. The price was the damage to the family, the damage to the culture, and the damage to the mind, all over three centuries.
In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well. Now, how were they forced into a matriarchy? The seeds were planted in slavery where you had the negro men stripped of their power to protect and lead the family. And then after emancipation, the whites made it extremely difficult for negro men to progress economically. So the self-esteem and the pride for a lot of the men was all the way down. And a lot of women had to step up and take on the masculine, uh, role of leading the household.
There is presumably no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. I don't agree with that, but that's his opinion. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. In this instance, most of America's society had their households led mostly by men. And Negroes, on the other hand, had a much larger percentage of households led by women. And he's saying that this wasn't advantageous for Negroes to go against the grain right here.
This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture such as that of the Negroamerican in which this is not the pattern is placed at a distinct disadvantage. Here an earlier word of caution should be repeated. There is much evidence that a considerable number of negro families have managed to break out of the tangle of pathology and to establish themselves as stable, effective units living according to patterns of American society in general. So there were a considerable number of them that broke free from that cultural practice. They got out of that pit, which is difficult to do because these patterns of life literally take hold of the human vessel, and they're literally fighting to stay alive inside of the human vessel. But some people fought them off and escaped.
E. Franklin Frasier has suggested that the middle class Negro American family is, if anything, more patriarchal and protective of its children than the general run of such families. Given equal opportunities, the children of these families will perform as well or better than their white peers. Uh-oh. They need no help from anyone and ask none. Now, imagine if the entire Negro community was like that back in the day. Then a lot of the problems would not have exploded, and the later generations of blacks/affrican would have been a model group for society. Right? But that's not what the universe had in store. It requireth the full transformation to be completed, or the problems continuous.
While this phenomenon is not easily measured, one index is that middle class negroes have even fewer children than middle class whites, indicating a desire to conserve the advances they have made and to ensure that their children do as well or better. So, it sounds like the middle class Negroes were intentional, which is a very good thing. Negro women who marry early to uneducated laborers have more children than white women in the same situation. Negro women who marry at the common age for the middle class to educated men doing technical or professional work have only four-fifths as many children do their white counterparts. It might be estimated that as much as half of the Negro community falls into the middle class. This estimate was in 1965, and it's roughly the same percentage in 2026 for their black/AfricanAmerican descendants. So he estimates that about half of the Negroes were middle class at that time.
However, the remaining half is in desperate and deteriorating circumstances. The other half was financially in the pit, and in the pit in many other areas as well, especially culturally. Moreover, because of housing segregation, it is immensely difficult for the stable half to escape from the cultural influences of the unstable one. Here we go. Now, why do they need to escape the cultural influences of the other half? I thought they were all supposed to be negroes and sticking together. That sounds good in theory, but not in reality. In reality, when you have groups of people who think and behave in ways that don't align at all with how you want to raise your children, then no matter how close and melanin you are, you still need to escape and get away from them. Because cultural influences are like the common cold. When you keep your kids around them, then those influences are going to find homes inside of those kids. And once they're in there, it's extremely difficult to get them out. And many of the middle class Negroes understood this. But most of them couldn't get out of the environment because of the housing discrimination. So they were stuck.
The children of middle class negroes often as not must grow up in or next to the slums and experience almost unknown to white middle-class children. You see that? That's a major difference. That's one less battle that the parents and the kids had to fight. The white middle class kids only knew a middle class lifestyle, and they grew up to repeat that because those were the cultural patterns that found a home inside of them. So those patterns repeated themselves in the middle class whites, just as the patterns repeated themselves in the negro lower class. Right? You got to understand what's operating underneath the surface. They are therefore constantly exposed to the pathology of the disturbed group and constantly in danger of being drawn into it. That's talking about the negro middle class kids growing up around the lower class Negroes in the slums. They were in constant danger of picking up the ways of the lower class Negroes and being a host for that program.
It is for this reason that the propositions put forth in this study may be thought of as having a more or less general application. In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world. And probably a majority are so entrapped. Here we go. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only. As things now are, their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. It happens all the time. And anyone who comes from this lineage will most likely have firsthand experience of this. I have my uncle out in Los Angeles who grew up in the streets. He was part of the gang life, and then he turned his life around and he climbed out of the financial pit so he can give his sons a better life than what he had. Then one of the sons reverted to barbarism and he started hanging out with the gang members in Compton, and they ended up robbing and shooting someone, and then he went to prison for that. So instead of him taking the opportunity to build on the life that my uncle helped build for him, he has to run the gauntlet all over again. This is how a lot of people from the black community climb up just for the next generation to fall back down.
That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the negro. Obviously, not every instance of social pathology afflicting the Negro community can be traced to the weakness of family structure. If, for example, organized crime in the Negro community were not largely controlled by whites, there would be more capital accumulation among Negroes and therefore probably more Negro business enterprises. I don't know if that's true, but it's just an opinion that he's given. If it were not for the hostility and fear many whites exhibit towards Negroes, they in turn would be less afflicted by hostility and fear, and so on. There is no one negro community. There is no one negro problem. There is no one solution.
Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. He's saying that that's the centerpiece of the issue, the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the apparent, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation. It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people. Although that will has reasserted itself in our time, it is a resurgence doomed to frustration unless the viability of the Negro family is restored.
Again, this was in 1965, and a lot of people thought that what he was saying was a game, and they didn't take it seriously at the time. And we know what happened afterwards. Things became much worse. And there's a reason for all of this, and it should be getting clearer and clearer to those who have been following along for some time. Okay? And so we're going to stop right here, and we're going to pick up with some more information in the next commentary. And so I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael, and I'll see you in the free.