Families

1. Families

2. Do Families Play an Important Role in Explaining Racial Inequality? • Positive Effects of Families • Colin Powell • Oprah Winfrey • Adverse Effects of Families • Yvette (Anderson: Code of the Street) • Vietnamese refugee (Zhou and Bankston: Growing Up American)

3. A Central Concern: Single Parent Families • Are single parent families more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority groups? • Why? • What are some of the differences in life chances associated with growing up in a single parent family?

4. Table 1: Percentage of children aged 0-17, by family living arrangements: 1990. Arrangements Group Total White Black Latino Asian American Indian Both Parents 72% 81 37 64 84 56 Father 4 3 6 6 3 7 Mother 20 13 49 24 9 30 Relatives 2 1 6 3 2 4 Other 2 2 3 3 2 3 Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 Source: Hogan and Lichter, 1996, Table 3.2, p. 105.

5. Table 2: Percentage of children aged 0-17 below the poverty line, by family living arrangements: 1989. Arrangements Percentage Poor Total White Black Latino Asian American Indian Overall 18 11 39 31 17 39 Both Parents 9 6 15 22 14 25 Father 23 15 34 33 20 49 Mother 46 34 57 55 39 60 Relatives 34 21 47 36 35 46 Source: Hogan and Lichter, 1996, Table 3.3, p. 107.

6. What is a family? • Nuclear Family • Blended Family • Extended Family • Non-relatives? Moore: giveaways; Duneier: life on the street

7. The Debate Over Single-Parent Families • Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1967) • Continuing racism • Three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment • “The Negro family in the urban ghetto is crumbling.”

8. Alternative Views: Carol Stack, All My Kin • Support networks outside the nuclear family • Low income, not absence of father figure, seen as real problem • Robin Jarrett: 1)low-income families can be stable; 2)important to examine the functioning of families, not just their demographic type

9. Evidence • Family Structure as a risk factor • Single parent families have become more prevalent: changes in sexual behavior, separation of childbearing and marriage; divorce • Racial and ethnic differences in family structure • Parental education, family size, neighborhoods also play a role

10. Problems • Low Incomes of Single-Mother Families • Absentee Fathers and Child Support • Teen Pregnancy • Out-of-wedlock childbearing

11. Possible Solutions • Strengthen Social Programs • Fatherhood Initiatives • Sex Education and Improved Contraceptive Use

12. Changing Numbers, Changing Needs American Indian Families and Children in the 21st Century

13. Themes • In many respects, American Indian families are following the same trends as non-Indian families. • In most respects, American Indian families are “worse off” than others. • We find considerable variation across groups and reservations. • We must do more to help families and children.

14. Some illustrations, 1990 USA Indian Reser Okla % child/2 par 70.2 54.4 48.8 65.5 % wom NM 23.4 29.7 37.1 21.7 % wom Div 9.5 12.8 9.5 12.4 % poor 13.1 31 50.7 29.8 % unemp 6.3 14.4 25.6 12.4

15. Variations Across Reservations • Pine Ridge: 35.2% of children lived with two parents and 43.5% of women aged 15+ had never married. • Navajo: 57.2% of children lived with two parents. • Zuni: 31.3% of women aged 15+ had never married

16. Enduring Ways of the Lac du Flambeau • Ojibwa or Chippewa: follows them through a year • Roles of nuclear and extended families • Cultural preservation

17. Duneier, Sidewalk • General Reactions to the book • What made 6th Avenue a sustaining habitat? • Was Local Law 33 a good idea or a bad idea?

18. Wacquant, AJS (May 2002) • Duneier replaces negative stereotypes of street vendors, panhandlers, and scavengers with inverted cardboard cutouts. • Parochial, solely American view of urban poor • close to his subjects with insufficient attention to larger sociological theoretical issues • Mad scramble for accessible books on sexy topics

19. Duneier’s response • Wacquant chooses to ignore the balanced portrayal of the good and bad behaviors of Sidewalk’s characters • Ethnographers have tough choices to make in deciding how to present their findings and results. • A major thrust of Duneier’s work has been to reveal the common elements of humanity.