Considering African American and American Culture

In your Intro to African American Studies text, the authors summarize a number of sociological theories relating to black family life. In your blogs, identify and summarize these theories, and consider how all of them can be described by the concept of institutional decimation (120). That is, show me how the language used to characterize black families as deficient and dysfunctional itself shapes the way we think about what a family is. Why is it that our definition of family as only including a nuclear household--a heterosexual couple who have children and all live under one roof, without any other blood relations, no grandparents or other extended family, no defined role for neighbors or others not related by blood who may also have a role in child-rearing--is so narrow, and so potentially damaging, not just in terms of racial hierarchies, but also sexual and class hierarchies? What are some of the social, economic and political conditions in contemporary society as described in your textbook that illustrate how the structures created to support the nuclear family model for whites work against that same model being realized and maintained for blacks?