Robert Staples

The Black family : essays and studies

Edited by Robert Staples, a leading scholar on Black family Life, this comprehensive anthology of 36 readings provides readers with a combination of empirical research and scholarly essays that are both accessible to undergraduates and accurately reflect all the diverse trends in the Afro-American family life.

Changes in Black Family Structure: The Conflict Between Family Ideology and Structural Conditions

The family ideology of black Americans is compared with actualfamily arrangements and lifestyles. Dissonance between the two is explained by the intervention of structural conditions that prevent the fulfillment of normative familial roles by black males. Exchange theory is used to explain the conflict between family ideology and structural conditions: in general, black women fail to marry or remain married when the costs outweigh the benefits

Racial and Cultural Variations among American Families: A Decennial Review of the Literature on Minority Families.

This article is a review and assessment of the past decades literature on AsianAmerican, black, Chicano, and Native American families. The authors report that, prior to 1970, minority families were subject to negative stereotypes which were not empirically supported. In the case of blacks and Chicanos, the family literature of the 1970s represented an improvement because it depicted the positive aspects of their family life. Theory and research on Asian and Native American families remained too limited to make any generalizations about their family lifestyles. The insider-outsider perspective continued to be a source of controversy in the study of minority families.

The Myth of the Black Matriarchy

(1981). The Myth of the Black Matriarchy. The Black Scholar: Vol. 12, The Best of the Black Scholar: The Black Woman, pp. 26-34.

The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists

that black women were already liberated, that white women were as racist as white men and the middle class issues on which the movement focused were irrelevant to the largely working class black population. Moreover, the black male had been spared as a target of feminists. After all, he was certainly in no position to be sexist, whether he wanted to be or not. White feminists generally left him alone in their assault on men. Many were careful to refer to white male domination as

White Power, Black Crime, and Racial Politics

(2011). White Power, Black Crime, and Racial Politics. The Black Scholar: Vol. 41, Special Anniversary Conference Issue: A Celebration of the First Forty Years November 19–20, 2009 Lipman Room, Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley, pp. 31-41.

The Political Economy of Black Family Life

discussion of the changes that have occurred in the black family over the last 35 years commonly assumes that black family problems are a function of the decline of familial values and the triumph of hedonism over the discipline and perseverance necessary for marital stability. In some quarters the old canard is that slavery and its concomitants destroyed the value of family life for many Afro-Americans. But any objective analysis of marital and family patterns in the United States would reveal a weakening of the patriarchal, monogamous and nuclear family for all racial groups during the past third of a century. One remarkable and understated fact is that the statistics used as an indicator of

The Matricentric Family System: A Cross-Cultural Examination.

This paper reports on the matricentric family system as it appears in three different societies: the Caribbean, the Nayar of India and Afro-American families in the United States. The authors purpose is to show the variations in female-centered families by studying their nature and functions among different groups in diverse parts of the world. A suggestion for more conceptual clarity of the matricentric family concept is posed in order to provide more theoretical consistency in its further analysis.

Social Inequality and Black Sexual Pathology: The Essential Relationship

SUMMARYSexuality, in a historical and biological sense, was the tool by which Homosapiens reproduced their species. There is evidence that in its original form, there were few regulations or controls of this powerful drive when property was held in common by human tribes. Only as the concept of private property developed did sexuality become a part of property relationships in Western society. The female body was objectified and bartered as a commodity among men of the bourgeoisie. However, black women in the United States, always fell under a special set of rules. As true of black males, they were used primarily for their labor value. Because the could not legally enter into a legally-recognized contractual marriage except in rare instances, sexuality was not a commodity to exchange for the frequently given- and taken- by the physically superior males in her environment. Where possible, during slavery and immediately afterwards, she tried to stay in monogamous relationships. However; the social and legal...

Race and Colonialism: The Domestic Case in Theory and Practice

the post-slavery years various theoretical perspectives have competed as an explanation of the status of Afro-Americans in the United States. Until the last ten years those theories were all in the range of biological determinism to racial equality through assimilation. While Pan -African is m took hold as a social movement during certain early periods, it never fitted into the mainstream of scholarly thought about the condition or fate of AfroAmerican s until recent