How Have Black Families Been Misrepresented In The Research?

Marisa Ruiz October 10, 2008 Sociology 251 Question 9: How have Black. Families been misrepresented in the research? What-are some common experiences of Black families in this country? In recent years, social scientists have become increasingly interested in studying African Americans. Based on their own perceptions and using the White American family ideology, researchers have presented biased studies that emphasize a stereotypical image of the low income impoverished African Americans habitually prevalent in geographically specific areas of the country. The lack of using a theoretical approach to study African American families has had a great deal of repercussions inflicted on them as individuals, as families, as well as their population as a whole. This negative representation is largely evident in how they are portrayed by the media. This negative and inaccurate impression has prompted Ronald Taylor, an African American from the south, to further investigate the previous research leading to the deficient information and further dispel these myths. He states that as he”… became more familiar with the growing body of research on African American families. It became increasingly clearer that a source of a major distortion in the portrayal of African American families in Social Science literature and the media was the overwhelming concentration on impoverished inner city communities of the northeast and Midwest to the near exclusion of the south where more than half the African American families are found and differences among them in family patterns, lifestyles, and socioeconomic characteristics are more apparent” (Skolnick 399). In his article, “Diversity within African American Families,” Taylor ascertains some of the problems posed in

previous research and offers his particular findings from a holistic approach that represents modern African American families in its entirety. In his inquest, he found many discrepancies in or lack of the theoretical approaches that are implemented in sociological family studies. Much of the previous studies did not characterize African American families in their own context distinct from other ethnic groups; instead they were evaluated against the White American family model. He concluded that, “Using White American family structure as the norm, the earliest studies characterized African American families as impoverished versions of white families in which the experiences of slavery, economic deprivation, and racial discrimination had induced pathogenic and dysfunctional features” (Skolnick 400.) Aside from the predisposition to idealize White American families as the poster child from which all other families are compared to, there other obvious problems in this extremely inadequate approach. For example, there are obvious ethnic and cultural differences between African Americans and White Americans. Historically, each group came from different parts of the world (voluntarily or involuntary) in which they brought their own distinct culture, beliefs, and experiences. If we apply the cultural approach, account for each population’s distinct characteristics, historical experiences, social-economics, and their own individuality (for starters) and apply the sociological imagination to the research, the findings would clearly indicate widely divergent differences. Additionally, using the “cultural variant” perspective when further examining these differences between racial family units, the diverse forms including their differences are considered as legitimate functional forms (Skolnick 402.) Another problem that has become apparent in is the scholarly assumption that the consequence of slavery has detrimental and demoralizing effects on African American families. This presumption gives means for researchers to impress upon the deterioration of these family units (in comparison to the norm) and the prevalence of matriarchal families in the African-

American community. This assumption was met with substantiate differences in the recent research. Taylor reports that the results of these studies “provide compelling documentation of the centrality of family and kinship among African Americans during the long years of bondage and how African Americans created and sustained a rich cultural and family life despite the brutal reality of slavery” (Skolnick 403). The interpersonal relationships between slaves were in constant states of disruption. Essential to their survival under these deplorable conditions, slaves established close knit groups that collectively formed diverse social and family arrangements that included various compositions of nuclear, extended, and augmented households. In the recent past, prejudicial sociological studies from assuming “authorities” and the inaccurate scientific literature it presented have unfairly depicted African Americans as an impoverished population of unorganized dysfunctional social units suffering from the residual effects of historical adversary. Across the country, the media glamorizes this ghetto life and urban living prevalent with images of African American youth. As a result, African Americans are unfortunately faced with some stereotypical images that have negative connotations. In changing the way research is conducted and study African Americans in their own context, in which their own distinct culture, beliefs, and experiences are examined from a cultural approach, researchers could offer a much more accurate account of their population as a whole.