By William Raspberry*
August 1999 – I can summarize in two sentences my prescription for combating the social problems that occupy so much of our time and attention these days: Restore the family. Renew the community.
So much of what has gone wrong in America – homelessness, hopelessness, school failure, teen pregnancy – can be traced to the disintegration of the family structure and the loss of that affiliation we call community.
Everybody knows it, but too many of us have been reluctant to talk straight about it. We know that children need intact families that include fathers, but we fear to say it lest we appear to be blaming hard-pressed single mothers for the very problems they are struggling to overcome.
We know that families thrive best in cohesive functioning communities. Just listen to us as we get all dewy-eyed talking about how communities used to be. But we hesitate to make restoration of community a central part of our social policy – partly because we think it’s not possible and partly for fear that someone will accuse us of blaming the residents of dysfunctional communities for their own problems.
But my purpose is not to assign blame but to encourage analysis that can lead the way to solutions.
American families are in trouble, and the social problems that concern us tend to be worst where families are in the worst shape. And yet we are not likely to undertake policies that might restore family integrity so long as we persist in talking about the explosion of female-headed households as a mere change in lifestyle.
Nathan and Julia Hare put it this way in their book, The Endangered Black Family:
“There is nothing wrong with being a black female single-parent, and one rightfully makes the most of any situation in which she finds herself. But there is something wrong with why a black woman is so much more likely to experience the single-parent situation.
“Also, there is something wrong with glorifying this problem instead of rising up to change it. People will speak here of options,’ but forced or unintended options must be called by some other name.”
That’s from a pair of radical black social scientists. Now hear this from white ethologist Phon Hudkins:
“The family is the only social institution that is present in every single village, tribe or nation we know through history. It has a genetic base and is the rearing device for our species.”
Or the conservative Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the Religion & Society Report:
“Millions of children do not know, and will never know, what it means to have a father. More poignantly, they do not know anyone who has a father, or is a father…It takes little imagination to begin to understand the intergenerational consequences of this situation. It is reasonable to ask whether, in all of human history, we have an instance of a large population in which the institution of the family simply disappeared. It is reasonable and ominous, for the answer is almost certainly no. There is no historical precedent supporting the hope that the family, once it has disappeared, can be reconstituted.”
It strikes me as it strikes these writers – as it struck Daniel Patrick Moynihan a quarter century ago – that children unlucky enough to be born into fatherless households may not be doomed, but they tend to be at serious disadvantage.
A lot of our talk about family these days is driven by economic considerations. The biggest single category of poor Americans is the children of single mothers. Black families headed by husband and wife have, on average, three times the income of households headed by single white women.
But I think it goes beyond the matter of having a second income to enhance the family budget or a second person to help with rearing the children. Our big danger is not that some families will be headed by single women. We’ve always had families headed by single women – whether divorced, widowed or never married. What is new is the loss of the sense that marriage is important. And when marriage stops being important, young men stop being as valuable as they might be, and then they become positively dangerous.
Neither our communities nor our women will be as well off as they need to be until we learn how to solve the problems of our men. Some people who don’t understand what I’m talking about will think I am exalting men over women in some forlorn attempt to return to the old days when women knew their place and kept it.
What I am trying to say is something quite different. Let me tell you what my secret agenda truly is. It is simply to return children to the center of things. While we are working out the roles for men and women in our society, and while individual men and women are working out their own private and intimate relationships, we need to keep clear that this whole marriage/bonding enterprise is not primarily about the gratification of men and women but about maximizing the life chances of children.
Thus when I talk about my prescription – restoring families and renewing communities – it is the children I have in mind.
Time was, when we spoke of children in trouble, we meant primarily inner-city black and brown children: the drop-outs, the dope dealers, the gang bangers, the social menaces. Now the phrase “children in trouble” evokes not the ghettos and barrios but places like Paducah and Pearl and Jonesboro and Springfield.
You will note a few things about the violence those place names evoke. They all involve white people, which is to say they remind us that it is not minorities but Americans who are in trouble.
They all involve children, though their victims are boys and girls, men and women – a reminder that when our children are in trouble, we’re all in trouble. And the shooters are all boys, which should remind us of what we already know: our children are in trouble, but our boys are in the most trouble of all.
And I think they are in trouble because they are losing their sense of a valued place in our society. As with the problems Moynihan pointed out 30 years ago, the symptoms of placelessness first manifest themselves in the most vulnerable populations, but they soon spread through all populations.
It makes sense to me, therefore, to do what we can to reclaim our boys and men and return them to their socially useful roles – as husbands, as fathers, as protectors of families and defenders of communities
When I was a boy growing up in rural Mississippi, I considered myself a pretty smart fellow. Then came the time when I decided I must be brilliant. That was the day I thought I had caught God Himself in a mistake. You see, we had been fooling around with some wild bees, and we made the discovery that when a bee stings you, it dies.
And I thought: What sort of defense mechanism is that? This surely has to be some sort of design error, to give an animal a defense system that he can employ only at the cost of his life. When I went to tell my father about my discovery, that wise and patient man explained to me that a bee doesn’t sting you to protect itself; a bee stings you to protect the hive.
For bees, the hive is the thing, and the baby bees are the focus of the hive. That is the way bees perpetuate themselves.
That’s the way it used to be in our neighborhoods, where children used to be our number one priority. That's the way we need to make it again.
How? By renewing our communities and strengthening our families. 
* William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, is syndicated by Washington Post.
