Has Marriage Gone Out of Style among African Americans - Research Paper Example

Has Marriage Gone Out Of Style Among African Americans? Marriage seems to have become less appealing to Americans, especially those of African American origin. Studies show that there is an increasing rate in divorce among African Americans. This has been countered with corresponding lower rate of Blacks willing to get married. Marriage also seems to be headed for extinction among African Americans, with an alarming 70 per cent of children born today living in single parent families (Roy).According to Raley and Bumpass, in their study, “The Topography Divorce Plateau,” the high rates of divorce among African Americans can provide important information on the decrease in the number of these people who are willing to get married, and also the rising rate of single parents within the African American community. Raley and Bumpass cite age, education level and income as major factors that contribute to the loss of interest to marriage, irrespective of the people’s race. Therefore, my paper seeks to explore the various factors that have contributed to the decrease in the number of marital unions within the African American community. It also purposes to show how this situation can be reversed to save the African American population from extinction. According to M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, African Americans now take more time before getting married as compared to other races. They show that in the past, approximately over 90 per cent of black women were getting married. However, this proportion has reduced drastically, with over 30 per cent of them opting to remain single today. Moreover, the divorce rate has increased to almost double that of the whole American population. This has left much of the family care in the hands of the women, thereby exposing the population to poverty and violence, which eventually lead to unstable ties within the community. Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan have attributed the fall in marital commitments to the corresponding decline in the number of men who are ready and willing to marry. These men have failed to marry due to the increased rate of unemployment, a factor which has made black men less desirable as marriage partners since they are unable to take good care of their families. According to Roy, unstable job puts a lot of pressure on a man who wants to take good care of his family while at the same time seeking for alternative sources of income. This has in turn made the low-income men undesirable to fellow low-income women who consider them as not fit for lifetime union. These women peg successful family to financial stability of the man and the man’s ability to overcome work pressure. Faced with slim chances for getting well-paying jobs that can help them sustain their families, African American men tend to give their back to marital ties and consequent responsibilities of child-rearing. They therefore avoid marriage as a whole (Roy). The decline in marital commitments among African Americans has also been attributed to lack of male role models to the young men in this society. Many of these families are made up of single mothers, with fathers who are always absent. Most of the single mothers, unable to take care of themselves and their children, resort to living with relatives, who in most cases are always female too, may be their mothers, aunts or sisters. The lack of a father figure in these families has given rise to young men who do not have skills on how to relate to women and even children. Therefore, they reach marriageable age with little or even no skills for becoming good fathers and husbands. They may also see no sense in becoming husbands, since themselves they grew up in families without fathers (Fiske). Most inner city communities comprise of African Americans. Life in the inner city is characterized by extreme poverty and suffering. The abject poverty in turn puts a lot of indignity upon the men due to their lack of access to educational and employment opportunities. These put a lot of pressure on the men to an extent that they can only think of how to survive and not getting married (Fiske 2003). In addition, the poor African Americans have fallen victims to low self-esteem due to the existing economic inequalities within the American society as a whole. To live at par with the rest of the population, the poor African Americans look for dangerous, and always undesirable, sources of income like crime. Criminal activities carry with them serious punishments, for instance, incarceration, life imprisonment and even death sentence in some states in America. For those who receive death sentence or life imprisonment, their hopes of marrying die. However, in case of incarceration, upon their release, men find it hard to marry due to lack of employment and stigmatization from the general public (Coontz). Another inhibitor to marriage among African Americans is what Fiske calls structural violence. The American societal structures is made in such a form that the poor do not get access to education and employment. The uneducated men find it almost impossible to hook up with employed women, and worse still with low-income women who are always looking for financially stable men. This renders most of the African American men undesirable marriage partners and even unmarriageable. Moreover, the decline in marital unions has also been attributed to gender imbalance within the African American community. During graduations after college, for instance, it is alarming to realize that for one male graduate there are two corresponding female ones. However, there is a strong belief within this society that in order to strengthen the black families, black women have to get married to black men. This disregards the partners’ education levels and rate of income. Therefore, the black women who strictly follow this find themselves in relationships where partners have no mutual interests, making the marriage to head for trouble from the first day. Moreover, those who cannot cope with the situation forget about marriage all together (Roy). Still on the gender issue, looking at the ages of 25-29, studies have shown that the male-female sex ratio difference is very high within the African American community. The women within this age bracket seem to be way more than the male counterparts. This puts marriage for more than a third of the female population literally impossible, especially if the women are seeking partners from the same race and age bracket. The incarceration discussed above has been cited as the major contributor to the disparity within the male-female ratio (Lane, et al. 405). According to Raley and Bumpass (245), the African American community has of late made so many attempts to fully fit into the mainstream American population. They have become so materialistic that they now put so much emphasis on wealth creation and acquisition. It is their behavior to chase money that has seen them look down on the institution of the family and the values attached to it. Therefore, most of African Americans no longer view marriage as that important, and resort to a divorce at slightest provocation. For those who are not married yet, marriage makes no sense any more (Raley and Bumpass 248). Decline in spirituality among African Americans is another factor that has promoted the fall of the marriage institution. The fall in spirituality has seen less people participating in the church. Unlike in the past, people no longer stigmatize unmarried women within this society, even if they are pregnant. Having children outside marriage is no longer viewed as an abomination. It is sad to realize that most black women only have children because of their motherly instinct, but will not even think of living with the child’s father as wife and husband. They see being married as a burden. In addition, black women have been blamed for the situation. The harshness the black woman faces in the modern world puts her off whenever she thinks of marriage (Raley and Bumpass 252). Today marriages within the African American community do not die because of physical fights between spouses but because of the reversed marital responsibilities and roles. Most women also earn more than their husbands and have better jobs. This affects the natural order of things in this patriarchal society. However, men in such families can no longer control their households as family heads because they have ceased to be sole bread winners. It is this pressure that puts off most men. They may not run away from their responsibilities, but will always feel very insecure in a female headed household. Their insecurity is what makes their marriages vulnerable to collapse any time (Lane, et al. 407). Another factor is the nature of the African American culture in itself. African Americans put a lot of importance on extended family relations. This presents a situation whereby grandparents, cousins, aunts and other relatives tend to be valued more than a wife or a husband. Therefore, there is little commitment for one to get married when they already have the important ties they need in their extended family members. There are also higher death rates within this population, a situation compounded by poor health care, diseases, and a culture of violent crime. These factors have worsened the situation of lack of marital commitment (Roy). How this situation may be reversed Belinda and Mitchell-Kernan have proposed that there should be policies aimed at reducing problems which act as barriers for getting married, especially in connection to the dynamism in the marital behavior. The policies should concentrate around support for single parents as well as public education and creation of employment opportunities for the African American men. However, according to Lane et al. (417), the policies already in place to encourage marriage within the African American population are inadequately biased. The social policy has embarked on a desperate attempt to discourage single-parenthood. It has stipulated a policy that encourages marriage as a way of reducing poverty levels. Nevertheless, this policy has failed to look into the factors that discourage marriage within this population. It only emphasizes the monogamous male-female relationship as the ideal relationship, while at the same time discriminating against single mothers and men who are not married (Lane, et al., 426). The cultural context of the African American community also needs to be understood well so as to see ways in which the various difficulties that face this population can be reduced. The issue of drugs abuse, unemployment and poverty need to be fully addressed so as to reduce the rate of decline in marital commitment. Furthermore, marriage and relationship education programs should be put into place, and be framed in such a way that they can adequately meet the unique needs of the African American population. In addition, the programs should be relevant to the poor families. The programs may not solve their psychosocial problems but may make positive impacts in their lives all the same. And for those couples with an interest in getting married, they should be assisted in navigating through the tides until they achieve their super objective, that is, a healthy marriage (Ooms and Wilson 440). Another step toward reversing this situation is the adoption of more research on the dynamics of the barriers to marital union. Moreover, the research should also touch on the circumstances under which these barriers impede success in marriage, especially for the African American men. Doing this will help the men understand, better, their roles and responsibilities as husbands and fathers. The research should also address other important factors like how to make the social policy more productive for the African American population (Ooms and Wilson 443). Even in the attempt to reach out to low-income men, who make the better part of the African American population, trouble comes up since there is fear that they may not take the education programs on marriage and relationship seriously. This population may be tricky to approach since the men are mostly engaged in activities that sustain their day-to-day survival. Therefore, they may view these programs as useless, since they cannot concentrate on programs aimed at making them better fathers and husbands yet they have other important things to do (Ooms and Wilson 446). Marriage is indeed a dying institution among the African Americans. This is mostly contributed to by the shortage of men who are ready for marriage due to the various socio-economic reasons that discourage them from getting into marriage unions. The most discouraging fact about this is that as marriage between men and women decline among the African Americans, divorce is taking a deep root in the same society. Without proper policies to combat this trend, there lies a danger of more disintegration of this institution. Those who marry among the African Americans face a high risk of divorce. Nothing can explain this worrying trend better than the serious barriers like high levels of poverty, high rates of unemployment, and a pool of deferred dreams within the African American population. Therefore, to change this trend, these factors need to be addressed first before looking into other factors. Works Cited Raley, Kelly R., and Larry Bumpass L. The Topography Divorce Plateau. Web. 7 Dec. 2011. Coontz, S. and Folbre, N. Marriage, Poverty and Public Policy: a discussion paper from the council on contemporary families. Presented at the Fifth Annual CCF Conference. April 26-28, 2002.Web. 7 Dec. 2011. Fiske, H. Saving Our Boys. Recovering Our Men. Social Work Today. February, 2003. Lane et al., Marriage Promotion and missing men: African American Women in a demographic double bind. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Volume 18, Issue no 4, 2004. Roy, K. Transitions on the margins of work and family life for low-income African American fathers. Journal of Family and Economic issues, Volume 26 (1), Spring, 2005. Ooms, T and Wilson, P. The challenges of offering relationship and marriage education to low-income populations. Family Relations, Volume 53, no 5, 2004. Read More