Single Parent Synonymous with Blackness.

In the Third chapter of "The Truly Disadvantaged," by William Julius Wilson he talks about poverty and how it has affected the family structure. He talked about how there was a disproportionate increase in single parent households between white families and black families from 1960 until the end of the 1980's. One of the theories that became popular to try to understand why this was happening was that the increase in government assistance, through programs such as Medicaid and welfare, lead to the increase in female led households, with the rate of black mother led households increasing faster than white mother led households. This popular theory was embraced for a while, but eventually fell out of favor due to the lack of evidence that could support the argument. Instead, there were a few other factors that contributed to the increase in single parent household’s disparity between black families and white families: the rate of “marriageable males,” for white women decreased slightly between 1960 and 1980, whereas that number for black women decreased significantly. One of the key points in the book that I thought was interesting was the fact that black women who run a single parent household are more likely to remain in poverty for a long period of time as opposed to white women who don’t come out of poverty quicker and more often. “Most white women can maintain their families above poverty with a combination of earnings and income from other sources such as alimony, child support, public-income transfers, personal wealth, and assistance from families… in addition, many white single mothers remarry,” (Wilson 77). I found the fact that white women remarry at larger rates than black men to be interesting, coming from a single parent household I was surrounded by that environment but thinking about it from that perspective never occurred to me. You see this portrayed in a lot of films. One of the first films that came to mind when I thought of how common it was for white families to remarry was the film Parent Trap. It’s a film a lot of kids raised in the 90’s grew up with, the film is about a set of twins that got separated at birth by their parents after they decide to get a divorce. The father of the twins gets a new finance and when the twins find out that they were separated at birth, they set a plan in motion to get their parents back together.

 The importance of “marriageable father,” in a family structure as it relates to poverty reminded me of the film the Pursuit of Happyness. In this film, the father is barely making ends meet and is pretty much homeless with his 5 year old son, he banks his entire livelihood on an unpaid competitive internship that would get him a well-paying job should he succeed. The father is sort of with the mother in the movie, but their relationship is clearly strained and she barely takes part in raising her child. There’s a scene in the movie where the father and son sleep inside of a men’s bathroom and when someone tries to come in, the father has to hold the door shut with his foot. To me this represented the epitome of living in poverty. Another thing I found interesting is how single parent households have become socially accepted to the point where it is uncommon to see a black family with both the mother and father actively present. There is a hip hop artist by the name of Childish Gambino who said “This one kid said something that was really bad. He said I wasn't really black because I had a dad. I think that's kind of sad. Mostly cause a lot of black kids think they should agree with that,” in his song Hold You Down, which goes to show that blacks being raised in a single parent household has become so accepted in our society, it has become synonymous with blackness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv_d2RUDMag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Kq8SDyvfg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32WeiH4TrIY