The Ties That Bind: Timeless Values for African American Families
224
The Ties That Bind: Timeless Values for African American Families
224Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780471399582 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 12/12/2000 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 689,743 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.51(w) x 8.52(h) x 0.59(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Frank Talk About Black Values
To succeed in life, people need a clear inner sense of the right thing to do and the right way to be. No one knew this better than traditional African American families. The Ties That Bind represents my rediscovery of their values, standards, and traditions. Their distinctive system of values inspired the best of our past-and now, more important, it offers the truest hope and the surest compass for our children's future. It provides the best answer I know to today's burning question: How can we strengthen our children's souls?
I have spent thirty years as a sociologist thinking about family matters in the context of our rich and opulent black culture and history. For the past twenty or more of those years, I was not always able to distinguish between my scholarly purpose and my practical interest as the mother of a growing son. As a mother, I have shared the deep fears, proud dreams, and intense responsibilities of most parents who have struggled to raise a young person to adulthood in one piece. As a scholar, I have researched the value system that held together the tight-knit black communities that through the ages helped raise Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Mary McLeod Bethune down to Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and countless other moral leaders.
Every black generation, including my own, learned these values in a uniform, crystal-clear fashion. It is therefore up to us to reach back now, celebrate how far we have come, and call out the values again by name so that our children and their children can learn them in a conscientious way.
A PERSONAL TURNING POINT
I set out to write this book because of a conversation I had one afternoon with a group of friends from the 1960s whom I hadn't seen for years. As we sat around Rose's elegant dining-room table eating her gumbo, we realized that we had a lot to catch up on: marriages, careers, divorces, reconciliations, and especially that most challenging and rewarding part of our lives-children.
Rose and her former husband, Waldorf, had raised their seven children-Cynthia, Lavatryce, Adkins, Alyson, William, Carol, and Ellen-on one of St. Louis's private streets in the West End. They had been fortunate enough to have a bountiful extended family that consisted of two sets of grandparents who were deeply involved with their grandkids. Aunt Eileen, an aunt of Waldorf's, lived with them, and provided baby-sitting and the other help that enabled Rose to hold down a full-time job as an elementary-school teacher. They had brought up their children in the Jack and Jill organization with the other members of St. Louis's black middle class.
Ethel and I met in undergraduate school at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where we were sisters in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, she became my roommate for a time when we both studied at Washington University's graduate program in sociology. Ethel stayed on in St. Louis after graduate school, and became the dean of a local college. She married and divorced, and is the proud mother of a young adult son, a student.
Inez had been an educator for her entire career. St. Louis was home for her and her husband, a businessman, so she, too, had the advantage of having a large extended family nearby. She beamed as she talked about her two grown daughters, who had finished college. Of the four of us who sat around Rose's table that day, Inez was the only one who was still married.
I had been divorced for about a decade. I left St. Louis in the late 1960s to launch an academic career. My son, Thomas, has been reared mostly in Washington, D. C., with my sister Dorie and her daughter Yodit, who is a year older than Thomas. Dorie and I made our own extended family with each other and an assortment of close friends and their families.
We all had a lot to be grateful for, and we surely counted our blessings. But as we talked, a rising sense of unease crept into our conversation. Despite our good fortune, each of us was worried, and we knew one another too well not to notice. We were old friends who didn't have to explain ourselves to one another.
Here's what was bothering us. Our children had many virtues, but they also had several traits that none of us remembered anyone in our families having in previous generations. In fact, our parents would never have tolerated these traits in their children:
Selfishness
Slothfulness
Materialism
An inability to cope
A fragility of the soul
Where had these traits come from in just one generation? We could not throw up our hands and blame the "times" or "society," no matter how tempting that was, because we knew that one finger pointed out would mean three fingers pointed right back at us. We were the times. We, too, were society. If we accepted responsibility for our parenting, the answer was painful and all too obvious.
Let's face it. In many cases, those of us who achieved middle-class status and beyond moved to the suburbs-to integrated neighborhoods where we sent our children to schools that we considered to be better than those in our old, segregated communities. We moved away from our familiar institutions, hoping that our children would receive and achieve as much as any other American children did. To some degree, we were successful.
Our children have had all the material comforts: music lessons, soccer, tennis, and basketball camps, vacations, phones in their rooms, cars, and so forth. We believed that as young African Americans their dues had been paid by generations before theirs, including our own. We wanted to spare them our own strict upbringing. In short, we gave them a childhood and an adolescence unfettered by serious responsibilities so that they would have more space and freedom to breathe, to dream, and to make a better life than we felt we ourselves had had.
Unfortunately, many of us did not pause to evaluate the implications. No, our children were not abysmal failures. They were not even finished products yet. They were doing well by society's standards. But something important was missing from their lives.
Without any doubt, we were prospering in ways that our Jim Crow-era parents would never have thought possible. Yet despite all that we'd given to our children, we could now see that the gifts our own parents had given us were of far greater worth: Traditional values. Practical dos and don'ts. The shoulds and oughts and musts, as well as the ought nots and should nots that were inculcated in us as toddlers, children, teens, and even as wholesome adults. Traditional African American values.
What went wrong? Where did we lose our way as parents? There is no easy answer. Some of us were too busy marching to the beat of modernity (and post-modernity). Some of us renounced the tried-and-true for the new-and-improved on the say-so of so-called experts. Others had passed on some of what we were taught, but not enough. In hindsight, it was all too easy to see that we were the first generation of African Americans who had failed to pass our traditional values and standards on to their children with the same uniformity that our parents did when they entrusted the future to us.
How would our children cope without those values? If they could not get their acts together as adults, what, pray tell, would we reap from our grandchildren? Was there time to teach the old ways to our children, all of whom were already young adults? How were other African American parents and children faring? What would be the fate of millions of poor children growing up in the underclass, where these values, once our daily bread, were now barely in evidence?
These questions and many others that I never voiced to my girlfriends set me on a course of self-examination. This book is the result of that odyssey. It is about rediscovering the traditional values most African Americans of my generation learned from their families at a time when our families were more stable. And it is about why we should and how we could put this value system back into its proper place at the epicenter of our lives.
BLACK VALUES EXPLAINED
In every previous generation, African Americans, whether parents or not, consciously tried to engender these qualities in their young:
A sense of identity
Faith in God
Respect for others
Honesty and a sense of responsibility
Self-reliance and respect for hard work
Resourcefulness
Belief in education
Resilience
Courage
Integrity
These values molded the character of a people who fought their way out of slavery and the poverty that followed in the rugged years after emancipation. Our grandmothers and grandfathers, and our mothers and fathers, held them dear, used them daily for their very survival, and determinedly taught them to every child in their sphere of influence.
Those early lessons were supposed to remain with young people in a vital way throughout their lives. For me, they are as strong today as they were in the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up. Without those lessons to draw on, I would have failed many more times than I have. I would not have been able to endure the horrors of segregation and the difficulties I encountered in the civil rights movement, including going to jail. I would not have been able to rise above my working-class background, graduate from high school, and earn a college degree. The values planted by my parents and developed in childhood have seen me through major illnesses and career challenges, and actually gave me more grit and determination to rise above personal difficulties as the years went by.
Four basic principles ran through that value system.
1. The power of self-identity. Few groups in American society have had to struggle as long or as hard as African-Americans for their basic humanity. For no other group has the quest for a positive identity been more complex. Thus lessons in black values frequently teach the importance of developing a strong sense of both group and personal identity in the face of conflicting messages about our worth.
2. The power of the extended family. Throughout slavery, every effort was made by slaveholders to prevent our ancestors from forming and sustaining families. One could call this period of history the subfamily phase, as did the sociologist Andrew Billingsley, when the slave family was forced to go underground in order to exist at all. Resilience, resistance, self-reliance, and resourcefulness became the dominant tools of the struggle to have a stable family life. Because there is strength in numbers, every member added value to the whole.
3. The power of the community to determine its future. Determinedly working together, African American families built communities, churches, and schools. Interdependence was the rule. All of our families wanted the children of the community to succeed, and we wanted our children, when successful, to bear some collective responsibility for those who were less fortunate.
4. The power of the past to influence the present. The collective values of black people find their uniqueness in the far-reaching history of slavery. Black values are ultimately centered on the keys to survival. In our traditional communities, we referred to the wise elderly people who taught or embodied those values as "old heads." It was also a term of endearment given to exceptionally insightful young people.
When I was young, I used to love to hear my grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, and other elderly people in our neighborhood talk about the old days. They also passed on to us the stories their parents had told them. These stories made me feel a special kinship for my great-grandparents and other ancestors whom I never met. The stories told of how our forebears solved some of the toughest problems any human beings have had to face. I was especially fascinated by the gripping tales of how they outfoxed the people who had done them wrong and coped without losing their dignity. I also remember inspirational stories of their many successes: buying their own homes and educating their children on the meager salaries they earned as maids, janitors, factory workers, and field hands.
I now realize that my older relatives weren't just spinning yarns. Embodied in these stories of the old days were lessons about character-building, self-esteem, and, in general, ways for us to survive and prosper and become better people. Thus children learned to fight for what they believed was right, to sacrifice to get what they wanted, and, in doing so, to defer gratification. They also learned the importance of patience, having goals, and sacrifice, as well as how to find practical ways to turn dreams into reality.
We looked up to adults because of what they had done and how they had prevailed, not because of what they had. Their values were functional, workable guidelines that applied to everyday life. These values for living involved the most basic elements of survival: the health and welfare of families and children, the viability of neighborhoods, and the building and preservation of churches, schools, lodges, and social institutions. It was through such day-to-day concerns that their ancestors before them had reinforced their sense of authority and purpose as husbands and wives, as parents, sons and daughters, neighbors and friends. It was by successfully fulfilling these roles that they achieved their good names, honor, self-respect, and the respect of others.
I am describing not only my own memories and kin but the common experience of several generations. Black values cut across economic and geographic divisions. While there are some variations in the traditional values of African-Americans who grew up in urban or rural environments-and in the values of those who grew up in poor, working-class, or middle-class families or some combination thereof-these values are essentially the same.
Our ancestors brought some of these values from their old cultures. Others originated during and in response to the Middle Passage and slavery. Still others developed in response to the twentieth century and were severely tested in a national environment of legally recognized segregation. Taken together, they constitute a living legacy.
Our forefathers and mothers kept no special covenant with virtue, and, without question, many failed to live up to the standards they dictated. But they had a talent for setting standards of moral and ethical conduct. Always cunningly creative, they kept these standards intact and used them as they formed families, raised children, expressed their spiritual natures, and generally navigated even more rugged social, political, and economic terrain than we face today.
Some readers are bound to question the wisdom of my writing this book on black values and not on the American values that, as African Americans, we also share. They will wonder whether the differences warrant such a book. To anyone who would argue that values are the color of water, I say that's a fine point of view, as far as it goes. I do not argue with it; I simply add the truth of my observations and cultural experience. Every ethnic group puts its own flavor into the water. For black people, the flavor is rich and deep.
LOSING OUR WAY
Like most kids, I used to feel that I should have more freedom to make my own rules. Back then, I was annoyed with my parents' "preaching," as I called it behind their backs. "Wait until you get some kids," they would say. "Then you'll appreciate what we're trying to teach you." They were right. As a beneficiary of generations of struggle for survival and advancement, I could not imagine the consequences of materialism, immediate gratification, and lifestyles devoid of self-sacrifice. Our children are paying the price.
Far too many African American children-middle-class, wealthy, and poor alike-do not have a clear set of values to lean on, because we did not give them one. The consequences have been swift and stunning. Many kids do not have a positive sense of their racial or ethnic identity, nor do they know about exemplary, ordinary black heroes and "sheroes" in the past and present. They do not have a sense of belonging to a community of black people that is larger than their immediate families. Our children may have a more comfortable lifestyle than many of us enjoyed when we were young, but they often do not have the strong identity and survival skills they need on the inside, where it really counts.
When middle-class children lack a certain core of values, they experience the kinds of problems my friends and I were discussing over dinner in St. Louis. But when poor children lack those values they are in crisis. They do not have the economic advantages-jobs, incomes, safe homes, and communities that bring stability, if not wisdom-that insulate middle-class children from their confusion or the confusion of others. Most of the black poor are struggling to make ends meet, to abide by the law, and to uphold the values they were taught. But their ability to do so is compromised because their environments are at such high risk, and many are steadily losing ground.
It is easy to become discouraged. Our individual successes notwithstanding, social and economic forces have come together to create an uphill battle for blacks as a group. Since 1960, black families have become so fractured that 48 percent of them are now headed by women. The majority of the children in these families are living in poverty. The infant-mortality rate among blacks continues to increase, as the gap between blacks and whites widens.
The school dropout rate, too, continues to rise. The number of homeless individuals and families, estimated to be as high as 1.2 million, escalates daily. Blacks now make up a disproportionate number of AIDS cases, and have the fastest-growing rate of AIDS of any group in the United States. Teenage pregnancy, though it has slowed, continues to be a problem; many babies have grandparents who are in their mid-twenties. The rates of child abuse and neglect are increasing, especially among drug-addicted mothers and teenage mothers.
Crime and violence have torn many communities apart, undermining stable neighborhoods to such an extent that people now fear for their safety. And drugs have come to symbolize a modern-day plague, both in its seriousness and in its proportions. In Washington, D. C., drug-related violence caused reporters to dub the city "the murder capitol of the nation." I'm talking about young black men in their late teens and early twenties, who were cut down in the prime of their lives, long before they had the opportunity to become husbands, fathers, workers in productive jobs, or socially responsible citizens. More black youths enter prison than enter college each year. A similar pattern has developed among poor, young women, whose prospects are just as bleak. They believe that a bright future with a college degree, a good career, and a good marriage with children is absolutely impossible. They don't value life very much because they don't feel they will live very long.
What can we do? How do we intervene? How do we help these young people to veer off their destructive courses? How do we help to restore a sense of normalcy to our communities so that elderly men and women can walk the streets safely? How do we keep children in school long enough for them to graduate? How do we stop children from having children? The answers to all of these questions require taking this first step: restoring a value system that inspires hope, trust, and a desire to achieve.
Did our failure to endow our children with our value system cause all these problems? Of course not. I do not pretend that restoring a traditional value system alone will solve them. Values, however, are a critical factor. As the old heads used to say, we have to earn our space in this world. Our value system requires us to take responsibility not only for our own successes but for the success of every child among us. Fixing our problems starts with fixing our values.
I have an unshakable faith in our power to heal ourselves. We need to understand that discarding our traditional values is not a precondition for prosperity. To the contrary, living by our values is the precondition. Like every other ethnic American immigrant group, we have to "keep the faith," because we have come so far and aspire to so much. We can participate fully in an integrated society without giving up the essential parts of our culture. We need to teach our children that it is neither necessary nor an option for them-or us-to forsake our heritage of values.
In fact, most of us are already swimming in the mainstream. Our children need to know that. We have failed to communicate this effectively enough. Being black does not mean being poverty-stricken, dejected, or a member of the underclass. It means being culturally distinct because we have unique ties that bind us securely to the past and to the present.
Even though I have explained my intent, some people will be concerned that a book on black values singles African Americans out from the rest of the society and exposes "family secrets" that should be discussed only among ourselves. These same critics will surely ask an important question: Don't these problems and issues also apply to other people?
My answer is yes, they do. As a nation, we are preoccupied with values for a good reason. All of us want to stop the erosion of solid and honorable beliefs and traditions. The lessons in this book can be helpful to anyone who cares about young people. The problems and wisdom of African Americans are certainly not ours alone.
Yet there is a vast difference between what Pat Buchanan means when he says "traditional American values" and what Jesse Jackson means when he says the same thing. In the chapters that follow, I will try to make this distinction clear and lay down a path for our families to travel in order to rediscover and embrace the time-tested values of our heritage.
YOUR JOURNEY NOW
It is impossible to write a book on values that everyone will agree with. Values are personal. They represent our individual choices and the things we hold to be important. Values, by definition, differ across groups, time, and place. For example, I do not expect all African Americans to agree that the particular values I will discuss in the following chapters are the right ones; other values may loom larger in their memories, and that is to be expected.
This is not a book that seeks to define an absolute code of standards. It is a book that asks you to think about a critical set of questions: What should we teach our children? How can we bring back into the fold those who have lost their way? What was the path of our fathers and mothers that brought us this far? How can we adapt their lessons to our times? This is the quest that I invite you to take with me now, in a journey toward under-16 standing how we can help our children develop clear, functional values.
In the next four chapters of Part One, I offer a closer look at the four fundamental principles underlying the black value system. I show how these principles took root and examine what they mean to us today. In Part Two I share lessons in values from my own Mississippi childhood in order to show how one typical black family passed their values on in a traditional African American context. In Part Three I share my feelings and insights regarding the connection between our values and the two most intimate and vulnerable ties in our lives: our relationships and our children. Finally, in Part Four I give you a number of specific ideas for things you can do now to bring the treasure of the African American value system into your family, church, community, and schools.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Dr. Dorothy I. Height. Acknowledgments. KEEPING THE PROMISE. Frank Talk About Black Values. The First Principle: Identity Determines Personal Power. The Second Principle: We Did Not Raise Ourselves Alone. The Third Principle: We Are Making the Future Together. The Fourth Principle: The Past Is Prologue. THE BLACK VALUE SYSTEM—TIMELESS TIES THAT BIND. The First Lesson: Remember Where You Came From. The Second Lesson: Trust in the Lord. The Third Lesson: Respect Is a Two-Way Street. The Fourth Lesson: Don't Make Excuses. The Fifth Lesson: Do an Honest Day's Work. The Sixth Lesson: Make a Way Out of No Way. The Seventh Lesson: Every Child Can Learn. The Eighth Lesson: Keep the Can-Do Spirit. The Ninth Lesson: Stand Tall. The Tenth Lesson: Your Word Is Your Bond. PERSONAL TRANSITIONS—THE POWER OF INTIMATE TIES. Saving Our Relationships. Loving Our Children. PASSING ON THE LEGACY. Timeless Treasures for the Family. Timeless Treasures for the School and the Community. Timeless Treasures for the Church. Timeless Treasures for the State and the Nation. Facing Tomorrow. Selected Bibliography. Resources. Index.Introduction
To succeed in life, people need a clear inner sense of the right thing to do and the right way to be. No one knew this better than traditional African American families. The Ties That Bind represents my rediscovery of their values, standards, and traditions. Their distinctive system of values inspired the best of our past-and now, more important, it offers the truest hope and the surest compass for our children's future. It provides the best answer I know to today's burning question: How can we strengthen our children's souls?
I have spent thirty years as a sociologist thinking about family matters in the context of our rich and opulent black culture and history. For the past twenty or more of those years, I was not always able to distinguish between my scholarly purpose and my practical interest as the mother of a growing son. As a mother, I have shared the deep fears, proud dreams, and intense responsibilities of most parents who have struggled to raise a young person to adulthood in one piece. As a scholar, I have researched the value system that held together the tight-knit black communities that through the ages helped raise Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Mary McLeod Bethune down to Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and countless other moral leaders.
Every black generation, including my own, learned these values in a uniform, crystal-clear fashion. It is therefore up to us to reach back now, celebrate how far we have come, and call out the values again by name so that our children and their children can learn them in a conscientious way.
A PERSONAL TURNING POINT
I set out towrite this book because of a conversation I had one afternoon with a group of friends from the 1960s whom I hadn't seen for years. As we sat around Rose's elegant dining-room table eating her gumbo, we realized that we had a lot to catch up on: marriages, careers, divorces, reconciliations, and especially that most challenging and rewarding part of our lives-children.
Rose and her former husband, Waldorf, had raised their seven children-Cynthia, Lavatryce, Adkins, Alyson, William, Carol, and Ellen-on one of St. Louis's private streets in the West End. They had been fortunate enough to have a bountiful extended family that consisted of two sets of grandparents who were deeply involved with their grandkids. Aunt Eileen, an aunt of Waldorf's, lived with them, and provided baby-sitting and the other help that enabled Rose to hold down a full-time job as an elementary-school teacher. They had brought up their children in the Jack and Jill organization with the other members of St. Louis's black middle class.
Ethel and I met in undergraduate school at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where we were sisters in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, she became my roommate for a time when we both studied at Washington University's graduate program in sociology. Ethel stayed on in St. Louis after graduate school, and became the dean of a local college. She married and divorced, and is the proud mother of a young adult son, a student.
Inez had been an educator for her entire career. St. Louis was home for her and her husband, a businessman, so she, too, had the advantage of having a large extended family nearby. She beamed as she talked about her two grown daughters, who had finished college. Of the four of us who sat around Rose's table that day, Inez was the only one who was still married.
I had been divorced for about a decade. I left St. Louis in the late 1960s to launch an academic career. My son, Thomas, has been reared mostly in Washington, D. C., with my sister Dorie and her daughter Yodit, who is a year older than Thomas. Dorie and I made our own extended family with each other and an assortment of close friends and their families.
We all had a lot to be grateful for, and we surely counted our blessings. But as we talked, a rising sense of unease crept into our conversation. Despite our good fortune, each of us was worried, and we knew one another too well not to notice. We were old friends who didn't have to explain ourselves to one another.
Here's what was bothering us. Our children had many virtues, but they also had several traits that none of us remembered anyone in our families having in previous generations. In fact, our parents would never have tolerated these traits in their children:
Selfishness
Slothfulness
Materialism
An inability to cope
A fragility of the soul
Where had these traits come from in just one generation? We could not throw up our hands and blame the "times" or "society," no matter how tempting that was, because we knew that one finger pointed out would mean three fingers pointed right back at us. We were the times. We, too, were society. If we accepted responsibility for our parenting, the answer was painful and all too obvious.
Let's face it. In many cases, those of us who achieved middle-class status and beyond moved to the suburbs-to integrated neighborhoods where we sent our children to schools that we considered to be better than those in our old, segregated communities. We moved away from our familiar institutions, hoping that our children would receive and achieve as much as any other American children did. To some degree, we were successful.
Our children have had all the material comforts: music lessons, soccer, tennis, and basketball camps, vacations, phones in their rooms, cars, and so forth. We believed that as young African Americans their dues had been paid by generations before theirs, including our own. We wanted to spare them our own strict upbringing. In short, we gave them a childhood and an adolescence unfettered by serious responsibilities so that they would have more space and freedom to breathe, to dream, and to make a better life than we felt we ourselves had had.
Unfortunately, many of us did not pause to evaluate the implications. No, our children were not abysmal failures. They were not even finished products yet. They were doing well by society's standards. But something important was missing from their lives.
Without any doubt, we were prospering in ways that our Jim Crow-era parents would never have thought possible. Yet despite all that we'd given to our children, we could now see that the gifts our own parents had given us were of far greater worth: Traditional values. Practical dos and don'ts. The shoulds and oughts and musts, as well as the ought nots and should nots that were inculcated in us as toddlers, children, teens, and even as wholesome adults. Traditional African American values.
What went wrong? Where did we lose our way as parents? There is no easy answer. Some of us were too busy marching to the beat of modernity (and post-modernity). Some of us renounced the tried-and-true for the new-and-improved on the say-so of so-called experts. Others had passed on some of what we were taught, but not enough. In hindsight, it was all too easy to see that we were the first generation of African Americans who had failed to pass our traditional values and standards on to their children with the same uniformity that our parents did when they entrusted the future to us.
How would our children cope without those values? If they could not get their acts together as adults, what, pray tell, would we reap from our grandchildren? Was there time to teach the old ways to our children, all of whom were already young adults? How were other African American parents and children faring? What would be the fate of millions of poor children growing up in the underclass, where these values, once our daily bread, were now barely in evidence?
These questions and many others that I never voiced to my girlfriends set me on a course of self-examination. This book is the result of that odyssey. It is about rediscovering the traditional values most African Americans of my generation learned from their families at a time when our families were more stable. And it is about why we should and how we could put this value system back into its proper place at the epicenter of our lives.
BLACK VALUES EXPLAINED
In every previous generation, African Americans, whether parents or not, consciously tried to engender these qualities in their young:
A sense of identity
Faith in God
Respect for others
Honesty and a sense of responsibility
Self-reliance and respect for hard work
Resourcefulness
Belief in education
Resilience
Courage
Integrity
These values molded the character of a people who fought their way out of slavery and the poverty that followed in the rugged years after emancipation. Our grandmothers and grandfathers, and our mothers and fathers, held them dear, used them daily for their very survival, and determinedly taught them to every child in their sphere of influence.
Those early lessons were supposed to remain with young people in a vital way throughout their lives. For me, they are as strong today as they were in the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up. Without those lessons to draw on, I would have failed many more times than I have. I would not have been able to endure the horrors of segregation and the difficulties I encountered in the civil rights movement, including going to jail. I would not have been able to rise above my working-class background, graduate from high school, and earn a college degree. The values planted by my parents and developed in childhood have seen me through major illnesses and career challenges, and actually gave me more grit and determination to rise above personal difficulties as the years went by.
Four basic principles ran through that value system.
1. The power of self-identity. Few groups in American society have had to struggle as long or as hard as African-Americans for their basic humanity. For no other group has the quest for a positive identity been more complex. Thus lessons in black values frequently teach the importance of developing a strong sense of both group and personal identity in the face of conflicting messages about our worth.
2. The power of the extended family. Throughout slavery, every effort was made by slaveholders to prevent our ancestors from forming and sustaining families. One could call this period of history the subfamily phase, as did the sociologist Andrew Billingsley, when the slave family was forced to go underground in order to exist at all. Resilience, resistance, self-reliance, and resourcefulness became the dominant tools of the struggle to have a stable family life. Because there is strength in numbers, every member added value to the whole.
3. The power of the community to determine its future. Determinedly working together, African American families built communities, churches, and schools. Interdependence was the rule. All of our families wanted the children of the community to succeed, and we wanted our children, when successful, to bear some collective responsibility for those who were less fortunate.
4. The power of the past to influence the present. The collective values of black people find their uniqueness in the far-reaching history of slavery. Black values are ultimately centered on the keys to survival. In our traditional communities, we referred to the wise elderly people who taught or embodied those values as "old heads." It was also a term of endearment given to exceptionally insightful young people.
When I was young, I used to love to hear my grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, and other elderly people in our neighborhood talk about the old days. They also passed on to us the stories their parents had told them. These stories made me feel a special kinship for my great-grandparents and other ancestors whom I never met. The stories told of how our forebears solved some of the toughest problems any human beings have had to face. I was especially fascinated by the gripping tales of how they outfoxed the people who had done them wrong and coped without losing their dignity. I also remember inspirational stories of their many successes: buying their own homes and educating their children on the meager salaries they earned as maids, janitors, factory workers, and field hands.
I now realize that my older relatives weren't just spinning yarns. Embodied in these stories of the old days were lessons about character-building, self-esteem, and, in general, ways for us to survive and prosper and become better people. Thus children learned to fight for what they believed was right, to sacrifice to get what they wanted, and, in doing so, to defer gratification. They also learned the importance of patience, having goals, and sacrifice, as well as how to find practical ways to turn dreams into reality.
We looked up to adults because of what they had done and how they had prevailed, not because of what they had. Their values were functional, workable guidelines that applied to everyday life. These values for living involved the most basic elements of survival: the health and welfare of families and children, the viability of neighborhoods, and the building and preservation of churches, schools, lodges, and social institutions. It was through such day-to-day concerns that their ancestors before them had reinforced their sense of authority and purpose as husbands and wives, as parents, sons and daughters, neighbors and friends. It was by successfully fulfilling these roles that they achieved their good names, honor, self-respect, and the respect of others.
I am describing not only my own memories and kin but the common experience of several generations. Black values cut across economic and geographic divisions. While there are some variations in the traditional values of African-Americans who grew up in urban or rural environments-and in the values of those who grew up in poor, working-class, or middle-class families or some combination thereof-these values are essentially the same.
Our ancestors brought some of these values from their old cultures. Others originated during and in response to the Middle Passage and slavery. Still others developed in response to the twentieth century and were severely tested in a national environment of legally recognized segregation. Taken together, they constitute a living legacy.
Our forefathers and mothers kept no special covenant with virtue, and, without question, many failed to live up to the standards they dictated. But they had a talent for setting standards of moral and ethical conduct. Always cunningly creative, they kept these standards intact and used them as they formed families, raised children, expressed their spiritual natures, and generally navigated even more rugged social, political, and economic terrain than we face today.
Some readers are bound to question the wisdom of my writing this book on black values and not on the American values that, as African Americans, we also share. They will wonder whether the differences warrant such a book. To anyone who would argue that values are the color of water, I say that's a fine point of view, as far as it goes. I do not argue with it; I simply add the truth of my observations and cultural experience. Every ethnic group puts its own flavor into the water. For black people, the flavor is rich and deep.
LOSING OUR WAY
Like most kids, I used to feel that I should have more freedom to make my own rules. Back then, I was annoyed with my parents' "preaching," as I called it behind their backs. "Wait until you get some kids," they would say. "Then you'll appreciate what we're trying to teach you." They were right. As a beneficiary of generations of struggle for survival and advancement, I could not imagine the consequences of materialism, immediate gratification, and lifestyles devoid of self-sacrifice. Our children are paying the price.
Far too many African American children-middle-class, wealthy, and poor alike-do not have a clear set of values to lean on, because we did not give them one. The consequences have been swift and stunning. Many kids do not have a positive sense of their racial or ethnic identity, nor do they know about exemplary, ordinary black heroes and "sheroes" in the past and present. They do not have a sense of belonging to a community of black people that is larger than their immediate families. Our children may have a more comfortable lifestyle than many of us enjoyed when we were young, but they often do not have the strong identity and survival skills they need on the inside, where it really counts.
When middle-class children lack a certain core of values, they experience the kinds of problems my friends and I were discussing over dinner in St. Louis. But when poor children lack those values they are in crisis. They do not have the economic advantages-jobs, incomes, safe homes, and communities that bring stability, if not wisdom-that insulate middle-class children from their confusion or the confusion of others. Most of the black poor are struggling to make ends meet, to abide by the law, and to uphold the values they were taught. But their ability to do so is compromised because their environments are at such high risk, and many are steadily losing ground.
It is easy to become discouraged. Our individual successes notwithstanding, social and economic forces have come together to create an uphill battle for blacks as a group. Since 1960, black families have become so fractured that 48 percent of them are now headed by women. The majority of the children in these families are living in poverty. The infant-mortality rate among blacks continues to increase, as the gap between blacks and whites widens.
The school dropout rate, too, continues to rise. The number of homeless individuals and families, estimated to be as high as 1.2 million, escalates daily. Blacks now make up a disproportionate number of AIDS cases, and have the fastest-growing rate of AIDS of any group in the United States. Teenage pregnancy, though it has slowed, continues to be a problem; many babies have grandparents who are in their mid-twenties. The rates of child abuse and neglect are increasing, especially among drug-addicted mothers and teenage mothers.
Crime and violence have torn many communities apart, undermining stable neighborhoods to such an extent that people now fear for their safety. And drugs have come to symbolize a modern-day plague, both in its seriousness and in its proportions. In Washington, D. C., drug-related violence caused reporters to dub the city "the murder capitol of the nation." I'm talking about young black men in their late teens and early twenties, who were cut down in the prime of their lives, long before they had the opportunity to become husbands, fathers, workers in productive jobs, or socially responsible citizens. More black youths enter prison than enter college each year. A similar pattern has developed among poor, young women, whose prospects are just as bleak. They believe that a bright future with a college degree, a good career, and a good marriage with children is absolutely impossible. They don't value life very much because they don't feel they will live very long.
What can we do? How do we intervene? How do we help these young people to veer off their destructive courses? How do we help to restore a sense of normalcy to our communities so that elderly men and women can walk the streets safely? How do we keep children in school long enough for them to graduate? How do we stop children from having children? The answers to all of these questions require taking this first step: restoring a value system that inspires hope, trust, and a desire to achieve.
Did our failure to endow our children with our value system cause all these problems? Of course not. I do not pretend that restoring a traditional value system alone will solve them. Values, however, are a critical factor. As the old heads used to say, we have to earn our space in this world. Our value system requires us to take responsibility not only for our own successes but for the success of every child among us. Fixing our problems starts with fixing our values.
I have an unshakable faith in our power to heal ourselves. We need to understand that discarding our traditional values is not a precondition for prosperity. To the contrary, living by our values is the precondition. Like every other ethnic American immigrant group, we have to "keep the faith," because we have come so far and aspire to so much. We can participate fully in an integrated society without giving up the essential parts of our culture. We need to teach our children that it is neither necessary nor an option for them-or us-to forsake our heritage of values.
In fact, most of us are already swimming in the mainstream. Our children need to know that. We have failed to communicate this effectively enough. Being black does not mean being poverty-stricken, dejected, or a member of the underclass. It means being culturally distinct because we have unique ties that bind us securely to the past and to the present.
Even though I have explained my intent, some people will be concerned that a book on black values singles African Americans out from the rest of the society and exposes "family secrets" that should be discussed only among ourselves. These same critics will surely ask an important question: Don't these problems and issues also apply to other people?
My answer is yes, they do. As a nation, we are preoccupied with values for a good reason. All of us want to stop the erosion of solid and honorable beliefs and traditions. The lessons in this book can be helpful to anyone who cares about young people. The problems and wisdom of African Americans are certainly not ours alone.
Yet there is a vast difference between what Pat Buchanan means when he says "traditional American values" and what Jesse Jackson means when he says the same thing. In the chapters that follow, I will try to make this distinction clear and lay down a path for our families to travel in order to rediscover and embrace the time-tested values of our heritage.
YOUR JOURNEY NOW
It is impossible to write a book on values that everyone will agree with. Values are personal. They represent our individual choices and the things we hold to be important. Values, by definition, differ across groups, time, and place. For example, I do not expect all African Americans to agree that the particular values I will discuss in the following chapters are the right ones; other values may loom larger in their memories, and that is to be expected.
This is not a book that seeks to define an absolute code of standards. It is a book that asks you to think about a critical set of questions: What should we teach our children? How can we bring back into the fold those who have lost their way? What was the path of our fathers and mothers that brought us this far? How can we adapt their lessons to our times? This is the quest that I invite you to take with me now, in a journey toward under-16 standing how we can help our children develop clear, functional values.
In the next four chapters of Part One, I offer a closer look at the four fundamental principles underlying the black value system. I show how these principles took root and examine what they mean to us today. In Part Two I share lessons in values from my own Mississippi childhood in order to show how one typical black family passed their values on in a traditional African American context. In Part Three I share my feelings and insights regarding the connection between our values and the two most intimate and vulnerable ties in our lives: our relationships and our children. Finally, in Part Four I give you a number of specific ideas for things you can do now to bring the treasure of the African American value system into your family, church, community, and schools.