Ok so tell me, what do you think is the reason behind the high rate in single parent in the black community and how our culture is to blame.
When slaves arrived in America they didn't arrive as blank slates, their entire existence and history, their personalities, beliefs and practices were not wiped clean.
So, just as every other human on the earth they raised their own children grounded, as much as they could, in what they knew and what they believed. Granted, slave-owners tried to impose white-Christian early American values on the slaves and in some cases they got outward compliance along with inner resistance and other times a new custom was grafted onto the slave's customs. This cultural imposition is still playing out today - kids enforcing black customs when they target a peer for "acting white."
Blacks like being black, they like their customs, just like Japanese like being Japanese and they like their customs.
I'm surprised that so many people are ignorant of African cultural practices with respect to mating and marriage.
A huge factor responsible for the AIDS crisis in Africa is the mating practice of parallel mating. Multiple sex partners, even for married people is very common.
In European societies we see more of serial mating patterns. Monogamy until it no longer satisfies and then move onto a new person.
This mating pattern is so rooted in African cultures that the downstream effects are widely felt. Even inheritance law, for instance. See
here, (don't pay attention to the reporter's ignorant theorizing, just note the facts she reports):
There are two reasons why 11-year-old Chikumbutso Zuze never sees his three sisters, why he seldom has a full belly, why he sleeps packed sardinelike with six cousins on the dirt floor of his aunt's thatched mud hut.
One is AIDS, which claimed his father in 2000 and his mother in 2001. The other is his father's nephew, a tall, light-complexioned man whom Chikumbutso knows only as Mr. Sululu.
It was Mr. Sululu who came to his village five years ago, after his father died, and commandeered all of the family's belongings - mattresses, chairs and, most important, the family's green Toyota pickup, an almost unimaginable luxury in this, one of the poorest nations on earth. And it was Mr. Sululu who rejected the pleas of the boy's mother, herself dying of AIDS, to leave the truck so that her children would have an inheritance to sustain them after her death.
Instead, Chikumbutso said, he left behind a battery-powered transistor radio.
"I feel very bitter about it," he said, plopped on a wooden bench in 12-by-12-foot hut rented by his maternal aunt and uncle on the outskirts of this town in the lush hills of southern Malawi. "We don't really know why they did all this. We couldn't understand."
Actually, the answer is simple: custom. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the death of a father automatically entitles his side of the family to claim most, if not all, of the property he leaves behind, even if it leaves his survivors destitute.
What the reporter misses is this - in a social environment where there exist many parallel sexual relationships, the man CAN NEVER be sure of paternity. Is the child born to his wife his or that of another man? What can he be sure of? He can be sure that the child born to his sister is related to him. Who gave shelter to the orphans? The maternal aunt and uncle and they did this because they knew that these children were born to their niece. The paternal side of the family has no assurance that these children were in fact fathered by the husband.
This custom exists for a reason, it's not some mindless invention.
So to get to your question, why would we expect the slave experience to bust the cultural practices of the slaves? It hasn't. What we're seeing play out in America's black community is pretty damn close to how the mating and marriage game is played out in numerous African cultures. Americans blacks are more comfortable with parallel relationships than are white-Americans. This preference plays out and delivers the consequences we see. Why would a black-American male want to commit to raising a child which might not be his?
Black male behavior in America is found in Black-run societies in Africa:
Kenya:
Six of every 10 Kenyan women are likely to be single mothers by the time they reach 45, one of the highest rates for single-parent families in Africa.
According to new research that reveals an astounding new face of the Kenyan family, an increasing number of women are drawn into single parenthood as more men abandon their traditional role as providers for their children.
An array of factors, including irresponsible fathers, peer pressure and the struggle to cope with modernisation, are blamed for the trend, in which three in 10 Kenyan girls become pregnant before the age of 18.
South Africa:
Almost half of all mothers in South Africa are single.
Only 33% of black children live with their fathers whereas 87% of white children live with both parents.
Liberia:
A research conducted in some counties of Liberia suggests that approximately 95 percent of women in the country are single mothers, which estimate gender experts say represents a single most significant gender-factor in national development because it clearly relates to women participation and representation.
