'A New Look at Black Families' is an enlightening book written by Charles Willie and Richard Reddick. The book focuses on explaining how black families in America go about their dealings. By use of case studies the authors are able to depict an array of Black family experiences and how socio economic status affects these experiences. The book does not only try to portray the working, low-income, and middle class families but also hints on the life of highly successful African Americans, their family experiences and the environmental factors that drove them to achieve success. The authors of this book disapprove the general myth surrounding the Black matriarchy common in many people’s imagination. The two authors go ahead to expound on same-gender parent families and other different family relationships. The recent edition of the book includes Part III, 'Cases Against and for Black Men and Women,' which in cooperates familiar chapters from the earlier editions into a strong argument of misunderstandings and stereotypes from scholars and mass media facets. The authors go an extra mile to include a chapter featuring the Obama family, giving a greater insight on cross-racial and cross-gender mentoring, and it shows the important part of extended relations.
The book, 'A New Look at Black Families' provides a challenging and unsteady analysis of the different experiences black families go through and the common notion that considers black families coming from different socio-economic classes as major contributors to the larger social foundation of American life (Willie and Reddick 3). Willie and Reddick explain their thoughts without grouping black families and other social group as mainstream, instead they view conformity and deviancy as elements that arise in regards to someone’s situation, economic status, and life chances; using this situations the authors are able to give a clear outline of the black community.
Willie and Reddick give readers a rich insight, on personal histories, complete case studies, and testimonies that purely portray the common black men and black women on the organization and governance of family life in their immediate social-economic strata, and at the same time expounding and deflating the impression of a one-dimensional, ubiquitous, single black experience (Willie and Reddick 19). After the two authors do away with the single-minded view of black experience, they give a flow of depictions of black working class, low-income, middles class, low class, and same gender family scenarios with backing testimonies. The use of case studies and testimonies in this book deprecates the unequal treatment of the black family. The authors are able to show that each family regardless of their economic status is equal as they all poses an equalitarian family structure and a large dependence on religious and spiritual platforms for self-identity, knight in shining armor in the face defeat, and liberator in the face of adverse life circumstances and grief.
In part two the authors utilize family case studies that give an engaging and insightful discussion on how socio economic status impacts on middle class families. The initial analysis embraces a largely prosperous, racially integrated environment where two middle class families reside. The neighborhood allows the two families to buy and invest in their immediate human and social capital. The authors show that the middle class families tend to largely display a more idealized, customary, westernized life direction. Willie and Reddick reached this conclusion by use of Robert Merton’s typology of modes of group adaptation (Willie and Reddick 35). This mode allowed them to show that this class of Black families praised higher education since they considered it 'a breath of life' (Willie and Reddick 36), and a great barrier that protected them from experiencing racial injustice. Still on the middle class families children are treasured. The families consider children to be a great investment firm in terms of the accountability and responsibility teachings that parents pass on to their children, while still embracing the African heritage and culture by holding Kwanza events. Children brought up in black middle class families are more involved athletic, academic, and artistic extra-curricular activities more than children from low-income and working class black families.
In part two the authors give a case analysis of the black low-income families. In the case study Willie and Reddick give an account of two families faced with an array of disturbing societal afflictions: family death, limited health care coverage, unemployment, and teenage pregnancy (Willie and Reddick 67). Among all the black classes in this book, the low-income families carried the burden of a social capital that is disappearing, due to the position they hold in the 'mainstream' social-political and social institutions discourse.
Part three of the book embraces a more argumentative, harsh and rebellious tone disregarding, 'The black matriarchy, ' which is one of the most famous propositions concluded by sociologists (Willie and Reddick 101). Willie and Reddick in their own way, puncture this myth by looking at the middle class and referring the woman in this class as redefining and reconstructing, the classical description of womanhood, where the black family exhibits equality in their lifestyle as neither the husband nor the wife has total dominance or authority in the family (Willie and Reddick 85). The other studies in the book that claim to explain how a black woman totally defines womanhood do not completely clear the doubt in the mind of a reader. The sophistication surrounding the 'black matriarchy' as an erroneous notion is not yet examined completely, since the supporting studies that exist do not hold substance and are not completely examined as the two authors of this book try to pose an unrelenting argument in this issue.
According to Willie and Reddick, the working class, are portrayed as a unit who can disguise themselves as 'living betwixt and between,' lower-income and middle-class families more than once creates an atmosphere of strange vagueness on their ways of imparting and controlling familial responsibilities. The authors go ahead to analyze and describe the working class families basing their notions on mutual assistance and familial sharing solely for black family members who are 'down on their luck' (Willie and Reddick 56) The working class family’s embedded experiences of tedious, strenuous, steady labor, mixed with their negligible mistrust in social platforms and minimal relations with their neighbors, usually minimizes their chances of gaining strategic opportunities for increasing their social capital. How the black working class families live their lives and how what they go through is singularly represented by 'whatever is God’s will, will happen' (Willie and Reddick 58). This group of individuals lives by hope and they believe that things would be better in their life. According to the analysis by the authors, they believe that everything they experience and the life chances that befall them were a strange mix of human intuition and the works of God.
Works Cited
Willie, Charles V, and Richard Reddick. A New Look at Black Families. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Internet resource.
