Privileged eyes constantly remove their gaze from root causes of social and economic despair to myopically perceive positive family adaptations as dysfunction or as causing poverty. You’d think people intuitively would know that Black people don’t deliberately choose their family arrangements so they will be worse off. To be clear, we shape and create family configurations to protect children and adults. I don’t think Karen, who had four children before her twenty-third birthday, could have overcome the obstacles she faced early in life to become a social worker if Mom hadn’t taken in her three boys. In Black communities, it’s fairly common to have women plan family based on a more expansive understanding of what a family is. A lack of opportunities for Black men and women demands innovation, creativity, and more options for family—not fewer.
The fact that many of my friends grew up with one female breadwinner doesn’t mean Black people don’t want to be married or that Black men are unwilling to work. Instead, maternal caregivers stepped into the breach when an economy that didn’t pay women fairly, denied Black men and women job opportunities, and criminalized labor in the underground economy made it harder to form nuclear family units—if they wanted to do so. But those aren’t the stories you read in much of the research on Black communities that ends up recommending changes in individual behaviors rather than endorsing anti-racism policy. Theorists who posited that poverty was mainly about individual choices produced the foundational studies undergirding family planning research. First popularized in the 1960s by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, culture of poverty theories argued that low-income people share inherent characteristics and values that keep them impoverished. Thus, children who grow up in poor communities fall victim to the decisions of their parents, replicating the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Subsequently, low-income mothers were—are—rendered culpable for putting their children in poverty. Culture of poverty theories manifest themselves in a seemingly constant focus on how Black folk aren’t living up to White norms instead of probing how to dismantle systems that privilege White people at Black people’s expense. I now know that my existence is a manifestation of Black women’s resistance against the criminalization of poverty and the devaluing of Black lives. For me, family planning research has mostly been a thinly veiled negative reinforcement campaign that attempts to punish Black people for poverty we didn’t create.
Since 1965, when Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, better known as the Moynihan Report, researchers and journalists have continued framing poverty mainly as a function of individual choices—that is, mothers form families that put children in harm’s way. Moynihan also offered a robust structural analysis of the economic and social conditions that help shape Black family structures. However, he set a dangerous example by identifying the main problem as Black people not living up to White middle-class ideals. This is a mold that researchers of Black people and cities willfully maintain to this day. One of the major goals of this book is to show that there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.
What Hotsy and some researchers called a no-parent home I called family. I had multiple mothers, guardians, and father figures whose love didn’t fit in a neat little nuclear family structure. In that Hill Avenue home, I learned to read, write, share, love, and accept others who didn’t share my genes. Mom regularly said, “I took you from the hospital, and you were born into love.” It was her way of making the single Black mother debate irrelevant for me.
Still, my struggles with Hotsy, Dot, and Patrick Moynihan are with me and manifested in my work on Black-majority cities.
In the U.S. context, we, as researchers and as residents, are bombarded with studies that project how bad Black families, students, and residents are compared to an assumed White norm. Researchers rarely ask these analytic questions: What is good about Black families? Where are the assets of Black communities? According to the research nonprofit the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, “Assets provide the tangible resources that help individuals move out of and stay out of poverty.”2 Assets include the material and nonmaterial, such as physical property, federal treasury notes, cash, stocks, bonds, brand names, savings, copyrights, and more. Assets are the physical, nonphysical, and behavioral resources that can be exchanged for quality of life improvements. People are the most important asset of all. My upbringing was an asset.
Our relentless pursuit of disparities between Black and White people often omits the policies that were designed to devalue Black assets. Those omissions help foster a sense of superiority among Whites while minimizing financial and social privileges gained from not acknowledging root policy causes of disparities.
As a way of moving toward research frameworks that look for assets in Black communities, I spoke with several of my Black colleagues who grew up in Black-majority places. I asked them two basic questions: “What are the benefits to living in a Black-majority city?” and, “Why do so many of us choose to stay in them?”
One of my peers, the Brookings fellow Makada Henry-Nickie, responded, “Home feels safe.” She leaned back, sprouting a smile that spoke of relief and comfort, and added, “I don’t have to explain myself.” However, much of the research that is motivated to bring about equity or fairness amounts to making a case of why we should belong.
Though Henry-Nickie currently lives in Washington, D.C., home for Henry-Nickie is the Black-majority island country of Trinidad and Tobago. She acknowledges that being a Black woman and an immigrant from a Black-majority country gives her a particular appreciation of Black-majority cities in the United States. Henry-Nickie is a researcher who works with data every day. She, like many Black immigrants, feels the collateral damage of negative expectations, stereotypes, and assumptions she didn’t grow up with but now has to live with in her adopted country. The expectations of Blacks in America spill over onto those who haven’t been reared in our context.
Adding insult to injury, we’re professionally trained and rewarded to make White people the default referent group that Blacks are measured against. In doing so, we acquire a tendency to center White people in our work.
I was first introduced to the practice of White centering later in life as a graduate researcher, when I first learned how to carry out a regression analysis, a staple of quantitative research. Regression analyses examine the relationship between two or more variables—say, the impact of race on academic achievement. For a category like race, one must pick a referent group for the purposes of comparison. I was taught to make White men (not White women) the default referent in most of my models. In the aforementioned example, achievement test scores of White women, Black women and men, as well as their Hispanic non-White, Asian, and Native American counterparts are measured against White men. Regression models are mathematically most stable if the referent group is the largest within the sample you are drawing from. For that reason, in the United States, data sources that make note of racial categories are generally presented sequentially, with “White,” the largest single racial group, listed first.
But if we really are interested in improving Black communities, it’s much less useful to select Whites as the referent. Historical discrimination categorically leveled against Black people makes it difficult for many research projects to make a true apples-to-apples comparison with White people. For instance, to compare a Black person’s income to that of a White person without accounting for wealth that was systematically denied to Black people by federal policy is to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore the roles of racism and White privilege. Racism is a common denominator for Black people; it’s a given. It’s much more useful, in many cases, to examine the variation within the Black population to see what factors and conditions can be attributed to differences.
In leading up to my study on devaluation (presented in chapter 2), I examined incomes of Black families living in Black-majority cities. It was a very simple study that simply asked, “Where are Blacks with high incomes living?” Incomes are proxies for decent job opportunities,