Universally Speaking
Rahim Islam is a National Speaker and Writer, Convener of Philadelphia Community of Leaders, and President/CEO of Universal Companies, a community development and education management company headquartered in Philadelphia, PA. Follow Rahim Islam on FaceBook(Rahim Islam) & Twitter (@RahimIslamUC)
Rahim Islam
In part 1 of my article I tried to establish a few critical points that will carry throughout this series related to the “The Black Male – A Targeted Group.”
Key amongst them is the effects of slavery in our lives today.
Many of these conditions are alive and well and many of the disparities that exist today in our community have their roots in the enslavement of our ancestors.
The Black family, and the Black man in particular, is being targeted by design.
If successful, the Black community will never achieve self-determination and sustained stability.
Blacks need to be as diligent as the Jewish community has been in never allowing anyone to forget their own Holocaust and also in making sure that anyone and everyone who contributed to the Holocaust be held accountable for what they have done.
Now, I’m not trying to compare the Black Holocaust with the Jewish Holocaust to see which is worse; what I’m trying to say is the Black Holocaust should receive the same passionate and intentional responses as the Jewish Holocaust has.
I would like to continue the discussion of the legacy of slavery, specifically how the demise of the Black family is directly linked to our enslavement under the American institution of slavery.
We have been extremelyimpaired. It is clear that the enslavement of our people essentially destroyed the concept of family.
During slavery, the Black man was evaluated by his ability to endure strenuous work and to produce children (stud).
The more children that the enslaved Black man could sire, the greater the expansion of the master’s slave holdings – resulting in a greater financial wealth for the slave owner. Black men were defined by their ability to impregnate women. Don’t we see this today? In many Black communities we still carry the mark of the strongarmed stud from slavery.
These modern-day slaves delight in leaving abandoned and neglected children dispersed around town.
This peculiar behavior is often characterized as a racial trait attributable to some type of moral deficit in Black men.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that this doesn’t happen among Blacks that have never endured the ravages of slavery or who were able to preserve their cultural integrity.
While it appears that some of our families have survived the Black Holocaust, the truth of the matter is that it’s just an illusion.
Yes, while we have a few families that resemble the Huxtable’s – an upper middle-class Black family far too many of our families carry the baggage of an inherited dysfunction and on-going socialization process that continues to scar our children and our future.
Instead of our homes being emotionally secure and nurturing environments that produce positive and confident children, our homes are the place for dark secrets that perpetuate a vicious cycle of despair against our children that has its origins in slavery. Our socialization process is seriously flawed.
The socialization process is described as the process by which children learn from adults. What do they learn? Everything! We begin learning from others during the early days of life and most people continue their social learning all throughout life.
The socialization process begins when infants and children are protected both physically and emotionally and are allowed to explore, play and discover the social world around them.
In stable families, the socialization process is planned and occurs when the adults take actions designed to teach and/ or train their children from infancy.
There are two types of socialization: 1) Positive socialization is the type of social learning that is based on pleasurable and exciting experiences.
We tend to like the people who fill our social learning processes with positive motivation, loving care, and rewarding opportunities; and 2) Negative socialization occurs when others use punishment, harsh criticisms or anger and often we come to dislike both negative socialization and the people who impose it on us.
There are all types and mixtures of positive and negative socialization, The more positive our social learning experiences are, the happier we tend to be, especially if we learn useful information that helps us cope well with the challenges of life.
A high ratio of negative to positive socialization can make a person unhappy, defeated or pessimistic about life.
Some people will defend negative socialization, since painful training can prepare people to be ready to fight and die in battle, put themselves at great risk in order to save others, and endure torture and hardship.
This is true, but many people receive far more negative socialization than they need, and hopefully fewer and fewer people will need to be trained for battle, torture and hardship, especially our children.
Our children are extremely traumatized by receiving extremely poor parenting that has its roots in slavery.
This socialization process is learned and perpetuated by our children when they become adults and parents and, in many cases, inflict the same pathologies on their children.
Thus the vicious cycle continues. We cannot dismiss this process.
Why? Because the socialization process defines how we think and how we feel about so many critical issues and none can be more critical than the dysfunction and the consequences of a failed concept of fatherhood.
Many experts state that there is a “Father Factor” contributing to our community’s worst social problems.
Today, 75% of our families live in biological father absent homes. This has crippled our efforts towards self-determination and stability of our communities.
We can’t cross the finish line with these types of numbers.
While these numbers are staggering, they will get worse because of the vicious cycle of pathology that a dysfunctional socialization process will generate.
Children, especially our boys, will repeat the dysfunctional behavior if this isn’t interrupted.
How will our boys learn how to become men if there are no men in their lives?
How will our boys become men when the sum of the behaviors of some of the men that are in the homes are detrimental to both the family and the community (i.e. provider and protector of the family and community)?
Research shows that children born into poverty face a serious challenge getting out of poverty and that number increases exponentially when there is no father in the home.
For many of our children, while it is not impossible, it is nearly impossible.
There is almost a guarantee that children, especially boys, born into poverty will likely remain in poverty.
Children in father-absent homes are almost four times more likely to be poor.
In 2011, 12 percent of children in married-couple households were living in poverty, compared to 44 percent of children in mother-only households (this number is much higher in the Black community).
In addition, many of our young boys are diagnosed with learning deficiencies, as special needs or as having aggressive behaviors that many times require prescribed medication.
Much of this can be contributed to the fact that so many of our Black fathers are not present.
Current data show that children born to single mothers show higher levels of aggressive behavior than children born to married mothers.
Further research indicates that living in a single-mother household is equivalent to experiencing five and a half times partnership transitions and, among other factors, can be a predictor of anxiety, depression and aggressive behavior in children.
Absentee fatherhood is a behavior and characteristic established and perfected in slavery that is crippling our community today.
Data show that infant mortality rates are 1.8 times higher for infants of unmarried mothers than for married mothers.
Young boys whose fathers are absent have significantly higher odds of incarceration than those from two-parent homes.
While we glorify single parent mothers, the facts are that being raised by a single mother raises the risk of teen pregnancy; dropping out of high school; never getting married; an increased risk of child maltreatment, and an increased risk of abuse and neglect.
When our fathers are absent, our children are subjected to increase levels of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse (trauma).
In my next article I will articulate some of these examples, specifically the predisposition to drug abuse and antisocial behavior that this phenomenon creates.