The Unraveling of the Black Family

An uncomfortable self-reflection

THE UNRAVELING OF THE BLACK FAMILY

An uncomfortable self-reflection

John Washington

It troubles me to write this, but I feel compelled to speak the truth as I saw it unfold. We black Americans need to engage in some self-reflection, however uncomfortable. The best way I can provoke that is by speaking of what I have seen in my own life.

In 1978, when I moved in with the woman who would become my wife a year later, I had to buy a shotgun just to live peacefully with her in her apartment. This was in the Hillcrest Apartments—a government housing project nestled in the western hills of North Carolina. It was intended for the elderly, the disabled, and unwed mothers, but the unwed mothers formed the overwhelming majority of the residents. Though this was after Jim Crow, the population was entirely black.

Hillcrest has since transformed into a more respectful neighborhood, but back then, it was rabid. My fiancée lived there because she had two children and could not afford regular housing on account of the fact that their biological father offered no support. I was in college on the GI Bill, working minimum-wage jobs, and serving in the Army Reserve on end-of-month (EOM) weekends. When I formed a bond with her, I promised her I would get her and her kids out of that place as soon as possible, even if I couldn’t do it immediately.

She worked at a factory sorting rags for minimum wage, but most of the other women in the complex were on public assistance. I didn’t look down on them. I had been raised by a single mother myself and had a deep empathy for their struggles. And from the interactions I had with them I found them to be mostly good people.

Born in 1945, I had seen the black family endure through Jim Crow. Now, just over 30 years later, I was watching a segment of it disintegrate. Around the same time, I encountered the 1965 Moynihan Report in a sociology class. In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan argued that many of the problems facing black America stemmed from the breakdown of the family. He was reviled for saying this by some in the black community, but his conclusions were prophetic. I was witnessing his thesis come true, in real time.

According to the Moynihan Report, the rate of birth to unwed black mothers in the 1940s (my birth decade) was 16.8 percent and 23.8 percent in 1965 when it was published. By the time I moved into that apartment just over a decade later, it had ballooned to an astonishing 83.1 percent—evidence of a changing of the guard in how black children were being raised, with the traditional family structure coming totally unraveled. Today it has improved, but hovers around an unacceptable and unsustainable 70 percent (69.3 percent in 2023, to be exact).

My own father beat my mother. But she was a strong soul who chose not to endure that brutality. She divorced him around the time of my birth, making me one of the 16 percent of black children raised without a father in the house back then. Since in the Jim Crow South her only real option for survival was domestic work, she became a live-in maid for a white family. It meant long hours and just one and a half days off each week.

The American welfare system, before the late 1960s, was designed for survival—not to help struggling people through life. Thankfully, the black family was still mostly intact. So, my mother could drop me off with an aunt or uncle during the week, and I’d spend summers at my maternal grandparents’ one-mule farm in the country. I carry warm memories of those wonderful—and married—relatives and remain forever grateful.

The Civil Rights Movement helped dismantle the overt, de jure racism of Jim Crow laws, leaving forms of de facto social racism largely untouched. These forms were subtler, harder to detect, but they couldn’t stop a determined person as the legal form of racism could. We were making progress, but I saw troubling cultural shifts emerging, pathologies in black culture that were just as destructive as racism itself. I saw us, as a people, doing damage to ourselves.

One eye-opening moment came at the end of the month, when assistance checks arrived. I returned from class one evening to find a crowd of about 15 women surrounding the mailman at one of Hillcrest’s four communal mailbox clusters. They pressed in so tightly that he could barely work. As he placed a check in a box, hands would reach over his shoulder to snatch it. Some women were still in robes and headscarves. Anger and disgust covered the mailman’s face, and since he was white, I knew he was spreading word of the scenes he was witnessing throughout the white community.

I mentioned it to a friend, hoping to shock her, but she was already familiar with this drama. She even told me about a woman who snatched her check directly from the mailman’s hand, prompting him to go off on her angrily, letting her know that mail was government property until it was in the recipient’s mailbox.

What angered me most was the glaring absence of fathers, since they were the ones who were or at least should have been responsible for feeding their offspring. This wasn’t just an embarrassment, it was a sign of black family collapse.

Moynihan’s statistics were visible in real time. A few days after checks arrived, the parking area filled with predatory males—some likely the fathers of children living in the complex, drawn by the prospect of partying until the money dried up.

Like I said, I had no father in my life. But I was surrounded by upright black men—my maternal grandfather, uncles, older cousins, and neighbors—all of whom filled that void. These male elders gave me a foundation and inspired me to build something better for my own family. So, when I met my fiancée, I knew what my responsibilities were.

My mother and relatives earned so little that dinner was often just beans and cornbread, and lunch was sometimes missing altogether. We lived in crumbling homes that would be condemned today. But our family network, my magnificent family tribe, held us together with a kind of high spirituality. That’s why I knew what I saw in Hillcrest wasn’t sustainable. It was the slow-motion collapse of a people.

Hillcrest itself was chaos—littered with trash, overrun with rats burrowing through the building’s foundation. Kids ran wild. Roaches wallpapered the rooms. Bootleggers sold paper cups full of beer, wine, and cheap bourbon strong enough to drown any pain from their apartments. I admit I wasn’t immune. And I must testify that at the time I drank with and like the rest when I found time. Young men raced around the encircling street with loud mufflers and bass-heavy music, flexing bravado for the girls. Children cursed like paratroopers.

One morning, as I rushed to school, I found that my car wouldn’t start and on opening the hood I found the battery was missing. Some days later some neighbors, disapproving of my relationship with my future wife, barged in to our apartment without knocking and threatened me. I exploded with anger. But I wasn’t counting on them backing down the next time. That’s when I bought the shotgun.

It was a single-shot 12-gauge I picked up on sale at a pawn shop, along with a box of birdshot shells. For about a week, I fired a warning shot into the air every time I left the apartment or returned. After that, I was left alone.

You might ask, why didn’t the cops come and lock your rear end up? Simple, gunfire was so routine at Hillcrest that the authorities didn’t pay it any attention. The cops came only for the big stuff, and when they did, it was in force—five or six cars deep, having learned from past events not to send a lone officer.

One day, lying on the couch, I heard a small child’s voice yelling outside at another kid, “You goddamned motherfucker!” When I jumped up and looked through the window, I saw it was my fiancée’s two-year-old son, the boy who would later become my son. I realized it was time to go.

So why, as a center-left liberal, am I writing this—exposing something so embarrassingly painful and taboo about some of my people?

Because this is the image the world holds of us as black Americans. And though Hillcrest has cleaned up in recent decades, what I experienced there is currently a nationwide phenomenon. Ask a cop in Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, or whatever city. But to mention these facts is to risk being labeled racist—and racism has become the universal alibi. Yes, racism still exists. But we won’t fix our problems if we deny our own role in them. And there is “black fatigue”—not just on the part of whites, but on the part of other blacks, too.

In one of my psychology classes the professor lectured about a therapist having a child client with a serious psychological problem: he played with his own feces. Nothing the therapist did helped. One day, out of frustration, he took the child to the zoo in an attempt to develop a deeper relationship. As they stood by the monkey cage a monkey defecated in its own hand and played with it. The child immediately saw an image of himself, and the resulting self-disgust cured him.

A 2022 Pew survey titled Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism, but Little Hope It Will Happen found that 68% of black respondents saw racism as the primary barrier to progress and believed change must come from outside systems. Nowhere in the report was something entirely within our own control—the disintegration of the black family—mentioned.

The National Fatherhood Initiative reports that children without fathers face significantly higher risks of poverty, incarceration, addiction, and academic failure. And yet this root issue is routinely ignored.

I offer this unfiltered, unflattering portrait as a mirror—hoping it provokes the kind of self-reflection we so urgently need. Like the boy at the zoo, we need a moment of awakening, of uncomfortable self-recognition.

Because a 70 percent single-motherhood rate is not just a statistic, it is the slow death of a people. Yes, racism persists, but it no longer has the force it did in its legal form. Much of our suffering today is self-inflicted.

I left college two years short of my degree and rejoined the Army to get my family out of that housing area. My son, the one who once cursed like a paratrooper, earned a college degree and gave us three wonderful grandchildren. He carries the values of the male elders and I call that a victory.

I hope the little boy my son cursed out that day made it through, too.

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John Washington is an octogenarian who has earned his daily bread, first, as an Army paratrooper and then, later in civilian life, as a computer support technician, two careers from which he has now achieved a double retirement. In and around these occupations, he fed his family with janitorial work, factory labor, and long-haul trucking, while also managing the completion of 2 years of college during the journey. Though he is not academically credentialed, he feels his short school life expanded his ability to think broadly and enhanced his analytical thinking skills. As a center-left liberal, he holds firmly that values like family commitment, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility are not merely conservative but also deeply liberal ideals. He has published in Quillette and has two previous articles in the Journal of Free Black Thought: “Black Culture and the Euro-American Collective Brain” and “Blaming Racism Won’t Cut It.” He lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.