Chapter 7

Every time I read an ethnography that discusses the life of colored people though the lens of white America I get really upset. I think it is because I am tired of being studied, and told that what we are doing, how we have reacted over the centuries to our new environment, as African people in the Americas are not normal. I feel like that is an unfair assessment considering we, colored folks, that are not conforming to society are displaced here in the United States, and because of someone else decision about where we should be we now are forced to live in subhuman conditions and then labeled the nuances by the society. It is a vicious cycle that has told our men that they are not worthy to be fathers, and given our women the idea that men are expendable and not worthy of having and being in loving healthy relationships. What Stacks talks about in Chapter 7(All our Kin: C. Stack 1974) is the complication of having a relationship with the opposite sex while stilling actively participating in the kin-groups shared responsibility. She speaks about the mothers’ lack of respect for the man she is sleeping with and the biological fathers. The inability to make a decision that is separate from the kin group and to stick to that decision and not have any naysayers attached is difficult for the individuals living in the flats. The other things that Stack discusses is the relationship between, having a father figure in the home and his inability to sustain a means of providing for the family biological or otherwise and the mothers ability to depend on the state for compensation that is lacking when the father figure looses his job or access to income. The one thing that Stack says that I totally agree with is “the society’s welfare system collaborates in weakening the position of the black male (Stack 113)”. This is ideology is why black men are not giving as much respect in the eyes of main stream society. Small institutions such as marriage are seen as impossible. “Marriage and its accompanying expectations of a home, a job, and a family built around the husband and wife have come to stand for an individual’s desire to break out of poverty (Stack 113)”. What a sad state these people, are living in, where the idea of creating a new strand of their original family is a manipulative to keep them poor, and stuck without a way out. In class we have been discussing the notions of reciprocity and how that is working in this community. I do not think how these particular sets of families demonstrate reciprocity is healthy and balanced. I believe it is based on a missed inform ideals of what family and friends are supposed to be. These families are surviving, they are not living, they are not growing they are for lack of a better word, imploding upon themselves. Mind you this is all circumstantial because there are so many other factors that are involved in how these families operate. The one place were most of these insular and extremely narrow focused ideas change is in the presence of a new child, or off spring to a particular kin group. “The value place on children, the love, attention children receive from women and men, and the web of social relationships spun from the birth of a child are all interlocked in the chain of reproduction and the high birth rate among the poor (Stacks 121).” Children make the world go round, this information suggest that with children comes about in some cases the changes that are needed to help the parents get out of their perspective situations.