'CRISIS OF UNPRECENDENTED MAGNITUDE IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY'

'There is a crisis of unprecedented magnitude in the black community, one
that goes to the very heart of its survival. The black family is failing."

Quibble if you will about the "unprecedented magnitude" -- slavery wasn't
exactly a high point of African-American well-being. But there's no
quarreling with the essence of the alarm sounded last week by a gathering
of Pentecostal clergy and the Seymour Institute for Advanced Christian Studies.

What is happening to the black family in America is the sociological
equivalent of global warming: easier to document than to reverse,
inconsistent in its near-term effect -- and disastrous in the long run.

Father absence is the bane of the black community, predisposing its
children (boys especially, but increasingly girls, as well) to school
failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship, and to an
intergenerational repetition of the grim cycle. The culprit, the ministers
(led by the Rev. Eugene Rivers III of Boston, president of the Seymour
Institute) agreed, is the decline of marriage.

Kenneth B. Johnson, a Seymour senior fellow who has worked in youth
programs, says he often sees teenagers "who've never seen a wedding."

As Rivers recently noted, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the
alarm 40 years ago, only to be "condemned and pilloried as misinformed,
malevolent and even racist."

What is new is the understanding of how deep and wide is the reach of
declining marriage -- and the still-forming determination to do something
about it.

When Moynihan issued his study, roughly a quarter of black babies were born
out of wedlock; moreover, it was largely a low-income phenomenon. The
proportion now tops two-thirds and has moved up the socioeconomic scale.

There have been two main explanations. At the low-income end, the
disproportionate incarceration, unemployment and early death of black men
make them unavailable for marriage. At the upper-income level, black women
are far likelier than black men to complete high school, attend college and
earn the professional credentials that would render them "eligible" for
marriage.

Both explanations are true. But black men aren't born incarcerated,
crime-prone dropouts. What principally renders them vulnerable to such a
plight is the absence of fathers and their stabilizing influence.

Fatherless boys (as a general rule) become ineligible to be husbands --
though no less likely to become fathers -- and their children fall into the
patterns that render them ineligible to be husbands.

The absence of fathers means, as well, that girls lack both a pattern
against which to measure the boys who pursue them and an example of
sacrificial love between a man and a woman. Interestingly, they blamed the
black church for abetting the decline of the black family -- by moderating
virtually out of existence its once stern sanctions against extramarital
sex and childbirth and by accepting the present trends as more or less
inevitable.

They didn't say -- but might have -- that black America's almost reflexive
search for outside explanations for our internal problems delayed the
introspective examination that might have slowed the trend. What we have
now is a changed culture -- a culture whose worst aspects are reinforced by
oversexualized popular entertainment and that places a reduced value on the
things that produced nearly a century of socioeconomic improvement. For the
first time since slavery, it is no longer possible to say with assurance
that things are getting better.

As the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a slightly different context, "What began
as a problem has deteriorated into a condition. Problems require solving;
conditions require healing."

How to start the healing? Rivers and his colleagues hope to use their
personal influence, a series of marriage forums and their well-produced
booklet, "God's Gift: A Christian Vision of Marriage and the Black Family,"
to launch a serious, national discussion and action program.

In truth, though, the situation is so critical -- and its elements so
interconnected and self-perpetuating -- that there is no wrong place to
begin. When you find yourself in this sort of a hole, someone once said,
the first thing to do is stop digging.