Whose Tangle is it Anyway? The African-American Family, Poverty and United States Kinship

Abstract

This study establishes the erroneousness of popular discourses that compare the mutual aid and small business formation behaviors of immigrant kinship networks with those of African Americans in poverty to account for success, failure, and mutual aid in poverty.These discourses, particularly Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 model of African American family dysfunction, ignore the fact that the cultural templates of the black family are fundamentally similar to those of other non-immigrant American families. Data gathered over three years of ethnographic fieldwork among homeless African American and Latino families and Latin American immigrant entrepreneurs in New York City are used to deconstruct Moynihan’s model.These data reveal that the success of immigrant families may be attributed to family-based sacrifices, cooperation, and petty accumulation.Mutual aid and small business formation are strategies in which whole families of immigrants participate.African American family ideals and behaviors, however, are less suited to mutual aid in crisis and poverty. Rather than making sacrifices for small startups that have little chance for growth, black families, like other non-immigrant families, possess consumption-oriented ideals. As native-born, fully socialized Americans, African Americans have little of the space in which immigrants work to claim a set of roles and places for themselves. At the same time, they do not have the economic, political, and social resources that other American families have. (SAA)