“The Politics of Theorizing African American Families” by Shirley Hill is an essay published in the 4th edition of Ferguson’s book “Shifting the Center: Understanding Contemporary Families” in 2010 by McGraw-Hill Education. The book represents a collection of essays to deconstruct the notion of family, its evolution, and its relation to race-ethnical and social issues. As a part of a chapter dedicated to family variations and historical changes, the es by Hill discusses the topic of African American families’ peculiarities formed as a result of oppression and slavery. The author claims that many scholars primitively referred to the African American families as the ones that had to adapt and assimilate with the established family standard. Hill states that researchers should have had a broader scope in their studies and accounted for the cultural backgrounds of African Americans and the root causes of differences in their families’ structures and roles.
The essay starts with highlighting the importance of understanding the cultural heritage and experience of the Black families in contrast to simply comparing them to the White ones. Hill further indicatess the purpose of reading which, according to her, is about rethinking existing research by critically questioning it. The author demonstrates the analysis of theoretical data, articles, and research in this scholarship. The article one by one examines the theoretical and political contexts affecting the socialization and perception of African American families and then the social and cultural perspectives. Furthermore, Hill comes to reviewing the discussed academic papers and compares them with empirical data and qualitative studies. At this stage, the reader is presented with social and cultural changes both in the structure and characteristics of the Black families and in the social event of family norms. The conclusion is further drawn, highlighting new directions for overviewing African American families.
Hill’s primary goal is to illustrate the critical analysis of empirical and theoretical data, review political, cultural, and social contexts forming African American families and propose new scopes for further research. The author purposely chose the versatile assessment of the Black people’s surroundings, experience, habits, and living conditions to fully immerse the reader in the world of such a family. She uses irony in the analysis of the works of other scholars on this topic, underlining that for some reason, they all accepted the standard of the White family as given and something fundamental. Hill does not argue that African families are at times strikingly different from the traditional White family. However, the reader, through the critical analysis of the author, catches the main intended idea – standards are changeable, and culture is formed under many facts, and instead of changing culture, one should better study what constitutes it and create favorable conditions for a multi-ethnic society.
Of course, it is necessary to understand that the essay was written more than ten years ago. Fortunately, the discussion brought by Hill became less relevant in our society, although it is still present. Having reviewed the scientific works of those times, the author wonders whether the countless number of studies on Black families’ scholarship will now cease to be conducted. The target audience of the essay also emerges from this question – these are sociologists who in every possible way investigate the problem of poor single-mother families unable to fit into a White society, instead of dealing with identifying the root causes of the situation and creating conditions for the coexistence of different cultures.
Reference
Ferguson, S. J. (2010). The politics of theorizing African American families: Old debates, new directions. In S. Hill (Ed.), Shifting the Center: Understanding Contemporary Families (4th ed., pp. 75–89). McGraw-Hill Education.