Family

Over the past century, racial/ethnic minorities have grown as a proportion of the U.S. population. More attention has been given to their family experiences, and the lenses through which their families are viewed have been modified as scholars have recognized that U.S. family life is not and never has been monolithic or stagnant.

The family is frequently a site of cultural and political controversy because it is often viewed as the guardian of societal values or the womb in which each generation is created and molded. A society's sustain-ability is assumed to be dependent on the quality of its families. Consequently, governments generate incentives and disincentives, sometimes quite severe, privileging or disallowing certain family practices. Past policies have prohibited interracial marriage and used sterilization to prevent reproduction by poor or disabled people. Today, some states deprive women of public assistance if they have additional children, and other states constrict the grounds for divorce.

Then and now, such policies disproportionately affect families of color because racial minority families historically experienced higher levels of divorce, nonmarital births, and single parenting than did White families. However, during recent decades, these trends have increased at a faster rate among White families, so that the gaps between the races are in many cases smaller than they were previously. For instance, nonmarital births have been increasing for all racial/ethnic groups. In 1980, 57% of African American births were nonmarital, whereas 9% of White births were nonmarital. In 2004, nonmarital births accounted for 69% of Black births and 25% of White births, indicating a 21% increase for Blacks but a 178% increase for Whites. In terms of teen births, in 1991 African Americans had the highest rate of teen births, but during the ensuing decade they experienced the steepest decline, so that by 2002 Hispanic American girls had the highest rate. These changing trends are reflected in the way in which scholars have approached the study of families of color.