African American Families in the US

African American Families in the US

Introduction

No matter where or when a person lives, skin color, beliefs, class, or history he/she will see a difference in the way every ethnic group is treated. This world has never been fair for anyone. Life can treat a person with the greatest of care or it will treat a person as if he/she is lower than dirt. African Americans are no different. They have faced great hardships and triumphs throughout the years.

In industrialized societies, the most common type of family is the nuclear family: a unit composed of a husband, a wife, and their children. Most people belong to two families. The family of orientation is the nuclear family into which one is born. The family of procreation is the nuclear family which one makes with one's spouse and then by having children. A variation of the nuclear family is the blended or reconstituted family in which spouses and their children from former marriages live together as a single nuclear family. The blended family is not new. In times when the death rate was high, widows and widowers with children were common, so when they remarried they created a blended family. Today, divorce has resulted in the binuclear family, in which each divorced parent establishes a separate household and the children spend time in both. The extended family is composed of two or more generations of kin who function as an independent social and economic unit (Conrad, 2005).

Analyzing the Current Event

The Great Social Transformation Family structure including marriages and families changed a great deal as societies moved from communal to associational. Before industrialization, rural households performed a wide variety of functions and often contained many people such as servants, apprentices, orphaned children, elders, and live-in boarders. Family size decreased ...