AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE: REDISCOVERING OUR FOUNDATIONAL WORKS

Abstract

Race, ethnicity, and culture are central to human development and family life. However, early research pathologized these influences on African Americans. Pioneering scholars studying African American families challenged pathology-focused perspectives, laying the foundation for the strengths-focused culturally-anchored research that is now seen in the field. This article revisits this pioneering scholarship, rarely published in peer-reviewed journals, reintegrating them into the discourse on families so that their significance can be understood and recognized. Pioneering scholars offered nuanced theoretical frameworks, identified contextual and within-group variations, developed innovative methods to capture complexities and variation in African Americans’ functioning, and presciently recognized researchers’ positionality impacting research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We have chosen to use the term African American rather than Black. At the time of the writing of the foundational pieces, using the term Black was the convention and considered a more contemporary and sensitive term than the term Negro. Today, the social convention is to use the term African American when referring to those families whose ancestors endured the legacies of American slavery and its aftermath and consider the term Black to refer to all peoples who are part of the African diaspora who vary in ethnic or national background (e.g., U.S. born Blacks, Haitians, Nigerians in the United States, and other places). In practice, the foundational scholars likely included Black people in their research without regard to their ethnic background. However, they framed their research and their theoretical contributions on the historical experiences in America, including a history of enslavement, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and oppression.