Ensuring inequality : the structural transformation of the African American family

This text analyzes the evolution of the contemporary African-American family from historical, cultural and social policy perspectives in an effort to understand why marital ties have weakened among poor African-Americans and why mother-only families have increasingly become a normal feature of ghetto poverty.

It argues that the cumulative effects of slavery, sharecropping and urbanization significantly weakened African-American family ties and that mother-only families emerged in the early 20th century as a response to the instability of wage labour for African-Americans.