Photo credits: D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice
A professional research study was conducted in the late 20th century by a team of educated black professionals, which was a centerpiece of the 1985 Conference on the Black Family.
This historically relevant three-day event was held in Cleveland, Ohio. Though this event was organized over 30 years ago, the speeches and professional research presentations provided at the Conference on the Black Family remain relevant to black America today.
In 2020, nearly 35 years after this historic black summit, many people are reacting to the ongoing plight, which still faces a vast number of blacks who are experiencing systemic racism. This ongoing oppression is being carried out by multiple facets of America’s different societal institutions (economic, criminal justice, education, etc.).
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Black men, in particular, have been disproportionately disadvantaged in American society due to generations of social experiments. The impact on black men that these different social experiments created was overwhelmingly adverse. Not only that, these adversities created a lasting effect on black men, which persisted for years after the social experiments were conducted.
Ultimately, these lasting effects drastically altered black men’s connection to black women for the purpose of unifying with (not competing against) their female counterparts. This tremendously curtailed the strengthening of the black family, the foundation of black existence all over the world.
In his literary contributions to 1985’s Conference on the Black Family, Dr. Lawrence E. Gray touched on this monumental drift within the black subculture. Dr. Gray is the former director of the Institute for Urban Affairs and Research at Howard University. He is the author of a research paper titled Black Men’s Perceptions of Their Problems: Implications for the Family.
Dr. Gray’s research paper was based on an abundance of scientific research that was backed by empirical data. In addition to this, the data described in Dr. Gray’s work was principal in nature, not peripheral.
“Although writers have consistently used secondary data sources to document the high risk status of Black families, this paper will rely on primary data to examine how Black men see problems in their lives.The author plans to report on a study of 142 Black men who lived in a large northeastern metropolitan area in the United States,” Dr. Gray wrote.
His literary contributions begin on the 18th page of a 144-page document. The document unifies all the published contributions, which underpinned the historic 1985 Conference on the Black Family in Cleveland, Ohio.
Source: Study Examines How the Societal Challenges of Black Men Affect the Black Family
