"Bravo to the authors! They have done an excellent job addressing the issues that are critical to community members, policy makers and interventionists concerned with Black families in the context of our nation."
--Michael C. Lambert, University of Missouri, Colombia
"African American Families is a timely work. The strength of this text lies in the depth of coverage, clarity, and the ability to combine secondary sources, statistics and qualitative data to reveal the plight of African Americans in society."
--Edward Opoku-Dapaah, Winston-Salem State University
"African American Families is both engaging and challenging and is perhaps one of the most important works I have read in many years. This book will most certainly move the discourse of the socio-economic conditions of black families forward, beyond the boundaries already set by other books in the market. African American Families is an excellent book whose time has come, and one that I would most definitely adopt."
--Lateef O. Badru, University of Louisville
African American Families provides a systematic sociological study of contemporary life for families of African descent living in the United States. Analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, authors Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith identify the structural barriers that African Americans face in their attempts to raise their children and create loving, healthy, and raise the children of the next generation.
Key Features:
- Uses the lens provided by the race, class, and gender paradigm Examples illustrate the ways in which multiple systems of oppression interact with patterns of self-defeating behavior to create barriers that deny many African Americans access to the American dream.
- Addresses issues not fully or adequately addressed in previous books on Black families These issues include personal responsibility and disproportionately high rates of incarceration, family violence, and chronic illnesses like HIV/AIDS.
- Brings statistical data to life The authors weave personal stories based on interviews they′ve conducted into the usual data from scholarly(?) literature and from U.S. Census Bureau reports.
- Provides several illustrations from Hurricane Katrina A contemporary analysis of a recent disaster demonstrates many of the issues presented in the book such as housing segregation and predatory lending practices.
- Offers extensive data tables in the appendices Assembled in easy-to-read tables, students are given access to the latest national agencies data from agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, Centers for Disease Control, and Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Intended Audience:
This is an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses such as African American Families, Sociology of the Family, Contemporary Families, and Race and Ethnicity in the departments of Human Development and Family Studies, Sociology, African American Studies, and Black Studies.
Angela J. Hattery is Professor of the Women & Gender Studiesand co-Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender Based Violence at the Universityof Delaware. She received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Carleton College and her masters and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of 12 books. Her most recent, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement explores the ways in which racial antagonisms are exacerbated by theparticularstructures of solitaryconfinement. She is also the author of Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change (2022) and Gender, Power and Violence: Responding to Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence in Society Today. Prior to coming to UD she held positions at Ball State University, Wake Forest University, Colgate University, and most recently at George Mason University.
Earl Smith, PhD, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Sociology at Wake Forest University, and is currently teaching classes in Sociology, African and African American Studies, and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. Dr. Smith earned his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut. His teaching and research focus on the sociology of sport, social stratification, and the intersection of race and the criminal justice system. He is the author of 12 books, including his most recent book, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement (2021). The book is based on three summers of ethnographic research in a large state penitentiary system. Methodologically, we conducted over 100 face-to-face interviews with inmates and correctional officers. His other books include Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change (2022) and Gender, Power and Violence: Responding to Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence in Society Today and Race, Sport and the American Dream (2014).
