Healthy African American Families in the 21st Century: Navigating Opportunities and Transcending Adversities
| Author | Velma McBride Murry |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12363 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
V MB M Vanderbilt University
Healthy African American Families in the 21st
Century: Navigating Opportunities and
Transcending Adversities
Objective: To identify pathways through which
African American families successfully negoti-
ate and navigate stressful life events to facil-
itate positive family functioning, relationships,
and healthy developmental outcomes in their
children.
Background: Despite the advancement
of African Americans since passing of the
1965 Civil Rights Act, racism remains a major
stressor that affects everyday life experiences
of 21st-century African American families.
Little is known about the cascading effects
of race-related exposureon processes in African
American families, nor about what promotes
healthy functioning among African American
families.
Method: Three waves of data on 867 fami-
lies participating in the Family and Community
Health Study were analyzed to identify path-
ways that forecast family functioning and devel-
opmental outcomes of youth as they transitioned
from middle childhood to late adolescence.
Results: Stressful life events heightened mater-
nal depression and anxiety, which were
associated with a more cynical and hos-
tile worldview and poorer quality of family
Human and Organizational Development, Vanderbilt Uni-
versity,230 Appleton Place, PMB 229, Nashville, TN 37203
(velma.m.murry@vanderbilt.edu).
Key Words: African American families, cultural, family
relationship, longitudinal design, parenting, strength-based
assets, youth risk prevention.
relations. Parenting practices and family
relationship quality were linked with chil-
dren’s self-pride, which was closely associated
with more optimistic worldview. Self-pride
was also associated with future aspirations
among youth, and future-oriented youth tended
to engage in fewer self-harm behaviors as they
transitioned from middle childhood to early
adolescence.
Conclusion: Reframing one’s life situation,
despite exposure to racial discrimination, serves
a protective function for African American fam-
ilies. Exerting a sense of agency, internal will,
capacity, and strength are effective strategies
to transcend adversities.
Implications: That positive worldview can
render more manageable family outcomes
for African Americans, regardless of socioeco-
nomic status, is worth considering in research,
clinical practice, and preventive interventions.
At the turn of the century, Hildreth, Boglin, and
Mask (2000) posed a question: “Are Black fam-
ilies resilient enough for the challenges of the
21st century?” The present study was designed
to answer this question by examining ways in
which old and new challenges converge and
place additional demands on African American
family resilience in the 21st century. Specic
consideration is given to identifying pathways
associated with healthy family functioning and
family well-being. To set the framework for this
study, a brief overview of social context of the
342 Family Relations 68 (July 2019): 342–357
DOI:10.1111/fare.12363
Healthy African American Families in the 21st Century 343
21st century and its effect on everyday fam-
ily life is presented, followed by description of
relevant circumstances for understanding con-
temporary African American family life situated
within a legacy of marginalization.
Like other 21st-century families, African
Americans are living in and raising their chil-
dren in an era characterized as the digital age,
in which many aspects of individual and family
life are inuenced by social media (Chelsey,
2005). For African American families, however,
life in the 21st century continues to be affected
by the vestiges of slavery and the institution-
alized racial segregation that followed slavery
in the United States (e.g., Jim Crow laws).
Living at the intersections of these eras creates
a paradoxical experience for many African
Americans. Specically, there have been some
gains in quality of life and well-being in health,
education, employment, and economic status
in the half-century since passing of the 1965
Civil Rights Act (Murry & Liu, 2014). Yet
it is not uncommon for African Americans
to witness or directly experience explicit and
implicit incidences of racial discrimination
and marginalization. Further, the frequency
of sociopolitical incidents—including racial
proling and homicides of African American
males (many of which are attributed to police
brutality)—are of grave concern to African
American families (Varner & Mandara 2012).
These incidences are reminders to many African
American families that their modern experiences
cannot be understood separate from the experi-
ences endured by their ancestors; 21st-century
African American families must confront social,
economic, and political factors rooted in the past
that continue to impact their everyday life expe-
riences (Murry, Butler-Barnes, Mayo-Gamble,
& Inniss-Thompson, 2018). Of specic inter-
est in the present study is the identication
of factors and processes that explain African
American families’ capacity and resilience to
“intensify their own efforts toward improving
their quality of life” (Hildreth et al., 2000, p. 6).
The following section summarizes relevant
theories and empirical studies that informed
and guided the question guiding the present
study: Are Black families resilient enough for
the challenges of the 21st century?
C F
Several theories contributed to the conceptual
model and hypotheses posed and tested in the
present study. First, because of the rele-
vance of historical context to everyday lives
of 21st-century African American families,
Bronfenbrenner’s (1981) ecological theory
served as the overarching framework for our
study. This theory incorporates proximal and
distal processes that affect and inuence what
goes on inside African American families,
including development and adjustment of
children. According to this theory, African
American families’ lives are inextricably linked
and informed by multiple interrelated contex-
tual systems. Further, individuals’ capacities
and developmental outcomes are products of
the dynamic relational interactions that occur
within these systems.
Later advancement in the scholarship of ecol-
ogy, human development, and systems theories
was the conceptual integration of social rela-
tionship and relational interactions processes as
facilitators of individual developmental changes
(Lerner & Castellino, 2002; Lerner & Over-
ton, 2008). In this regard, human development
is inuenced not only by social relations (e.g.,
parent–child, siblings, peers) but also by multi-
ple systems that are structurally and functionally
integrated and embedded in historical and socio-
cultural systems, including educational, pub-
lic policy, governmental, and economic systems
(Lerner, 1986).
Specic to the present study,attention is given
to examining ways in which both proximal and
distal processes are linked with what goes on
inside families (Lerner & Castellino, 2002). In
this instance, the present study was based on the
premise that what goes on inside African Ameri-
can families is attributed to (a) the ways in which
families’ interact with and in their environmental
settings and (b) the capacity of family members
to engage in behaviors that shape social interac-
tions (Lerner, 1986). As active agents, I contend
that African American families have the capac-
ity to transcend socio-eco-political adversities
and shape the ways in which race, ethnicity, and
sociocultural settings inuence family function-
ing (Lerner & Castellino, 2002).
To capture families’ capacity to overcome
adversity, the resilience-strength-based concep-
tual model (Masten, 2014) and Murry et al.’s
(2018) integrativemodel for the study of stress in
Black American families were selected to frame
this aspect of the present study. These two con-
ceptual models highlight protective processes,
including cultural assets, that African American
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