NOTES FROM THE FOURTH WORLD: A Comparison of Black and Maori Families

Tu Tangata, Issue 34, 1 February 1987, Page 44

NOTES FROM THE FOURTH WORLD: A Comparison of Black and Maori Families

by Robert Staples, Professor of Sociology, Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Univesity of California, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA.

In an earlier article I described the dimensions of the Fourth World, its characteristics and composition. Basically, it was defined as a world of non-white groups living in a subordinate status in white settler nations. Those nations were the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Fourth World groups are Aboriginals, Maoris, Eskimos, Indians and Black Americans. Only the Black Americans are not indigenous to their societies and are included only because they, along with other Fourth World groups, were originally involuntary cohabitants with white settlers who colonized the United States. A central part of this article is that the white settler nations are manifested by the dominance of European derived culture and a capitalist form of economic organization. Both features serve to maintain Fourth World inhabitants in an unequal status in their societies, no matter how long their tenure in any of the white settler nations. It explains how even recently arrived European immigrant groups achieve a greater level of social mobility than Fourth World groups who have had a much longer residence in their countries.

Consider, for instance, the unit of the family in white settler nations. Over a hundred years ago Karl Marx and Friederich Engels wrote that the European family had become an appendage of capitalism. With the development of private property, the monogamous family came into existence in order that man could pass on property to his “rightful” heirs. Women became sexual objects, were relegated to the sphere of household labour and children were rendered a commodity whose number and value rose and fell with their importance in the relationship to production. The nuclear family supplanted the extended kinship structure in order to accommodate the need of industry for a mobile labor force. In contrast, Fourth World groups were tribally organized and communal in character and spirit. Property belonged to the group not the individual, and land was not an economic unit but contained the spirit and heritage of the group. In their cultural context, the family was a cultural and spiritual form and not subject to the economic rationalizations imposed by the European ethos.

As Fourth World groups were subject to European cultural values and economic pressures, their family structure has been transformed from its original purpose and character. Nowhere is this truer than among Black Americans, the most acculturated and de-tribalized of our Fourth Woirld groups. Still, the influence of European settlement and influence is so pervasive as to create a commonality among Black American

and Maori families. Both groups have a family system currently defined as experiencing a crisis because it fails to produce individuals capable of meeting the educational and economic requirements of the white settler nation. Hence, it is claimed that the different family structure of Maoris and Black Americans account for their unequal status in their respective societies.

What, exactly, is the different family structure of Maoris and Black Americans that renders them ineffective in reproducing the European ideal. Centrally, it refers to the higher number of lone parent households and ex-nuptial births among Maoris and Black Americans. In particular, the ex-nuptial births to teenage women is blamed for the high proportion of school leavers among these two Fourth World groups and their subsequent high unemployment rates. Alternative explanations are available if one understands the nature of the Fourth World’s culture and the current dynamics of European based societies. As the transmission of sexual values has been transferred from the tribe/family to the schools and mass media, Fourth World youth have been sent the message that sexual relations are separate from reproduction. Thus, the sexual instinct has been liberated from its traditional control by the family and tribe. At the same time the technological means for controlling the number of children has been perfected and made accessible through the means of contraceptives and abortion. While both Black American and Maori

women have a higher abortion rate than European women, they also have a higher fertility rate. Both are causes and consequences of their different cultural values. They have a higher abortion rate because they are less likely to use contraceptives and, if pregnant, less likely to use abortion to prevent a birth. A child, regarded as the soul of their culture and family, is brought to fruition and accepted into the family without stigma. This contrasts with the European value system that no longer needs children as laborers in an agrarian society and produces them only in the context of the nuclear family’s need to perpetuate its lineage. Moreover, those Black American and Maori women who wish to marry the biological fathers of their children are unable to do so because many of the men have been rendered redundant in the labor market. Almost half of Black American and Maori men under the age of 21 are unemployed. Thus, marriage becomes problematic for men who can not support families in the urban industrial system of white settler nations. Additionally, marriage registration is just one means of legitimating unions in Maori and Black American society. Despite the clash with their traditional cultural values, the fertility

rate of Maori and Black American women has declined over the last twenty-five years, especially among married women. For Maori women, their declining fertility rate is abopt the most rapid change for a national population anywhere in the world. Still, the growth rate for both Black Americans and Maoris remain higher than that of Europeans. Almost one half of the population for both groups is aged between 10 and 29 years of age. The infant mortality rate for both groups fell in the last twenty-five years but remains twice as high as that of Europeans. This continued racial differential reflects the unequal social conditions and life chances of Fourth world people.

Another commonality of Fourth World groups is their alleged matriarchal structure. It is claimed that women are the more powerful of the sexes in decision making, both for household and general affairs. Since matriarchy refers to women who rule an entire society, it would appear to be an inappropriate label for Maori and Black American women who are victimized by both racism and sexism. Among Maoris, women have higher rates of unemployment and lower levels of income and education than Maori men. Black American women have lower levels of income than men of the same race. Perhaps there is a confusion of dominance with strength. Both Black American and Maori women are strong because conditions of group survival required them to be. The European ideal of a subordinate woman prevailed because European men controlled every aspect of their society. Fourth World men only had that control until the advent of European settlement. As former Secretary to the United Nations, Andrew Young, notes, “This is a generality but a system of oppression tends to produce strong women and weak men”.

In sum, the family system of Black Americans and Maoris have been impacted by their contact with Europeans, the subsequent imposition of a Eurocentric value system and structural inequalities in the political economy of white settler nations. Enough of the Black and Maori values have been retained to put them at odds with the European ideal of a stable family system. As a people largely stripped of their ties to the land, and discriminated against in the wage labor system, the economic links between marriage, children and the nuclear family are weaker. Thus, the union between men and women does not have to be legitimated by marriage registration in order to facilitate property division in case of a nuptial dissolution. Community recognition is sufficient for a people largely bereft of property to dispose of when disharmony erupts in the marital

union. Children born to these unions are regarded as a value in themselves, regardless of the conditions of their birth. Paternity is not insured by the monogamy of women imposed by marriage registration as much as it is a function of the males ability to sire and recognise the children of his blood. Conversely, the European tendency is to regard children are a playful commodity or a reproduction of their race and lineage entitled to inherit their estate and perpetuate their status. This predisposition is mirrored in their reluctance to adopt children other than newborn, healthy children of the same race. In Fourth World culture, the extended family is the basic unit of socialization and support of children in contrast to the more restricted and isolated nuclear family environment of European children. Where there are no cultural explanations for the variations between Fourth World and white settler families, analyzing economic inequalities enhances our understanding of those differences. Some Maori and Black American women fail to marry in the event of an ex-nuptial birth because the father of their child is not gainfully employed, especially among the young people where a majority of males are unemployed. Such young men are often perceived as undesirable husband/ father candidates. The economic status of Maori/Black American women can also often shape the decision to bring an ex-nuptial child into the world. One American study found that there exists a link between school failure and adolescent pregnancy. Girls with poor basic skills were four times more likely to have a child in their teens as those with average skills. The author of that

study concluded that these girls with poor basic skills felt no avenues of opportunity were closed to them by a teen pregnancy because they never believed that any opportunities ever existed for them.

Thus, the structure of Black and Maori families is not the cause of their unequal status in white settler nations. In part, it is the cultural and economic discrimination they experience that accounts for problems in their family systems. Even the problematic aspects of Black and Maori family life is frequently a function of the European definition of what constitutes the ideal family organization. The solution lies in the recognition of and respect for Black and Maori family values and the elimination of racial and economic inequalities that impact on members of the Fourth World.