Family and Childhood in a Southern Negro Community1

The American Negro family is generally interpreted, ethnocentrically, as an impoverished version of the American White family, in which deprivation has induced pathogenic and dysfunctional features. This concept of the family is assumed in studies of Negro personality formation, which furthermore have relied entirely on clinical methods of research. Fieldwork among Negro town‐dwellers in the southeastern United States plus a reassessment of the literature yield a sharply contrasting portrait and interpretation of the American Negro family in which organizational strength and functionality are found. Observations of parent‐child relations show highly distinctive behavioral styles, some of which have remained undiscovered by psychoanalytically oriented studies and others of which differ markedly from the extrapolations of clinical research. These forms and styles are viewed as aspects of an indigenous American Negro culture. Finally, the formative effect of an indigenous culture is argued as a corrective to the common viewpoint of deprivation as the prime cause of Negro behavior. Negro, family in U.S.; Negro, child training in U.S.; Child study, U.S. Negro