- Author: Omolade, Barbara
- Title: The Unbroken Circle - A Historical and Contemporary Study of Black Single Mothers and Their Families
- Language: English
- Journal: Wisconsin Women's Law Journal 3: 239-274
- Publication Year: 1987
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Law School
■ Excerpt from the Foreword This essay, The Unbroken Circle, examines Black single-mother families and their historical development during three eras: slavery, segregation and desegregation. It focuses on the beginnings and contemporary condition and experiences of these families. The concept "social death," which is the theoretical framework for this study, comes from Orlando Patterson's cross-cultural study, Slavery and Social-Death. The study includes a Black feminist perspective and expands Patterson's concept of "social death" beyond the institution of slavery into the second class and marginal position of Black people within a racist society. In addition, the study examined another theoretical framework, the dialectics of oppression, and found that the debased condition and position of the oppressed always led to their conscious resistance and desire for freedom. Black resistance to social death took the form of creating viable families, whether patriarchal or female-headed, and of developing extended kinship networks along with political and protest strategies.
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