Repairing the Breach Revisited: A Focus on Families and Black Males

Abstract

How black boys and men are situated in social systems, opportunity structures, developmental contexts, and the consciousness of America were the foci of an initiative launched in the early 1990s by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s National Task Force on African American Men and Boys. The Task Force focused its attention on “African-American men and boys who, at the time, were not a part of either the recognized economic structure… the body politic of the country… nor communit[ies] with[in] their own ethnic groups …” The Task Force’s influential report, Repairing the Breach: Key Ways to Support Family, Reclaim Our Streets and Rebuild Civil Society in America’s Communities (Young & Austin, 1996), recounted the realities of what, by this point in historical time, most Americans should have known: that the health and development of black boys and men are anchored in an array of environmental, social, and psychological forces. These forces, in turn, are endemic to structural and operational systems ranging from macro-level political and economic structures and influences, to those at community and family levels, and to the individual cognitions and behaviors of black males themselves. The Task Force report also recognized that violence and disaffection toward and by black men and boys were symptoms of this multi-layered system of influences.