Contesting the Rhetoric of ‘Black Family Breakdown’ from Barbados

Abstract

The paper contests the persistent rhetoric of “black family breakdown”, defined in contemporary Barbadian discourse as the fragmentation of both the Afro-Caribbean extended family, and also the Euro-centred nuclear unit based on marriage and co-residence which has been consistently and for generations promoted as the model to which the black population should aspire. Separating myth from reality on selected issues which are highlighted as evidence of “family breakdown”, namely child discipline and abuse, adolescent sexuality and pregnancy, divorce and the so-called “abandonment” of the elderly, the paper recommends a greater appreciation of family structure and change as a process of reconfiguration in alternative ideological and cultural patterns within the historical and socioeconomic environment of Barbados, and the rejection of the deficit model of black families in social and moral crisis.