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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Reid has also booked a well-known Brooklyn minister, Rev. Herbert Daughtry of the House of the Lord church, to perform the service. After an article about the project mentioning his involvement ran earlier this month in the New York Daily News, he was besieged with calls from couples from as far away as Delaware and Texas inquiring about the contest. Daughtry, who will require the winning couples to go through premarital counseling at his church, agrees that the mass marriage will set an example for the black community. "We have a serious challenge with respect to family cohesiveness," he says. "Anything that can stabilize the family, anything that can bring families together, I extol to the highest."
Other community activists also applaud Reid's efforts. "There are no police dogs keeping us from the altar," says Robert L. Woodson Sr., founder and president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington. Noting that marriage rates were much higher among blacks until the 1960s -- even in the face of racism, poverty and lack of political participation -- he insists that societal woes alone are not to blame for the current instability of the African-American family. "What this woman is saying is that we must reach down and pick ourselves up out of the mess we're in now. And one of the ways we can do it is to encourage marriage."
Still, some experts wonder if Reid might be putting the Cinderella coach before the horse.
"Under the best conditions, marriage is probably a stabilizing force," says social psychologist M. Belinda Tucker, director of the Family Research Consortium IV at UCLA, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences, and co-author of "The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans: Causes, Consequences and Policy Implications."
But if it were up to her, she says, she'd focus on strengthening the community so that it can support marriage, not the other way around. "There are people who see marriage as the answer: If people get married, then all else will follow. But I'm not sure there's a recognition that there are all these barriers to marriage. I say that if you provide the supports for marriage -- jobs for all people who need them, dealing with the imprisonment rate, and all the other things that make it difficult for people to marry -- then you might see an increase in marriages."
David Popenoe, professor of sociology and co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, agrees in part. "The biggest problem, of course, is not that they can't afford the wedding but that the men don't make enough money to help support a family," he says, citing high unemployment and underemployment rates for black men. The resulting attitude among women, he says, is, "'Why bother marrying them if you're just going to inherit their debts?' So that leads to the whole idea of having more effort put into jobs and job training for black men." He also cautions that cohabitation -- which, in the context of Reid's project, is a good thing, showing that the couples are committed -- may actually be a shaky precursor to marriage; some research suggests that those who live together before marrying are more likely to split up afterward.
Still, he does believe in a fundamental effort to shore up the institution itself. "Promoting marriage in the black community is entirely worthy. There's a very, very striking correlation between problems in the black community -- whether crime or school dropouts or teen pregnancy -- and the percent of children in that community who are growing up outside of a married-parents family," he says. "I'm just not sure about promoting weddings." The key, he says, is marriage education, which is also what's at the core of the government's African American Healthy Marriage Initiative. "The best way is to teach -- especially guys, if you can get them in there -- the importance of marriage and how to treat women. Because a lot of these guys grew up without dads, and they have no idea what a marital relationship is all about -- and it's hard."
Manhattan psychotherapist and couples counselor Sharyn Wolf is more than willing to give Reid's couples the benefit of the doubt, but she also comes out and states something uncomfortably obvious. "To say you're not getting married because you don't have the money is kind of a lame excuse," she says. "Sure, there are couples who just haven't gotten around to getting married yet, and there are couples who for other reasons have been avoiding it and I hope she knows the difference when she picks them."
Reid, while conceding that there are "no guarantees," says she's confident that she can indeed tell the difference. "I want to bring black love back in style," says Reid. "Ten couples may not be what it takes, but the lives of over 30 children will be affected, plus countless family and friends who will be motivated by their courageous stand to get married. There's a cycle that has to be broken."
