Immigrant families
Sir: Amit Roy, despite the predigested 'sociology' of Peter Walker's diagnosis of bad housing and unemployment (incidentally given his record in government, why should anyone take notice) and underlying West Indian malaise, pinpoints the 'gradual fragmentation of West Indian family life.' `The proportion of single-parent families in their community has reached 30-40 percent.'
Is it true that the fragmentation has taken place in this country. West Indian selfanalysis traces the phenomenon back to slavery conditions (see any West Indian publication—the mirror imagery of white trash paperbacks of soft porn accepting the usual racial stereotypes of both sides). Those children brought over here in the mid and late 'sixties and now the West Indian woolly hat brigade, were pathetically rejected not only by their parents here, both forced to work and often living in subsequent liaisons not related to the newly arrived offspring; but by those mythical grandmothers who are the supposed backbone of the West Indian family system. The grandmothers dispatched them over here frequently on the basis of bad behaviour back home and resentful mothers here, put equally frequent appearances at the local child guidance clinic asking for residential schooling or other forms of care, having been turned down by child care departments seething with home-grown indignation at such dreadful rejection patterns. At this stage another mythological `diagnosis' was born, to be glimpsed in the descriptive verbiage of child care reports; thus, West Indian parents are 'Victorian' and `rigid', expanding oldfashioned, corporal punishment on their misunderstood children and a little later on throwing them out for 'normal' teenage rebellion. This right mix-up of liberal imagery subsituting for thought is not only confined in child care to West Indian problems of course, but it has certainly percolated through to the dreary cowardice of reporting on the West Indian scene in urban Britain.
The questions as I see them are as follows: (I) Do we expect the two-parent families with fathers in an active role?
(2) How do we tempt West Indian males into this encroachment on their sexual freedom ? It is cheaper and more fun the present way.
(3) How do we persuade West Indian teenagers not to have children they cannot cope with ?
I may be cynical and unconstructive, but I cannot—Mr Walker—see a reconstruction of West Indian family ( ?) lifestyle in our own present malaise.
S. Cohen Flat 5, 51 Sancroft Street, London SE11
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