The purpose of this research is to examine issues surrounding the subject of how African Americans respond to Alcoholics Anonymous. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the connection between African Americans and Alcoholics Anonymous arises, and then to discuss the weight of evidence for the persistence of AA in the black community.
The question of alcoholism among black Americans is connected to larger issues of substance abuse in the modern culture as a whole and in the African American community in particular. Midanik and Clark (1994) say that there are fewer cultural differences between social-drinking and alcohol-abuse patterns among black, Hispanic, and white Americans as of 1994 than as of 1984. Increased age rather than type of culture is said to be a more reliable predictor of a decline in alcohol use. There appears to be a widespread acknowledgment that substance abuse of any kind in the black community is connected, at least in part, to the failure of the dominant culture to sufficiently include African Americans as full participants. In this regard, Blake and Darling (1994), as well as Roberts (1994), cite problems of social and economic integration faced in particular by African American males, noting connections between unemployment, poverty, high rates of death, and substance abuse on one hand, and the pressures of the mains--ream culture on black men to conform to mainstream values despite the tendency to divide black men from the mainstream on the other. Blake and Darling focus principally on the social implications of the mixed message that the white culture sends to the black, suggesting that such problems as substance abuse have a primarily social rather than physical or even individual psychological basis. Roberts (1994) asserts that mainstream-culture pressure exerts an influence on the manner in which black men interact or fail to interact with one another in positive way...