The context in which Black children do housework and its effect on adult behavior have been relatively unexplored. This article presents analyses of the recollections of 45 Black fathers of young children about performing household chores when they were children and its relevance for their involvement in housework as adults. The fathers' relatively high involvement in housework is traced to the "socialization for competence" that most of them experienced as boys. Four dimensions in the socialization for competence are discussed: the actual household chores done in childhood, the ways of performing them, the rationale for assigning them, and parents' justifications for making children engage in housework. Although the childhood socialization for competence does not translate uniformly into men's sharing housework equally, it takes away ineptitude as an excuse for resisting housework as adults.KEY WORDS: childhood socialization; housework; African-American men.Thanks to numerous studies over the past two decades, we now know that Black husbands and fathers do significantly more housework than do men of other racial-that is so, then Black women's earlier, heavier, and more continuous participation in the paid labor force than White women's (Hochschild, 1995;Landry, 2000), coupled with their espousal of egalitarian attitudes toward family and paid work as early as the late nineteenth century (Landry, 2000), may help explain Black men's higher involvement in housework. Yet, scholars have left the context in which Black children do housework and its effect on later adult behavior relatively unexplored.In this article I address those issues by presenting an analysis of the recollections of 45 Black men about performing household chores when they were children and its relevance for their involvement in housework as adults. This analysis is informed by the premise that the role of early socialization is more complex than a "baseline" for a life course (Gerson, 1985(Gerson, , 1993. To say that childhood experiences are important does not mean that adults simply replicate the lives of their role models or that those early experiences determine adult outcomes; it does, however, indicate that those experiences are available as meaningful future references, even if only 261

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It has been argued that during the 200 years since the French Revolution, its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity gradually have become more visible in societies throughout the world. In other words, societies, in one form or another, have tended to walk the path toward the realization of universal ideals; the decline of racial and ethnic prejudice, the acceptance of cultures other than one's own, and the role of the various means of communication in providing fast information about peoples that were once inaccessible are evidence of this point. Therefore, the argument goes, if this continues to be observed, then it is fair to infer that, in about 50 years, the assimilation of all individuals and the full realization of their potential will be possible.This article attempts to discuss the validity of this argument. As its title indicates, it assumes that the acceptance or rejection of assimilationist trends requires the analysis of social variables that may hinder or speed that process such as race, prejudice and discrimination, and class divisions. The article focuses on the social construction of race and its impact on assimilation in the United States and Brazil. These two societies have been chosen not only because they are the ones with which the present writer is most familiar but also because, due to their histories and to the social diversity of their peoples, the issues of race and prejudice play an important role in both.

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Considerable variation exists in African American men’s involvement in family life. In-depth interviews were conducted with forty-five Black fathers of young children regarding their life histories and self-reported contribution to the division of housework. This article examines the impact of men’s job experiences and love relationships on their family involvement. Paternal involvement is both a function of structural constraints and of men’s interpretations and actions about them. Of paramount importance are how men construe their experiences on the job market and how they feel about the breadwinning ethic. In addition, women affect men’s behavior by mediating their connections with their children, either as former lovers or as current partners. For those who lived with women, their participation in housework is also related to their partners’ employment status.