BOOK REVIEW : An Upbeat Study of the Origin, Destiny of the Black Family : CLIMBING JACOB’S LADDER: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families <i> by Andrew Billingsley</i> ; Simon & Schuster; $27.50; 528 pages

F amily values, as the phrase falls from the lips of a cultural warrior like Pat Buchanan, are code words that may evoke the benign image of “Father Knows Best” but also carries a more threatening message: If your family does not conform to certain specifications, then it is not a family at all.

A much different--and a much healthier--notion of what constitutes a family is presented by pioneering black sociologist Andrew Billingsley in the pages of “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” a study of the origins, the challenges and the destiny of the black family in America.

Billingsley, a professor of sociology and African-American studies, refuses to fall into the trap of measuring the hard realities of family life against the mythic depictions in popular culture or political debate. Rather, he adopts an expansive definition of the very word family as it applies to black Americans: “An intimate association of persons of African descent who are related to one another by a variety of means, including blood, marriage, formal adoption, informal adoption, or by appropriation.”

What’s more, Billingsley refuses to subscribe to the notion that the black family is somehow defective or dysfunctional.

“The African-American family is neither dead nor dying, nor vanishing,” Billingsley insists at the very outset of his book. “Instead, the family remains a resilient and adaptive institution reflecting the most basic values, hopes and aspirations of the descendants of African people in America.”

Billingsley offers ‘Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” as “a sequel and a companion” to his pioneering 1968 study, “Black Families in White America.” As if to remind us of how startling Billingsley’s ideas seemed back in the 1960s, his new book includes a forward by historian Paula Giddings: “I remember feeling my mind expand,” she writes, “when I read what the new generation of black sociologists . . . had to say about the black family.”

A quarter-century later, what Billingsley has to say is no less mind-expanding and consciousness-raising. Indeed, given the public debate over the prospect of a “permanent underclass”--more code words with distinctly racist overtones--Billingsley’s thesis will strike some readers as both surprising and encouraging: Black families, as well as the churches, schools, businesses and other institutions that make up the black community, represent an underappreciated resource for combatting the undeniable social crisis that afflicts all of us.

“Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” should not be mistaken for a political manifesto or an inspirational tract. Billingsley’s work is scholarly, well-documented and well-thought-out, and reinforced with the charts, graphs and tables that one expects to find in a social-science monograph. Indeed, as I pondered Table 1.3 (“Typology of Single-Parent-Headed Households”), I began to worry whether “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” will find the readership that it deserves outside the classroom and the college library.

But even Billingsley’s scholarship is beguiling and provocative. He surveys the arguments in favor of the “African Genesis” of the human race: “What was Eve like?” Billingsley writes. “She was a dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed woman . . . who roamed the hot savannah region of Africa. . . .” He encourages us to understand the forces that shaped the development of black culture under slavery, and to appreciate how much was achieved in the face of institutionalized brutality and exploitation: “While in bondage the African captives made families,” he insists, “They also made revolution.”

Billingsley brings sharp psychological insight and what can best be described as a big heart to the sociological and statistical data that informs his study. Thus, for example, when analyzing the incidence of obesity among black women, he wonders out loud if women tend to internalize the “societal and interpersonal stresses” that men may express in the form of fighting or drinking.

“For women,” he speculates, “obesity may be a price for the manner in which they respond consciously and unconsciously to all the stresses in their life.”

Billingsley appears to concede that black families are forced to contend with some of the very worst manifestations of the societal crisis in contemporary America: drugs, violence, disease, poverty, and so on. And he acknowledges that fundamental reform in society at large may be essential to cope with the crisis. But Billingsley refuses to despair, and he insists that the African-American community contains within itself an abundance of human resources that are too often overlooked.

“We believe that black families have arrived at a point of maximum danger,” he concludes, “which is also a point of maximum opportunity.”