Racial Equality through Family Stability?
Every day we see headlines and hear stories about disparities between the races: gaps in employment, academic achievement, incarceration rates, poverty, and on and on. It is politically incorrect to expect individuals to play a role in improving their own conditions or to accept most or all the responsibility for their woes. It is more profitable and mentally satisfying to blame third parties.
Based on numerous studies, not to mention a good dose of common sense and observation, family stability plays a huge role in whether a person ends up poor or spends time behind bars.
Kay Hymowitz, author of Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, discusses this topic in “Reviving the fight against racial inequality, closer to home.” (Unfortunately, free registration may be required. Try username twincities@bugmenot.com and password bugmenot) She invokes Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report warning about rising rates of illegitimacy in the black community. Branded as a racist for merely stating facts, Moynihan was drummed into silence. Forty-three years later, he’s a prophet. Seventy-five percent of black babies in the United States are born to unmarried mothers.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Fatherlessless begets many bad things. Children raised by unmarried mothers are less likely to graduate from high school, more likely to end up pregnant as teenagers, and more likely to spend time in the criminal justice system.
But I digress. Moynihan’s assumptions that racims and poverty caused social pathologies were shattered. Hymowitz writes:
“There were other puzzling facts. In 1950, at the height of the Jim Crow era and despite the shattering legacy of slavery, the great majority of black children — an estimated 85 percent — were born to their two married parents. Just 15 years later, there seemed to be no obvious reason that that would change. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, legal barriers to equality were falling. The black middle class had grown substantially, and the first five years of the 1960s had produced 7 million new jobs. Yet 24 percent of black mothers were then bypassing marriage. Moynihan wrote later that he, like everyone else in the policy business, had assumed that ‘economic conditions determine social conditions.’ Now, it seemed, ‘what everyone knew was evidently not so.’”
As conditions worsened in the black community, no one dared talk about the real cause of the problem. As the government poured money into more and more bloated government programs, black women continued to have babies out of wedlock. Decades after government-sanctioned segregation, black families have the lowest median income, and almost 30 percent of black children are poor.
Rebuilding and strengthening the black family would improve conditions in black communities and, more importantly, for black children. Children of any color are much better off growing up in a stable household where the mothers are married, preferably to the children’s father. Can Obama, married to his children’s mother and living under the same roof, serve as a role model?
“Through the power of his own example,” writes Hymowitz, “Obama presents a chance to revive what Lyndon Johnson called ‘the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.’”
