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According to the modern-day
civil-rights establishment, most of the problems that currently
afflict African Americans result directly from the intractable white
racism that allegedly continues to plague blacks in every region of
the country -- across all age groups, all educational levels, and all
income brackets. This civil-rights elite largely ignores the role of issues within the
black community, such as the calamitous breakdown of the black family
since the 1960s, in framing its critique.
In mid-1960s
America, the nation's out-of-wedlock birth rate (which stood at 7.7
percent at the time) began a rapid and relentless climb across all
demographic lines, a climb that would continue unabated until 1994,
when the Welfare Reform Act put the brakes on that trend. Today the
overall American illegitimacy rate is about 33 percent (26 percent
for whites). For blacks, it hovers at near 70 percent—approximately
three times the level of black illegitimacy that existed when the War
on Poverty began in 1964.
Illegitimacy is an important issue because
it has a great influence on all statistical indicators of a
population group’s progress or decline. In 1987, for the first time
in the history of any American racial or ethnic group, the birth rate
for unmarried black women surpassed that for married black women, and
that trend continued uninterrupted until the passage of welfare
reform. The black out-of-wedlock birth rates in some inner cities now
exceed 80 percent, and most of those mothers are teens. Because
unmarried teenage mothers—whatever their race—typically have no
steady employment, nearly 80 percent of them apply for welfare
benefits within five years after giving birth to their first child.
No group can withstand such a wholesale collapse of its family
structure without experiencing devastating social
consequences.
Father-absent families—black and white
alike—generally occupy the bottom rung of our society’s economic
ladder. Unwed mothers, regardless of their race, are four times more
likely to live in poverty than the average American. Female-headed
black families earn only 36 percent as much as two-parent black
families, and female-headed white families earn just 46 percent as
much as two-parent white families. Not only do unmarried mothers tend
to earn relatively little, but their households are obviously limited
to a single breadwinner—thus further widening the income gap
between one-parent and two-parent families. Fully 85 percent of all
black children in poverty live in single-parent, mother-child
homes.
While the overall black poverty rate remains about
two-and-a-half times higher than the white poverty rate (24 percent
vs. 10 percent), the “face” of black poverty has changed
dramatically in recent decades. At one time, almost all black
families were poor, regardless of whether one or both parents were
present. Today, however, two-parent black families are rarely poor.
Among black families where both the husband and wife work full-time,
the current poverty rate is a mere 2 percent. Moreover, the
relatively small (13 percent) income disparity between black and
white two-parent families completely disappears when we take into
account such factors as occupational choices, educational attainment,
age, geographic location, and comparative skills.
Children in
single-parent households are raised not only with economic, but also
social and psychological, disadvantages. For instance, they are four
times as likely as children from intact families to be abused or
neglected; much likelier to have trouble academically; twice as prone
to drop out of school; three times more likely to have behavioral
problems; much more apt to experience emotional disorders; far
likelier to have a weak sense right and wrong; significantly less
able to delay gratification and to control their violent or sexual
impulses; two-and-a-half times likelier to be sexually active as
teens; approximately twice as likely to conceive children
out-of-wedlock when they are teens or young adults; and three times
likelier to be on welfare when they reach adulthood.
In
addition, growing up without a father is a far better forecaster of a
boy’s future criminality than either race or poverty. Regardless of
race, 70 percent of all young people in state reform institutions
were raised in fatherless homes, as were 60 percent of rapists, 72
percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of long-term prison
inmates. As Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector has noted, “Illegitimacy is a major
factor in America's crime problem. Lack of married parents, rather
than race or poverty, is the principal factor in the crime
rate.”
Since the black illegitimacy rate is so high, these
pathologies plague blacks more than they affect any other
demographic. “Even if white people were to become morally
rejuvenated tomorrow,” writes black economist and professor Walter E. Williams, “it would do
nothing for the problems plaguing a large segment of the black
community. Illegitimacy, family breakdown, crime, and fraudulent
education are devastating problems, but they are not civil rights
problems.”
The civil-rights establishment, however, paints a
very different picture, characterizing such problems as nothing more
than by-products of white racism. That view, through decades of
constant repetition, has won the minds of many black Americans.
“Instead of admitting that racism has declined,” observes Shelby
Steele, “we [blacks] argue all the harder that it is still alive
and more insidious than ever. We hold race up to shield us from what
we do not want to see in ourselves.”
It bears mention that
the astronomical illegitimacy rate among African Americans is a
relatively recent phenomenon. As late as 1950, black women nationwide
were more likely to be married than white women, and only 9 percent
of black families with children were headed by a single parent. In
the 1950s, black children had a 52 percent chance of living with both
their biological parents until age seventeen; by the 1980s those odds
had dwindled to a mere 6 percent. In 1959, only 2 percent of black
children were reared in households in which the mother never married;
today that figure approaches 60 percent.
The destruction of this stable black
family was set in motion by the policies and teachings of the left,
which for decades have encouraged blacks to view themselves as
outcasts from a hostile American society; to identify themselves as
perpetual victims who are entitled to compensatory privileges
designed to “level the playing field” in a land where
discrimination would otherwise run rampant; and to reject “white”
norms and traditions as part and parcel of the “racist” culture
that allegedly despises blacks. It is not inconceivable that one of
those traditions which many blacks have chosen to abjure is the
institution of marriage. In their landmark book America in Black
and White, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom make this profoundly
important observation:
“In the past three decades the proportion of intact
married-couple families has declined precipitously even though the
fraction of black women aged fifteen to forty-four who were divorced,
separated, or widowed also went down.… It is thus not divorce but
the failure to marry that has led to such a momentous change in black
family patterns. The marriage rate for African Americans has
plummeted in the past third of a century. In 1960 … [b]lack women
were only a shade less likely to marry than white women.... Today a
clear majority of African American women aged fifteen to forty-five
have never been married, as compared with just a third of their white
counterparts…. Many fewer black women are marrying, and yet they
continue to have children—which was not the case in an earlier
era.”
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