The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies

Via the DAD29 blog:

An article that examines the problem in the black community that the media, politicians and academics don’t want to face: the decline of the two parent family.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

It’s not hard to figure out why the arbiters of conventional wisdom don’t want to pay much attention to this problem. It doesn’t fit the template.

Having an interest in more spending on social programs, more "diversity" preferences and quotas and more bashing of those whites who don’t agree with these measures, they can hardly deal with a reality that threatens their interests and their worldview.

The template requires that white racism must be not merely the distant cause of problems in the black community, it must be the proximate cause.

And the villains must be white Republicans and conservatives.

In fact, there are indeed plenty of whites to blame. There are, for example, people in the entertainment media who have promoted sexual mores that seem harmless to middle class yuppies but are a disaster in the inner city. There are people in the public education monopoly who have fought against school choice. There were the policy wonks in the Johnson Administration that put together Great Society programs that encouraged welfare dependency and out of wedlock births.

But that line of inquiry raised questions that the conventional wisdom finds horribly inconvenient.