“Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate,” shouts an AP headline. Buried deep in the article is a a statistical baseline for comparison:
This issue entered the public consciousness in 1965, when a now famous government report by future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described a “tangle of pathology” among blacks that fed a 24 percent black “illegitimacy” rate. The white rate then was 4 percent.
I’m not sure what’s shocking: That the rate for blacks has tripled in my lifetime or that whites have now surpassed the level of pathology Moynihan described.
In 1993, Moynihan would coin a phrase to describe this trend.
In 2005, 40 years after Moynihan’s 1965 “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” report, Kay Hymowitz described the nuclear-level fallout in the immediate years after his report, which on some level remains radioactive — note the scare quotes around “illegitimacy” in the above AP piece. Incidentally, note the statistic at the beginning of Hymowitz’s article indicating that these numbers have increased just in the last five years:
Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
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.
So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.
Read the whole thing.
It is natural for children to go into the family business. The kids see a working pattern that supports a good income. That is much better than suggestions about what they could do in theory. That is a reasonable thing to do unless they are particularly gifted, driven by personal dreams, or excluded from the family business.
The middle classes look on city poverty and wonder why those families would perpetuate their own poverty in a world of free education and great opportunity. But, the education is poor and stifling, and only gives a promise of a better life in theory. All around them, there is a quite workable pattern of wellfare and a “good” income compared to the proven alternatives. The children are following the pattern of the family business. It does no good to say that they could accomplish so much more. Survival requires doing what reliably works, what is observed, and not what is hoped for.
Are their dreams too low? Only from a higher point of view. To change this, children need a combination of useful education (not more expensive) delivered by teachers held to account (not protected by a union) and a system of apprenticeship (despite the trades unions) so that the better pattern is observed while it is learned.
People are not made middle class by studying the classics. They will change their behavior to acquire what is proven to be available.
Charles Murray has noted that Middle Class Whites now have an illegitimacy rate of 20%, and that working Class Whites have a rate of 40%. Hispanics went from 17% in 1980 to over 50% today.
So, illegitimacy touches everyone BUT upper class Whites, and Asians. It has different rates among different races, but it still exists and is growing among almost all groups/races/socio-economic slices.
Why?
Because without a need for beta male providers, women will prefer to share Alpha Males. The seven kids whose names and six mothers names Antonio Cromartie struggled to remember, on “Hard Knocks” are maybe the extreme outlier, but nevertheless the direction of where family is headed. And why not? Welfare AND higher living standards allow women to have what they want most: Alpha males. Without dealing with what Sandra Tsing Loh in her Atlantic article described as “Kitchen B****” (i.e. provider beta males sharing housework). For middle class women, a maid or part-time nanny is a better substitute for a boring beta guy, with intermittent Alpha entanglements. This is what Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about in her Time essay in 2000, i.e. chaotic, amorphous family arrangements that maximize female sexual freedom.
Our entire consumer superstructure is built around female consumption and marketing. You can optimize this freedom, but the cost is child-rearing. The upper middle classes depend most on wealth protection, so they are more resistant to single motherhood and divorce than other groups. Blacks being poor and urban more than most fell into that trap deepest and earliest.
You can see this most clearly in what makes a man attractive in each class. For upper middle class, it is wealth generation and status. Lawyers, doctors, Wall Street Partners, etc. For Working Class folks, generally macho-ness over all (you can see this clearly in Chav Britain). Among the celebrity uber-classes, whoever has the most fame and power. Among the urban poor, whoever has the most gangsta appeal.
Black, Hispanic, and working class White women (and Middle Class White women) won’t change unless welfare is abolished and their working earnings so low that they and their kids face starvation. The possibility of that being so close to zero as to be impossible.
So, we will simply have to live with only a few being upwardly mobile, only a few people being middle class, a few upper class, and the rest as poor as Brazilian Favelas.
The nuclear family is fragile. It only exists when Alpha Male and most female choice is severely restricted. Despite its wealth generation abilities, its requirement for choice restriction is so unappealing to these groups that it is a historical anomaly.
The high out of birth rate is just another part of the strategy.
The marxists tear down every institution that gives power to others rather than the state. People in good families can weather adversity without government, so statists can’t have that.
Other examples of institutions that are under non-stop attack by marxists are: religion, small businesses, state and local governments, private schools. Unions will be attacked in due time. At the moment, unions are being explointed rather than being destroyed.
Stanley Ann Dunham was a trendsetter!
this is another consequence of socialism which is the dominent economic system in the inner city. if your on welfare and you have four children and can’t provide for them, want more money, have another child. its that wonderful idea of sharing according to your needs instead of your deeds. when i was living in the projects in the 1960′s i got to see the destruction of the black family first hand by the welfare rights movement. according to the 1960 census over seventy percent of black families had two parents in the home. by the 1980 census that number was thirty percent. that alpha beta male stuff is a bunch of bullshit. this breakdown of the nuclear family is a direct result of marxist strategy. the first place in america where divorce and the breakdown of the family occured was in left-wing hollywood. can’t get anymore marxist than that.
We have to stop rewarding women with checks for having babies. If a woman comes onto the welfare roles with two kids — that’s it. No having a third at the last minute so she can stay on welfare for six more years — no checks increasing with every baby.
If an additional child is born, it’s the mother’s problem to raise it with the money she’s already getting. Perhaps some women will give their babies to an orphanage — the child may well be better off than living with a social service gamester.
I’ve been familiar with the Moynihan report for some time. It was largely swept under the rug for a couple of reasons. First, it should be pointed out he did the report as Deputy HEW (now HHS) Secretary to determine why blacks had failed to progress ten years after Brown vs Board of Education (Eisenhower).
Now, the two other stark conclusions from the report: 1) Black poverty is the result of the same factors as white poverty 2) Black poverty was not the result of white racism towards blacks preventing them from being upwardly mobile.
Democrats did not like those two conclusions. It went against their soon-to-be political narrative that racism was causing lack of black progress. Important aspects of the report were largely ignored to justified massive money and programs steered to blacks on grounds it was needed to compensate blacks for racism, which democrats still maintain is the cause of their lack of social progress. Conservative whites became the villains to justify the programs and redistribution for the democrats to get the black votes.
Never mind Republicans were the anti-slavery and civil rights party. Go figure. No good deed shall go unpunished. Thanks for reminding us of another monumental lie told by our democratic friends.
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do people realize that for almost eighty years the government has been taxing good parents out of their ability to have children and then using that money to pay some of the worst parents in america to have more children. and they call it social justice.
kguerre: “Never mind Republicans were the anti-slavery and civil rights party. Go figure. No good deed shall go unpunished. Thanks for reminding us of another monumental lie told by our democratic friends.”
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Mr Mc Donnell: “do people realize that for almost eighty years the government has been taxing good parents out of their ability to have children and then using that money to pay some of the worst parents in america to have more children. and they call it social justice.”
ANSWER: No, most people voting today have no idea of the history of how we got into this mess. We need more responsible citizens voting for our public “servants” out of knowledge vs.emotion.
Government action cannot halt trends (unwed motherhood) that has as its causes something other than government action. The government trying to halt unwed motherhood is like Canute sweeping back the tide. More than the economics of the situation would have to change; feminism would have to be refuted; adultery and promiscuity would have to be criminally punished; etc.