To Truly Reduce Racial Disparities, We Must Acknowledge Black Fathers Matter
“When our parents married, there was a sense that you were marrying for life,” said Edward Zigler, founder and director of Yale’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. “That sense is not as prevalent.”
Single parents in the U.S. were more likely to be employed — 35.8 percent compared to a 21.3 percent average — but they also had higher rates of poverty, the report found.
“The in-work poverty is higher in the U.S. than other OECD countries, because at the bottom end of the labor market, earnings are very low,” said Willem Adema, a senior economist in the group’s social policy division. “For parents, the risk is higher because they have to make expenditures on childcare costs.”
The Paris-based organization looked at a broad sector of indicators that affected families and children, including childhood poverty, early education and amount of time spent on parental care.
Across the nations examined, preschool enrollment has grown from 30 to 50 percent between 1998 and 2007. The average enrollment was 58.2 percent, while in the U.S. it was lower.
The report noted that public spending on child welfare and education is higher in the U.S. than in other countries — $160,000 per child compared to $149,000. However, the authors say most of that money is spent after the crucial early childhood years.
“This means early investment — including childcare and support for families around the time of birth — could be strengthened,” the authors wrote in a separate paper examining the United States.
The study pointed out that the U.S. is the only OECD country that does not have a national paid parental leave policy. Some states have started to adopt such policies, but most parents are offered 12 weeks of unpaid leave. This is particularly difficult for unwed mothers, who may not be able to afford to take time off, Zigler said.
“We have not built in the kind of national support systems for families and children that other countries have,” he said.
Childhood poverty rates in the U.S. are also expected to climb — 23.5 percent from 20 percent. Adema said the rise is a direct result of the financial crisis and higher unemployment rates.
“The financial strain causes all sorts of other strains, so ultimately it might contribute to family dissolution,” Adema said. “At the same time, it might bring some families together. I suspect that the response differs across families.”
The only institution to which today’s black children are routinely denied is marriage. Their plight won’t improve until they receive equal access.
By Katy Faust and Stacy Manning
Americans must confront the injustice of George Floyd’s death and examine issues of police use of force. We should review sentencing guidelines and revisit qualified immunity. We must never dismiss the generational effects of slavery and Jim Crow. We must acknowledge that racism is not primarily responsible for the struggles of the black community. Fatherlessness is.
Don’t take our word for it. Here’s what black leaders have to say.
Activist and #Blexit founder Candace Owens declares,
“The biggest issue facing black America is father absence.”
Former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume, when asked if white racism or the absence of fathers posed a greater threat to black Americans, replied without hesitation, “The absence of black fathers.”
Given the devastation fatherlessness visits on black children, you would think racial justice activists would sound the alarm. Yet Black Lives Matter openly seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family,” the only institution that, through marriage, binds children to their fathers.
The BLM core statement of belief mentions black mothers, black families, black parents, and even black trans women. Yet nowhere does it mention black fathers, even though when black fathers have access to their children, they prove to be more involved parents than their white and Hispanic counterparts.
What Kids Need.
The three staples of children’s social and emotional diet are their mother’s love, their father’s love, and stability. When children are raised by their married parents, they have daily access to all three. These needs have nothing to do with a child’s race, and the absence of one or more of these critical staples makes children emotionally malnourished and more likely to struggle academically, suffer a host of behavioral and emotional challenges, become a teen parent, and be incarcerated. That’s why marriage is a social justice issue for children.
Today, black children face an overwhelming injustice, being denied en masse the benefits of growing up in a married home. Only 17% of black kids make it to their high school graduation living exclusively with their married mother and father. That means 83 percent of black youth are suffering the loss of a parent or the instability of split homes. That’s an emotional starvation rate an order of magnitude greater than any other racial group.
Unsurprisingly, Minnesota, the epicenter of today’s racial unrest, is located in the region of the country with the greatest disparity in racial marriage rates. Fatherless kids are hurting kids. Tupac penned of his childhood spent without a dad,
“Had to play catch by myself, what a sorry sight.
A pitiful plight, so I pray for a starry night.
Please send me a pops before puberty —
The things I wouldn’t do to see a piece of family unity.
Not only does father absence disadvantage kids, it breaks their hearts.”
Does Racism Cause Fatherlessness?
Some recognize the problem of father absence in the black community but object, “Racism is causing fatherlessness!” If that were true, the plight of the black family would have been far worse in eras of overt racism. Instead, early 20th-century black women married at higher rates than their white counterparts.
As the nation emerged from Jim Crow, 25 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today that statistic is 72 percent. Instances of racism exist today, but you would be hard-pressed to argue anti-black racism is worse now than in 1900 or 1964.
If racism were the primary problem, Nigerian Americans also would not be among the most successful immigrant groups in our country, but they are. Much of their success can be attributed to strong marriages and strong families. In Nigeria, only 4 percent of children are raised in single-parent households, compared to the overall U.S. rate of 23 percent.
Leftist Policies Feed Poverty.
Racism is not primarily responsible for the dissolution of the black family. Leftist policies are. Renowned economist Thomas Sowell explains, “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.” This way of life has kept many black children stuck in cycles of generational poverty.
But because family breakdown, not racism, is overwhelmingly responsible for high rates of child poverty, the solution is found in marriage. The success sequence — 1) get at least a high school degree, 2) get a full-time job, and 3) get married before having any children — lifts 91 percent of youth out of poverty. Marriage is our greatest anti-poverty weapon.
Father Absence Increases Crime.
It’s sickeningly obvious that instances of white cops targeting and brutalizing black suspects exist, but racism isn’t the main explanation for the massive numbers of black men in prison.
Regardless of their race, children who grow up without dads, especially boys, are more likely to commit violent crime. Fathers teach children different lessons than mothers do. One of those vital lessons is teaching children to police themselves through rough-and-tumble play, straight talk, and a disciplinary style inclined toward getting kids to take responsibility for their actions.
Fathers provide their sons a role model of what a strong and self-controlled man looks like, and for daughters they model what a father and husband should be. When a father fails, or is flat-out absent, a young man is more likely to encounter his first enforced boundaries at the hands of police. Prisons could be renamed “centers for dad-deprived boys,” and black boys are dad-deprived more than any other demographic.
That’s not to say that children, black or otherwise, who grow up in a broken home are doomed. President Barack Obama is an example of a man who overcame great odds to reach the pinnacle of power and success. He also, by his own admission, suffered from the absence of his father.
Fathers Foster Academic Success.
Blaming systemic police racism for the struggles of black Americans is easier than doing the hard work of building and repairing families, but if we seek real change, our energies need to be focused on the hard work — or the home work. As senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Shelby Steele notes, “You can have the police go to as many sensitivity trainings as you want, it’s not going to read a story to a child at night before he goes to sleep so he’s developing his mind … [and] serious about the academic and educational development [needed] … in order to be successful.”
Steele understands how father absence affects the racial achievement gap. While it’s true that black students are often unfairly disadvantaged by living in districts with poorly performing schools, family plays an often ignored role in school success.
Academically, black students, 65 percent of whom are being raised by single parents, struggle most in school. White students, 24 percent of whom live in single-parent homes, tend to inhabit the middle ground. Asian students, 15 percent of whom have single parents, generally occupy the top-achieving academic strata. The correlation between kids in single-parent homes and academic struggles is glaringly obvious, but it seldom factors into discussions aimed at helping black students succeed.
What happens when fathers, regardless of race, marry the mothers of their children? They raise successful students. A meta-analysis of 30 studies found student success has infinitely more to do with family than with race. The researchers concluded, “The family elements that were most strongly associated with a reduction in the achievement gap were coming from a two-biological-parent family and high levels of parental involvement.”
Even more interesting, when the study factored in the religious faith of an intact family, “The achievement gap totally disappeared” (emphasis added). When their emotional needs are met in the home of their married mother and father, black students are just as capable of academic success as kids from any other racial group.
The Institution Most Black Kids Lack Is Marriage.
The shameful time in U.S. history when blacks were excluded from the institutions of education, business, and government has passed. America’s centuries-long systematic segregation has been replaced by targeted searches for minority enrollees and employees in our nation’s most prestigious universities and businesses. African Americans have been elected to the most powerful positions in government and hold the highest offices in many of the cities currently overrun by Black Lives Matter protests.
The only institution to which today’s black children are routinely denied is marriage. Their plight won’t improve until they receive equal access to this foundational institution, which unites the two people to whom children have a natural right — their mother and father — for life.
Katy Faust and Stacy Manning are co-authors of the new book “Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement.”
Photo Biova Nakou/Pexels
Opinion by: Saagar Enjeti
A clip surfaced of President Joe Biden recounting an old tale about a man named “Corn Pop.” Yes, you heard me correctly. I urge you all to stick around because it tells an important story about his candidacy.
Let’s hear it now from the man himself.
To give you some background the former VP is verbalizing there a story he told in his autobiography about how in the summer of 1962 he took a job as a lifeguard in order according to the Washington Post, “Learn more about the Black community”
While he was a lifeguard he wants us to believe that a gang called “The Romans” led by a man named Corn Pop showed up at the pool. After violating the rules governing the diving board, Biden expelled Corn Pop from the pool area and was then met by an angry Corn Pop when walked back to his car.
Corn Pop was apparently rumored to always be carrying a straight razor and after the two exchanged words they apparently made up and he was protected by Corn Pop’s gang for the rest of the summer.
Now uh…Let’s leave aside whether this anecdote is true or not. I have many doubts, beginning with “Corn Pop,” but this anecdote demonstrates a strange paternalism that he tells us is evidence of how he’s been a supporter of the black community from the very beginning of race relations fights in this country.
This paternalism I don’t think reflects a personal moral failing on his part, but one that is a consequence of age.
I’ve mentioned Biden’s gaffes here before. As you can see in that clip they’ve been around for a long time. The issue isn’t the gaffes, it’s what he says in between. You see in that clip that he thinks he can win over the black community with weird dated anecdotes of being a strict lifeguard. That’s how he approaches many of these issues. His thinking is largely rooted in the 1980’s and he’s been the champion of a failed consensus that hardly anybody really wants to turn back to.
Fivethirtyeight Editor-in-chief Nate Silver, he notes in a new piece….
That voter’s don’t particularly care about Biden’s gaffes but they absolutely do care about his age. Julian Castro and others have gone after Biden’s age for what it says about his general fitness for office and while I think that discussion is legitimate, it’s one that misses the root of what we’re really talking about.
Think about it, Bernie Sanders is 79, Joe Biden is 78, Donald Trump is 75, Elizabeth Warren is 72.
Why is it we discuss Dementia Joe Biden’s age so much in this cycle and not the others? It’s because not only does Biden bumble his words when he speaks, but his thinking and general orientation towards politics is so reminiscent of an age that has passed them by. Biden is a candidate in that he’s fundamentally not running on a transformative vision for the country.
Donald Trump’s campaign was derided as a step backwards. However, what it really was -was a break from a failed consensus to seek greatness we once had. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns are very similar. All of these are older candidates seeking breaks from the system and it’s why voters many years their junior are willing to give them a chance, and it’s why when we watch those clips of Joe Biden, it’s very disturbing.
Alan West and Steve Black — Way of the World