Following up on my John McWhorter post, I notice that USAToday has an opinion piece entitled "Marriage is a Great Equalizer for Blacks." Hat Tip to Real Clear Politics. The piece is by Ronald Warren, President of the National Fatherhood Initiative. I know nothing about this outfit beyond what I saw from briefly visiting their webpage. Warren has this to say:
According to testimony given last fall to a Senate subcommittee by Ron Haskins of The Brookings Institution, from 1970 to 2001, the overall marriage rate declined 17% but 34% for blacks. The overall rate for out-of-wedlock births is 33% compared with 70% for blacks.
These disappointing trends are critical because research has shown that marriage provides significant benefits for men and women. Most important, children who are raised by their married, biological parents do better across every measure of economic, social, health and educational well-being than children raised in other family arrangements. In fact, when comparing families of similar socioeconomic status, these black children have similar outcomes as their white counterparts. Marriage is the great equalizer.
This is one of the most easily documented facts about human societies. I reproduced the following chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a previous post, in another context. It bears a second look.
Number of
poor Poverty
Year families rate for
Number of Poverty with female families
poor rate for (NSP) with female
families families householder householder
______________________________________________________________________
2004...... 7,854 10.2 3,973 28.4
2003...... 7,607 10.0 3,856 28.0
2002...... 7,229 9.6 3,613 26.5
2001...... 6,813 9.2 3,470 26.4
2000 12/.. 6,400 8.7 3,278 25.4
1999 11/.. 6,792 9.3 3,559 27.8
1998...... 7,186 10.0 3,831 29.9
1997...... 7,324 10.3 3,995 31.6
1996...... 7,708 11.0 4,167 32.6
1995...... 7,532 10.8 4,057 32.4
1994...... 8,053 11.6 4,232 34.6
1993 10/.. 8,393 12.3 4,424 35.6
What the chart shows is that the poverty rate for female headed households is about three times higher than for all households. Its not hard to see why. Two parents bring more than twice the level of resources to a family over what a single parent can provide. They allow a dynamic relationship and a division of labor that cannot easily be overestimated. This is just as true when the division of labor shifts in radical new ways.
When my daughter was an infant, I was the primary "mom." My wife worked full time to support us while I slogged through graduate school. I am sure I changed more diapers than the male Blanchard line going back to the Thirty Years War. At any rate, I have a deep appreciation of what two parents can bring to child rearing. No doubt that many single moms are great parents, but that doesn't change the impact of the numbers above. So I think Warren is dead spot on when he sees the state of the Black family as the most serious problem for Black America.
In 1890, 80% of black families with children were headed by married couples, according to sociologist Andrew Billingsley. That figure has dropped to 39%. In 1950, 64% of black males older than 15 were married compared with 68% of white males. By 1998, only 41% of black males were married. From 1950 to '98, the percentage of never-married black women doubled.
I think there is little doubt that this is the most important cause of the social dysfunction that so disproportionately afflicts Black Americans.
I would note something that Warren does not. Marriage is not only good for the children and their mother, though it is certainly that. The absence of the biological father from the home is the most reliable indicator of child abuse. But it is also vitally important for the male. Married males surpass their unmarried counterparts in every measure of physical, psychological, and social hygiene. They are far less likely to murder or be murdered, less susceptible to substance abuse, less likely to be poor or in prison. It is surely correct to worry about how tax policy and job growth affects the least fortunate of our citizens. But if you can figure out how to encourage marriage, that will do much more for the poor than any social program anyone can devise.
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