I have written here on the role of African American voters in gay marriage in California. Neither I nor anyone else so far as I can tell noticed a curious anomaly in this story. If indeed African Americans pushed Proposition 8 over the top in that state, they were defending a traditional institution that they, as a group, rarely engage in. The latter fact has had very unfortunate consequences for this population of Americans.
Kay Hymowitz, contributing editor of the marvelous conservative periodical The City Journal, explains:
In 1950, at the height of the Jim Crow era and despite the shattering legacy of slavery, the great majority of black children -- an estimated 85 percent -- were born to their two married parents. Just 15 years later, there seemed to be no obvious reason that that would change. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, legal barriers to equality were falling. The black middle class had grown substantially, and the first five years of the 1960s had produced 7 million new jobs. Yet 24 percent of black mothers were then bypassing marriage. [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan wrote later that he, like everyone else in the policy business, had assumed that "economic conditions determine social conditions." Now it seemed, "what everyone knew was evidently not so."
Well, yeah, economic determinism doesn't determine all that much. But here is the more important fact: at the very moment that the Civil Rights Movement achieved its astounding successes, the Black American family began to disintegrate.
Since 1965, through economic recessions and booms, the black family has unraveled in ways that have little parallel in human cultures. By 1980, black fatherlessness had doubled; 56 percent of black births were to single mothers. In inner-city neighborhoods, the number was closer to 66 percent. By the 1990s, even as the overall fertility of American women, including African Americans, was falling, the majority of black women who did bear children were unmarried. Today, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. In some neighborhoods, two-parent families have vanished. In parts of Newark and Philadelphia, for example, it is common to find children who are not only growing up without their fathers but don't know anyone who is living with his or her biological father.
And what has this meant for racial progress? Fifty years after Jim Crow, black U.S. households have the lowest median income of any racial or ethnic group. Close to a third of black children are poor, and their chances of moving out of poverty are considerably lower than those of their white peers. The fractured black family is not the sole explanation for these gaps, but it is central. While half of all black children born to single mothers are poor, that is the case for only 12 percent of those born to married parents. At least three simulation studies "marrying off" single mothers to either the fathers of their children or to potential husbands of similar demographic characteristics concluded that child poverty would be dramatically lower had marriage rates remained what they were in 1970.
It isn't difficult to understand the relationship between marriage and prosperity. Traditional marriage is a bond of commitment first and foremost, and a package of rights only as a distant second. It is a union of man and woman for the sake of a common investment in their offspring. It means that Mom and Dad's obligations toward one another take precedence over their own selfish interests. That creates an effective platform for the nurturing of children, and their launching into the future.
Coupling without marriage usually means coupling without commitment, at least on the part of the father. That is part and parcel of a larger collection of pathologies that has so severely retarded the advancement of African Americans.
The most successful social reform movement in the history of social reform movements was the nineteenth century religious revival that persuaded so many men to give up the gin, marry their significant other, and take care of their children. Liberals who care deeply about gay marriage should give some thought to this. Maybe marriage should be thought of not as a goody to be won from the state, but as a set of obligations that need to be reinforced by the larger community. The suffering of gay men and women whose relationship with their partners is not recognized in the law is worth caring about. The suffering of so many fatherless African American children is worse.
President Elect Barack Obama dared to tell brothers to pull up their pants. Will he dare tell them to marry the mothers of their children? And will it make a difference? So far, only religious faith has been effective creating strong families. If liberals think that they can solve the basic problem, now would be a good time to start.
Recent Comments