Let’s not cede this issue to the conservatives….
This op-ed in today’s WPost by Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor of the conservative City Journal and author of “Marriage and Caste in America,” does a succinct job of piecing together the scholarship on the decline of marriage among African Americans. Newcomers to this issue assume a straight line can be drawn from slavery to fatherless families. That’s not the case, as Daniel Patrick Moyniham famously revealed:
In 1965, a young assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan stumbled upon data that showed a rise in the number of black single mothers. As Moynihan wrote in a now-famous report for the Johnson administration, especially troubling was that the growth in illegitimacy, as it was universally called then, coincided with a decline in black male unemployment. Strangely, black men were joining the labor force more, but they were marrying — and fathering — less.
The topic was so incendiary that liberals pushed it into a politically correct debate – forcing the banning of the term “illegitimate” whle ignoring the issue. The liberals prevailed, but at a cost:
… the silent treatment was the wrong medicine. 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.
Probably for reasons of brevity, Hymowitz doesn’t mention the big driver behind the fatherless families, the education gap. Today, twice as many black females as males earn college degrees. As sociologists repeatedly confirm, women are less likely than men to “marry down,” a trait that applies to white women as well. All of which leads me back to the “marriageable mate” issue.
With overall college graduation rates favoring women by nearly a 60-40 balance, there’s no chance this is not affecting white women as well. Check out the “social consequences” heading in the library to the right and you can bring yourself up to speed. Significant changes in marriage rates and age are well under way. A connection to the campus gender imbalances? As a reporter, that’s out of my league. For now, I’ll await word from researchers.
Leaving this issue to the conservatives, as happened after the Moynihan report, would be a mistake. Hymowitz, however, does a nice job here. Her conclusion:
Merely walking down the aisle can’t explain these differences. Rather, the institution of marriage appears to promote ideals of stability, order and fidelity that benefit children and adults alike. Those who pin their hopes for black progress on education tend to forget this. Numerous studies, when controlled for income and race, show that, on average, children growing up with single mothers are less likely to graduate from high school and go to college. And Moynihan’s discovery of a negligible relationship between “economic conditions and social conditions” suggests that even increases in black male employment are not a certain cure.
Through the power of his own example, Obama presents a chance to revive what Lyndon Johnson called “the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.” Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” conveys the economic, emotional and existential toll of growing up fatherless, and he has spoken movingly of his determination to ensure for his own children a different life. Yet tackling this issue won’t be easy. When Obama gave a Father’s Day speech lamenting “fathers . . . missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Jesse Jackson was so incensed that he said he wanted to castrate Obama. Still, painful as the subject is, the alternative is far worse: racial inequality as far as the eye can see.
Tags: marriageable mate
