Quote Originally Posted by Lemur View Post
That sounds rather incomplete as an explanation. Doesn't address why (in some regions) black families are so much more fragmented than, say, Appalachian white families. After all, the largest percentage of welfare recipients are white. Why don't they have the same level of familial breakdown? Or do they fragment with less result?

Like I said, incomplete.

I'm not one to invoke white guilt, but buying and selling mothers, fathers, sons and daughters for centuries seems like the sort of thing that might have an impact on the family unit. That's not statistics, that's common sense.
It may be common sense, but it does not actually make sense when the historical statistics on black family creation are examined. In order to convincingly hypothesize a link between slavery and the poor state of the black family unit today, one would expect to see a steady, or at least a steadily trending, rise in the percentage of single parent families from that era to today as the effects of the family breakups compounded and became normative. Instead, the data shows that slavery was not all that damaging to the black family and that the percentage of single parent families decreased dramatically for multiple generations until the sudden reversal that began in the '70s. Why would the existence of slavery more than a century before cause a sudden and rapid deterioration of the black family when it seemingly had no effect on earlier generations that were chronologically closer to the institution?

I agree that the welfare theory is incomplete, but it does make more sense in my opinion than trying to draw a link back to slavery. For over thirty years black parents had a financial incentive to live apart. A family could not receive welfare if there was an able-bodied male living in the home. That is enough time for some very insidious habits to form, habits that correlate very closely with the sudden breakup of the black family. Add to that the Cloward-Pivenite social activists that targetted inner city black communities specifically to normalize welfare and swell the rolls, and you have a very unique incentivization for broken families that did not exist in other parts of the country such as Appalachia. In any event, it seems to be a theory that many social scientists and historians are gravitating toward.