Quote Originally Posted by Lemur View Post
That strikes me as unnecessary when there is a much more proximate cause for social-norm breakdown at hand: the deliberate breaking up of families under slavery.
I find it difficult to subscribe to this notion. It plays into white guilt more than statistical reality. Modern scholarship can trace no direct line between slavery and the state of the modern black family, as the breaking up of families was not as common as was once assumed and black families strengthened (i.e. became more two-parent) for several generations before deteriorating. Contemporary understanding of the problem pins the blame squarely on the welfare policies of the Great Society that perversely encouraged black men to live outside of the home so black women could collect.


IT ONCE WAS fashionable to suppose that slavery had made the conventional family difficult to sustain because of spouses so often being sold away from one another and children being separated from their parents. A natural conclusion was that, after slavery, the old patterns persisted, especially given how difficult conditions continued to be for black people, and that this was an understandable precursor to the fatherless norm in inner-city black communities after the 1960s. There is, indeed, sociological literature showing that it was hardly unknown for black people to be raised by single mothers during slavery and afterward. In fact, over the last 150 years, there have always been proportionately more single-parent black homes than white ones.

However, as classic work by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman has shown, despite the horrors of slavery, overall, during the pre-emancipation era, about two-thirds of enslaved families had two parents—far more than today. More recent revisionist work has stressed that, while forced separations were always an important part of the picture, the two-thirds figure remained dominant (Wilma Dunaway is especially handy on this). And this tendency continued into the Jim Crow era, contrary to a false sense one might have of daily life in a black ghetto of the 1930s and ’40s—think Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices or Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. Namely, it is wrong to suppose that, amid the misery of those neighborhoods, all but a sliver of children grew up without a dad. That is a modern phenomenon, whose current extent—fewer than one in three black children are raised by two parents—would shock even the poorest black folk 100 or even 50 years ago.

A standard reference on the subject by University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles in 1994 is most often taken as evidence of the uninteresting—that, gosh, in the old days poor black people didn’t find single parenthood unusual. What is actually more important in its findings is that, from 1880 to 1960, fewer than one in three black children nationwide didn’t grow up with two parents. Another key statistic, from Barbara Agresti in 1978, is that, just past emancipation, in 1870 in Walton County, Florida, about 57 percent of black children lived with two parents; just 15 years later, 89 percent did. Or, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton told us in Black Metropolis, in Chicago in the 1920s, it was considered a problem that just one in seven black children were born to single mothers. What’s more, that number went down during the Depression, not up.

Data like this are important because they show that the reason so few black children grow up without fathers today is not a mere matter of economics or, more graphically, because black men without college degrees find it so hard to get decent work that they abandon their children. After all, black people living under the vicious racism of 100 years ago nevertheless tended, very strongly, to form two-parent families.

Rather, what happens today is more a matter of what people in inner-city neighborhoods grow up seeing as normal (note my evasion of the loaded word culture, although for those who can stomach it, it is precisely what I mean). Plus, there is the sheer fact that, from the 1960s until 1996, expanded welfare policies made it possible to stay on welfare as a mother indefinitely without job training—impossible before the ’60s, and much less common today in most states than it was before 1996. This is why a man could so easily leave kids he fathered to be raised alone—and unsurprisingly, starting in the 1970s, an unprecedented number did.