Dads matter, case closed
AMERICA has witnessed months of civil unrest in cities around America following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Many of the protesters decry income “inequality.” But the most serious “inequality” is the unequal percentage of fathers in Black households, a phenomenon that has been encouraged by government policies that reward out-ofwedlock births.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was assistant secretary of labor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, published “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” At that time, 25 percent of Blacks were born outside of wedlock, a number that this former adviser to John F. Kennedy and future Democratic senator said was catastrophic to the Black community.
Moynihan wrote: “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected, it is very near to inevitable.”
Moynihan, according to his daughter, “was crucified by the left,” many of whom considered the book racist.
One of the most prominent liberal think tanks in America is the Brookings Institute. One of the most prominent conservative think tanks is the Heritage Foundation. Yet despite their ideological differences, they agree on America’s most important domestic issue: Fathers matter.
In 2015, Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote “Purposeful Parenthood” and said:
“The effects on children of the increase in single parents is no longer much debated. They do less well in school, are less likely to graduate and are more likely to be involved in crime, teen pregnancy and other behaviors that make it harder to succeed in life. Not every child raised by a single parent will suffer from the experience, but, on average, a lone parent has fewer resources — both time and money — with which to raise a child.”
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, in 2012 made the same case as did the researchers from Brookings: “Child poverty is an ongoing national concern. ... According to the U.S. Census, the poverty rate for single parents with children in the United States in 2009 was 37.1 percent. The rate for married couples with children was 6.8 percent. Being raised in a married family reduced a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 82 percent.
Rapper T.I. recently said: “If (Blacks) make up for 13 percent of this nation’s population, we should make up for 13 percent of the ownership of land. We should be representing at least 13 percent, 14 percent on boards (of ) financial institutions, and so on and so forth.” Does this rule apply to the NBA, where three-quarters of the players are Black? More importantly, does this apply to the percentage of Black kids born outside of marriage?