This article concludes that the low marriage rates among AAs is the major culprit for the sinking Titanic that best describes AA life in 2009. But what can President Obama actually do about this? The low rate of AA marriages can be laid at the doorstep of many self-serving AA males and the low Quality of the mate material that many AA women see when they view many AA males as well as the indoctrinated AA women's stubborn resistance to dating and mating other more Quality males from other groups.
THANKS, FELICIA FOR THIS PIECE. I'm just documenting history so that when it's all over, future historians will know what happened and why from the viewpoint of a segment of AA women who think the way we do.
Readers: Please check out the COMMON Sense and CRITICAL THINKING sections of this EZINE for articles (posted recently), along with my comments.
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http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/racial-challenge-for-new-president/2008/12/08/1228584738163.html
Racial challenge for new president
Kay Hymowitz December 9, 2008
In the nearly half-century in which the United States has gone from George Wallace to Barack Obama it has another, less hopeful story to tell about racial progress, one that may be harder to reverse.
In 1965 a young assistant secretary of labour named Daniel Patrick Moynihan stumbled upon data that showed a rise in the number of black single mothers, which coincided with a decline in black male unemployment. Strangely, black men were joining the labor force more, but were marrying - and fathering - less.
There were other puzzling facts. 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 per cent - were born to their two married parents. Just 15 years later 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 per cent of black mothers were then bypassing marriage. 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".
President Lyndon Johnson was deeply shaken by Moynihan's findings. Neither man was driven by sentimentality or religious conviction, but both believed that fatherlessness undermined the "basic socialising unit". Johnson declared: "When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled."
Unfortunately, those warnings were as prescient as they were reviled. Civil rights leaders, worried about reviving racist myths about black promiscuity, objected to what they viewed as blaming the victim. Feminists were inclined to look on the "strong black women" raising their children without men as a symbol of female autonomy. The Moynihan report and the subject disappeared.
But the silent treatment was the wrong medicine. Since then the black family has unravelled in ways that have little parallel in human cultures. By 1980 black fatherlessness had doubled; 56 per cent of black births were to single mothers. In inner-city neighbourhoods the number was closer to 66 per cent. By the 1990s, even as the overall fertility of US women, including African Americans, was falling, the majority of black women who bore children were unmarried. Today 70 per cent of black children are born to single mothers.
What has this meant for racial progress? Fifty years after Jim Crow, black 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 per cent of those born to married parents.
Black married couples make a median household income of $62,000, which is more than 80 per cent of what white households earn and represents a gain of 13 percentage points since the 1960s. Yet overall, black household median income is only 62 per cent that of white households, a mere six-point increase over the same period.
Merely walking down the aisle cannot 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 will not 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.
Kay Hymowitz is author of Marriage And Caste In America.
The Washington Post
Anyone can decide to marry, even selfish childish fools. When I read the question I read it as 'Can Obama cause people to marry that are marriage material?' The obvious answer is NO.
Posted by: Pamela | January 12, 2009 at 01:32 PM