Heather Mac Donald, in the City Journal, encourages President-Elect Obama to ignore the New York Times’ counterlogical social-program prescriptions for reducing crime among blacks. Her solutions: beef up inner-city police forces and tell blacks to get married before having kids:
Liberal policymakers and pundits have spilled buckets of ink over the years promoting social-service programs as the solution to crime, yet—like the Times’s recent editorial—those opinion-setters cannot squeeze out one word about the most effective anticrime (and antipoverty) strategy: marriage. The marriage imperative civilizes boys. . .
Freed of the social expectation that they will have to provide a stable home for their offspring, boys have little incentive to restrain their impulses and develop bourgeois habits. In 2005, the national black illegitimacy rate was 70 percent, and it approached 90 percent in many inner cities (compared with a white illegitimacy rate of 25 percent, and as low as 6 percent in some urban areas, like the District of Columbia). The disappearance of marriage from the black community is a social cataclysm.
Some highly structured, values-based youth programs, like the Boy Scouts, can provide boys a surrogate for the paternal authority that they lack at home; society is right to support these lifelines. But they cannot possibly bring crime down significantly among blacks in the absence of a cultural shift toward marriage. True, no one knows yet how to revive marriage in the black community. But given the imperative of doing so, you would think that somewhere in the flood of recommendations for more useless government social programs, a little space could be reserved for promoting the idea of a marriage movement. . .
Ideally, president-elect Obama would tear up the liberal playbook on crime that is so expertly summarized in the Times’s pronouncements. Obama’s political affiliations make that course unlikely. But if he pushed back against the Times’s economic determinism and stressed that people from any economic background have the capacity and duty to reject a life of violence, if he called on fathers to take responsibility for their children (as he has done in the past), he would start in motion a set of changes that could bring greater peace to black communities.
Question for Texas: Wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage black kids who are going to have babies anyway to get married beforehand even if they aren’t quite 17?
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Kurt, your conclusions above are right on.
Black families have deteriorated directly in proportion to government welfare programs, which largely removed the responsibility of black men to provide for their children. Johnson’s War on Poverty, begun in his term of office (1964), has cost the nation far more than the $11 trillion spent on welfare since this misguided program began.
Quote from Linda Chavez, July 21, 2007, NYP: “The poor are disproportionately made up of women and their children. Poverty rates for families headed by a single white woman with children under 18 were 25.3 percent in 2005; for similarly constituted black families, the rate was a shocking 42 percent. But for married couple families, the comparable rate for whites was just 6.1 percent, and for black families it was only 8.3 percent.” The contrast could not be more clear. Marriage largely resolves the poverty issue.
Walter Williams (“Blaming the Past”) quotes Herbert Gutman, author of The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925. He “found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were double-headed. In fact, “Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.” Williams concludes that the current problems in the black community have “nothing to do with a so-called legacy of slavery, unless we’re willing to say that slavery has a delayed reaction of four or five generations.”
But government-sponsored *welfare incentives* have almost everything to do with illegitimacy and absenteeism among fathers. And thereby virtually everything to do with black, inner-city crime rates.
There are other contributing factors that need to be addressed, across the board in every ethnic community. One of those that screams for attention is the pornography question — including the widespread endorsement of immorality and illegitimacy by Hollywood.
Ingrid Bergman, one of the greatest film actresses ever, was driven out of Hollywood in the 1950s because she had an illegitimate child. Today, Hollywood heaps praise on unmarried parents. No one ventures to disapprove of any behavior, no matter how outrageous or irresponsible.
It is a message that harms children all over the nation and the world. Moral Americans should boycott films and television shows that promote immorality, including those made by actors and actresses who live that life-style.
Sorry if this sounds draconian to libertines, but civilizations die from the toxins this kind of mindset generates.