That’s the title of a post I have on John Rosenberg’s fine “Discriminations” blogsite this week. Its basic point is that, by abandoning the married, two-parent family at the same time that the civil-rights movement finally triumphed in the sixties, too many African Americans have blown the opportunities that they could have seized. It’s in line with David French’s fine post yesterday. He and I note that it’s a reality ignored by the left, notably Black Lives Matter. And, as I conclude, this is really about family, not race:
"Some Blunt Talk on Race"While I’m focusing on African Americans here, let me also hasten to add that all of this is true for members of other racial and ethnic minority groups — and for whites, too.
Indeed, much is being made now of the collapse of strong families and the concurrent rise of social pathologies in large swaths of white America. That seems to be the theme of J.D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. That was also the point of Charles Murray’s earlier book, Coming Apart.
That’s all true. This is really not about race. Bad behavior leads to bad results for any demographic group, and bad behavior for any demographic group is strongly correlated with raising children in a home without a father.