I read. A lot. In fact when I am home you will generally find at least one book per room that I am reading, ask my wife she finds them all the time. One thing that my reading does is make me think. Recently I was reading an article by Mychael Massie, who is Mychael Massie you ask? Mychael Massie is the National Chairman of the conservative black think tank, Project 21. He has appeared on Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, CSPAN, BBC News. One thing he wrote recently caused me to sit straight up. In talking about the damage liberal entitlement policies have caused to the black family platform. The exact thing that caused me to sit up was the line At the signing of the Civil Rights Act, 87 percent of black households were married, two-parent homes, and 40 percent of blacks were business owners.
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Wow, this couldn't be right I thought. So I did some digging, mostly through the US Census Department's own web site, and sifting through numerous really boring charts, graphs and big worded studies I compiled my own list to check on these figures. In 1970 the number of black households that were married with both spouses living together was 68.3%. The number of households with just a black, unmarried female running the household was 28.0%. This was roughly 6 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I'm not saying the Act in and of itself was wrong, it was not. Segregation, poverty, crime and attitude towards the black culture by white Americans was deplorable. Something had to be done to right the wrongs. What happened to the black family from this point on is what Massie was trying to point out. The entitlement programs created, helped to drive a wedge in the black family dynamic, welfare, food programs and other social programs started gearing a thought process towards a non-nuclear family lifestyle. Let's take a look out from 1970 onward by decade and see...
1980: Percent of black households with both spouses present: 55.5%, Percent with unmarried black female running household 40.3%
1990: Percent of black households with both spouses present: 50.2%, percent with unmarried black female running household 43.8%
2000: Percent of black households with both spouses present: 32.5%, percent with lone black female running household 48.9%
2010: Percent of black households with both spouses present:30.1%, percent with lone black female running household: 73.4% with only 26.6% married with spouse present.
What does this all mean? It shows hard figures on what is happening to our society today, this isn't a black/white/brown issue separately, numbers of married living together couples have been declining for every race since the era of social reform in the 60's. It just seems that the minorities have been hit the hardest. Income does come into play in this whole figure yes, a black male making less than $15,000 a year only marries 24.2% of the time while a black male who makes over $100,000 will be married 68.4% of the time. Obviously money helps to have a family life but, while I do not know Mr. Massie personally what I took from his article and from my own research when you take a person who makes little or no money and give them incentives to not work they will most likely not work and learn to use that system to the best of their abilities. You then raise the next generation within that system and for those children living like that is normal, it's all they ever knew.
And yes these numbers work just the same for white and Hispanic populations too, my research was geared to finding the numbers that Massie quoted so I geared my research to the black family. In doing that research you can see an overall trend away from the nuclear family, especially within the poorest income ranges, note however that even though marriage rates are dropping in these income brackets, birth rates are not which generally means you have one parent raising one or more children, the cycle then continues.
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