There Actually WERE More Two-Parent Black Families under Jim Crow

with Megyn Kelly

On Friday, I sat down with Megyn Kelly of SiriusXM. We talked a lot about Late Admissions, but we also addressed a handful of topics in the news, including the new New York Times Magazine piece about Ibram X. Kendi (more on that tomorrow in my conversation with John McWhorter) and unfair criticisms of black conservatives like Clarence Thomas, Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, and, of course, me.

Donalds made the news last week when, during an event in Philadelphia, he noted that black families remained intact—more marriages stayed together, more children were raised in two-parent households—at higher rates during Jim Crow than today. There shouldn’t be anything remarkable about such a comment. It’s simply a fact. There were far more black two-parent households relative to the population in the US in the 1950s and 1960s than there are today. It’s not even close. And that shouldn’t surprise us, because there were far more two-parent households in the US overall at that time than there are now. The half-century-long surge in one-parent households is, for many reasons, a more dire problem for the black community than it is for others, but it’s not only a “black problem.”

Progressive commentators have unfairly claimed that Donalds is pining for the good old days of Jim Crow by pointing out a fact that anyone with even a passing familiarity with the statistics knows to be true. That’s patently absurd, and it demonstrates the dishonesty, smug superficiality, and condescension of those on the left who would rather smear black conservatives as Uncle Toms than deal with the serious questions many of us pose. Does Joy Reid have a real response to this crisis in black family life? Does she care? The fact—again, I say fact—that there were more intact black families in the US at a time when we suffered under actual systemic racism should provoke any thinking person to ask why that would be the case. Nobody—not me, not Byron Donalds, not Clarence Thomas—thinks the answer is “Because Jim Crow was good, actually.”

It would be one thing if Reid and her ilk actually believed that was what we believed. Then we could simply set the record straight. But she knows we don’t believe that. She’s pretending she does because it’s easier to portray black conservatives as buffoons and lackeys than to deal with the real critiques many of us have about liberal policies on race. She doesn’t have an answer to those critiques. Not only that, she seems not to understand there’s a problem.

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MEGYN KELLY: Because of your more conservative leanings and positions—and you're not shy about expressing your opinions, you're as open with your opinions as you are with your past—you've taken a lot of incoming. For example, you've been called “the pathetic black mascot of the right'“ and worse. And so I wonder how you feel looking around today as you see our news is full of more right-thinking black conservatives or conservative-adjacent figures who are taking exactly that kind of incoming, whether it's Byron Donalds, who's feeling it almost every day, a congressman from Florida, or Clarence Thomas, who has probably taken more of that than any other black American alive.

GLENN LOURY: Okay. You're talking to a black conservative. I greatly admire Justice Thomas. I got my eye on Byron Donalds. I think he's an interesting character. And yes, I do think they are more voices of that sort now than there were ten or twenty years ago. And I think there's a good reason for it. I think it's because the party line, the liberal party line—black people can't do anything in this country until white people get their knee off of our necks, we need reparations, structural racism is the root cause of all of the disadvantage that black Americans are experiencing, the police need to be defunded, we need to abolish prisons, affirmative action is the answer—I think that view of the world is collapsing before our very eyes. I think it's bankrupt. I think its inadequacy is becoming more and more clear.

And I think the calls that you hear—Justice Thomas is an Uncle Tom, he's a grifter, and whatever. Justice Thomas is one of the most significant people to sit on the Supreme Court in the history of this country. He's had an enormous impact on American life. He's a towering figure. And he, moreover, is an exemplar of what is possible for African Americans to achieve in this great country. And that is becoming more and more clear with each passing year.

Likewise for other of these voices. Byron Donalds, again, whom I've got my eye on, is one such. I think liberal orthodoxy is collapsing. I think the DEI view of the world is untenable in the long run in this country, and I think the people who adhere to it are desperate. Name-calling and character assassination is all they've got. They don't have any arguments.

The attacks on Justice Thomas are relevant, today and every day, but they've popped up again. And one of, I think, the most racist Americans we have is Elie Mystal, who writes for the Nation. He's on Joy Reid's program almost every night, and just says the most racist things about whites and about conservative blacks. It's crazy, the stuff this guy gets away with.

But his latest rant was on Joy Reid. He's very angry because this leftist group did a deep dive into the number of “gifts” that Justice Thomas has accepted while he's been on the high court. And while they do acknowledge that many other justices, including leftist justices, have also received multiple gifts, they said he's received more. His, if you count the private jet travel, seem to amount to more.

Well, once you've accepted that they can take gifts, you're done, right? If it's $2 million, if it's half-a-million—it's up to the Supreme Court to determine. And we've had whole Senate judicial confirmation hearings of these folks to figure out whether they're ethical and belong on this court. And we're going to trust them or not. It's up to them to decide. But anyway, here is Elie Mystal going off on this report with Joy Reed. Take a listen.

ELIE MYSTAL: I think it's important for people to ask, what are these people paying for, right? What are they getting for their four million dollars they've given to Clarence Thomas over the past twenty years? What they're getting is what Byron Donalds wants. What they're getting is Jim Crow. What they're getting is a guy like Clarence Thomas who, like Byron Donalds, entire judicial philosophy is that some Negroes are magic. No matter what the white man does to us, we can just rise above as long as they don't shoot us or kill us or rape us or drown us. And if you tell people that, if you're black, if you're Donalds, if you're Thomas, and you tell white people that, they will give you money. And that is what's happened to Clarence Thomas for twenty years.

Wow. Your reaction to him?

That turns my stomach, but it's par for the course. I don't even know where to begin. Clarence Thomas is motivated by money? That's laughable. Clarence Thomas's judicial philosophy has been many decades in the development. He has a long track record of intellectual contributions to the evolution of American law. You can disagree with Clarence Thomas's jurisprudence, but calling him a name, calling him, in effect, an Uncle Tom, a grifter, and a sellout—that's, as I say, desperation.

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I think this lapsing into Sambo talk in reference to one-ninth of one-third of the American government, and as I say, an African American whose accomplishments in his life illustrate the triumph of black people over Jim Crow and racism and so on. I'm not surprised And that does resonate in Joy Reid's audience.

Oh, by the way, I looked her up. She's getting paid a million-and-a-half dollars a year to spew her bile at MSNBC. And she's got the nerve to call somebody a grifter?

Exactly right, Glenn. And by the way, to your point about Thomas: if he were interested in money, he'd be making nine, ten million dollars a year at any white shoe law firm in America.

Easily.

That's right. It's just insulting. I want to get back to the book, but quick comment on Byron Donalds and the reason they were saying Thomas is just like Byron Donalds is that Byron Donalds was in the news this week making a comment about life for black Americans during Jim Crow. Yes, but he was talking about pre-Great Society America and what life was like. I'm going to play the longer clip of what he said, and we'll talk about how they're bastardizing it and him.

BYRON DONALDS: Growing up, the one thing I knew I wanted to do—and this is not about my father, this is about what I wanted to do—is I wanted to be a father to my sons. And so one of the things that's actually happening in our culture, what you're now starting to see in our politics is the reenactment, the reinvigoration of black families with younger black men and black women, and that is also helping to breed the revival of a black middle class in America.

During Jim Crow, the black family was together. During Jim Crow, more black people were not just conservative, because black people have always been conservative-minded, but more black people voted conservatively. And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson, and then you go down that road, and now we are where we are. What's happened in America the last ten year—and I say it because it's my contemporaries, it's Wesley's contemporaries—you're starting to see more black people be married, in homes, raising kids.

Glenn, what do you make of it? Because to me, I hear that and I'm like, yeah. Read some Shelby Steele. Yes, this is not a new thought or observation.

It's not. And the attack on him is that he said—during Jim Crow, the black family was healthier—as if there was something good about Jim Crow. He wasn't extolling the benefits of Jim Crow. He was pointing out the collapse of the African American family, which has occurred in the post-Jim Crow era on. He was just making a statement of fact.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York, who, working for the Lyndon Johnson administration in 1965, issued a report on the black family, he was alarmed at the collapse of the black family. And he was pointing at 25 percent of the babies born to a black woman being born to a woman without a husband. That number is [70%] today—seven-zero. Moynihan was writing in 1965, at the end of Jim Crow. Things have gotten worse. That's simply a statement of fact. People are putting their head in the sand to the extent that they ignore what is sociologically obvious, which is that it's a devastating indictment of a community and an inhibition of that community's ability to reproduce itself productively from generation to generation for the family to have collapsed, the nuclear family: husband, wife, mother, father, raising children.

This is a good thing, not a bad thing. It's time-tested through history. And what has happened to the African American society in that respect is unhealthy and is something to be lamented, in my opinion. I think, again, that's a demonstrable statement about how societies reproduce themselves. The family is key, and he was just pointing out that the collapse of the family is a post-Jim Crow phenomenon amongst African Americans, and that's true.

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