Republicans never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Byron Donalds (R-FL) walks into the barbershop and says Black marriage rates were better under Jim Crow. He later mumbles Black marriage rates are increasing now. He credits Conservatism. The bar shop customers look at each other, “Did that fool just say Jim Crow?” Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, and Roland Martin can’t wait to discuss Donalds.
Maxwell Frost (D-FL) walks into the barbershop and says Black marriage rates are increasing. Here is what Democrats did to relieve student loan debt. Frost adds Black people are amazing. Biden will receive the overwhelming percentage of Black votes.
There were also more black doctors and teachers. Integration stole the jobs from black teachers. The black students moved into white schools where they were often unwelcome, and the black teachers were simply gone.
My eyes were opened about 10 years ago when the 1940 census went online. I was looking through the data sheets for my old home town of Enid, which was firmly segregated at that time. I wasn't really looking for info about blacks, but started comparing my familiar white working-class neighborhood with the black part of town. I found lots of black teachers and doctors and preachers, and estimated that the black part of town had about the same percentage of homeowners as the working-class white parts. Iin both areas 60% of people owned their homes.
“Jim Crow’s Pink Slip” details the assault on Black educators after Brown v. Board. Predominantly Black schools were often illegally closed and Black principals and teachers were dismissed. If Jim Crow led to Black unemployment, wasn’t Jim Crow a major cause for destruction of the Black family unit, as noted by the Hoover Institute?
There was full Black employment on slave plantations.
2nd Edit to add:
Enslaved Black people had the benefit of learning skills during slavery.
Conservatives actually think these statements make sense
Even Robert Woodson has a video snippet voicing his agreement
The days of rational Black Conservatives like Jackie Robinson, Edward Brooke, and Colin Powell are gone. They are spinning in their graves. Each day reinforces Clay Cane’s book, “The Grift” Clarence Thomas is an honorable man who loves taking simple trips in his motor home. LOL.
Glenn, You stated that your comment, "there were higher rates of two-parent households in the Black community under Jim Crow than today" should not be controversial because it is a fact. Another fact is that the intent of LBJ's great society programs was "the elimination of poverty". The fact is that an unintended consequence of the current welfare system is that it has created more poverty, rather than less, and the financial structure of the welfare programs has been a causative factor in the disintegration of the Black family. I quote another commenter here, SJ Dubs, who implied that the demise of the Black family has created a negative effect i.e., "the tragic consequences of family disintegration". I defer to you and your research team, but I think I have been objective in coming to the conclusion that the LBJ Great Society welfare system has not decreased poverty, and has been a causative factor in the unfortunate decline in the percentage of intact Black families. The references given by Clifton Roscoe seem to support my opinion.
It's fair to point out that poverty hasn't been eliminated since the Great Society programs were created. That said, poverty rates, as measured by the US Census Bureau, are down since the Great Society programs were implemented. Here's an excerpt from a 2014 Pew Research analysis of the effectiveness of the 'War on Poverty:'
Critics note that the official poverty rate, as calculated by the Census Bureau, has fallen only modestly, from 19% in 1964 to 15% in 2012 (the most recent year available). But other analysts, citing shortcomings in the official poverty measure, focus on a supplemental measure (also produced by the Census Bureau) to argue that more progress has been made. A team of researchers from Columbia University, for example, calculated an “anchored” supplemental measure — essentially the 2012 measure carried back through time and adjusted for historical inflation — and found that it fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.
The analysis goes on to point out that the demographics of America's poor have changed over time. Here's another excerpt:
Today, most poor Americans are in their prime working years: In 2012, 57% of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, versus 41.7% in 1959.
Far fewer elderly are poor: In 1966, 28.5% of Americans ages 65 and over were poor; by 2012 just 9.1% were. There were 1.2 million fewer elderly poor in 2012 than in 1966, despite the doubling of the total elderly population. Researchers generally credit this steep drop to Social Security, particularly the expansion and inflation-indexing of benefits during the 1970s.
But childhood poverty persists: Poverty among children younger than 18 began dropping even before the War on Poverty. From 27.3% in 1959, childhood poverty fell to 23% in 1964 and to 14% by 1969. Since then, however, the childhood poverty rate has risen, fallen and, since the 2007-08 financial crisis, risen again.
Today’s poor families are structured differently: In 1973, the first year for which data are available, more than half (51.4%) of poor families were headed by a married couple; 45.4% were headed by women. In 2012, just over half (50.3%) of poor families were female-headed, while 38.9% were headed by married couples.
The analysis showed that black poverty rates are down since the implementation of the Great Society programs as well. Here's another excerpt:
Poverty among blacks has fallen sharply: In 1966, two years after Johnson’s speech, four-in-ten (41.8%) of African-Americans were poor; blacks constituted nearly a third (31.1%) of all poor Americans. By 2012, poverty among African-Americans had fallen to 27.2% — still more than double the rate among whites (12.7%, 1.4 percentage points higher than in 1966).
Use these links if you want to see more detailed and more recent poverty data from the US Census Bureau:
There's a robust debate to be had about the role that LBJ's Great Society programs may have played in fostering lower black marriage rates and the growing share of black children born to unwed mothers. As I said in my reply to CHARLES, a combination of cultural and structural factors seems to have been the key driver of these trends.
Thank you Clifton for pointing out how complicated it is to diagnose the etiology of current trends concerning marriage and income levels. Poverty may not be worse that it was in 1965, but the gains have been small after almost 60 years of assistance. The budgeted programs should be shrinking by now, rather than growing.
I agree with you that the budgets for these programs should be shrinking, but the problem is that the demand for these programs keeps growing because of changing family structures and lower labor force participation rates for men in their prime years.
The percentage of households with children headed by single parents jumped from 7% in 1950 to 29% as of last year according to the US Census Bureau. Use this link and go to either Table FM-1 or Figure FM-1 if you want to do a deep dive.
This is important because households headed by single parents, but especially single mothers, are more likely to live below the poverty line than people living in other family structures.
To put the single parenting phenomena in further context, a Pew Research analysis from 2019 showed that America has more households headed by single parents than any country in the world:
The reduction in married couple households means that America has more households that need assistance than it would have if more low income people were married.
Another issue is falling labor force participation rates for men between the ages of 25 and 54. The percentage was at 97.5% in January of 1955 vs. 89.1% in April of this year. Use this link if you want to do a deep dive over at the St. Louis Fed's FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) data base:
The combination of so many households headed by single parents, so many households headed by single people without children, and the ongoing decline of labor force participation rates for men in their prime years (25 to 54) all help explain why the poverty rate hasn't fallen nearly as much as one might have expected given the large expenditures for anti-poverty programs.
To make a long story short, this is a really complicated set of problems.
Having references to back your statements certainly adds credibility. You have put a lot of thought and work into this issue. Your statement, "households headed by single parents are more likely to live below the poverty line---", means that our country needs some introspection. For the sake of a healthy nation, should we discourage single family households? Unless some study indicates otherwise, regardless of race, the traditional family structure, on average, should result in more well adjusted and better educated children. In the long run, less violence and more prosperity for all.
The outrage over this quote has been wholly manufactured to support the damaging and unfair strawman that black conservatives believe life was better under Jim Crow, and to avoid addressing the tragic implications of family disintegration.
Byron Donalds statement was a juxtaposition of gains and losses for the black community, using the Jim Crow era as a temporal reference point.
Donalds refers to Jim Crow because the end of that era saw tangible policy gains for black Americans. A decline of family integrity that tracks from the point of those gains is relevant to a discussion where generalities and trends about black American families are being discussed.
I don't believe anyone is seriously confused about what's going on here. To paraphrase Glenn, name-calling and caricature appear frequently in the absence of a coherent counter-argument.
This is a complicated and contentious topic. I agree with you that Congressman Donalds' reference to Jim Crow while making a point about black marriage rates was unnecessarily provocative and probably not helpful. That said, the way he was treated during long interviews with CNN's Abby Phillip and MSNBC's Joy Reid and Al Sharpton was shameful. They did all they could to make it seem as if Donalds was nostalgic for Jim Crow instead of lamenting the sharp drop in black marriage rates that began after 1950.
Here's a link to a 2012 paper ("Historical Marriage Trends from 1890-2010: A Focus on Race Differences") that outlines the trend:
It was developed by researchers at the US Census Bureau and Pew Research. Here's the Abstract:
Public rhetoric often decries a societal retreat from marriage – that it is an increasingly obsolete institution (Time Magazine/Pew Research Center 2010). The 1950s have been described as the “golden age” of marriage in the United States and marriage has declined since the 1960s (Coontz 2000/1992; Cherlin 2009/2004). In this paper, we take a longer view of the history of marriage by sex and race, describing trends among those never married at age 35 and age 45 and older, and historical median ages at first marriage using Decennial Census data. We find that the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly for men and women given the high proportions married at young ages. Race differences are particularly interesting, as black women were more often married than white women prior to World War II, yet since the 1980s, have been increasingly less likely to be married.
There's no consensus about why black marriage rates fell.
Potential explanations fall into two basic categories - cultural and structural. A combination of cultural and structural factors is probably the key driver of the sharp drop in black marriage rates that began in the 1950's and continued through 2020 according to the US Census Bureau:
U.S. marriage rates have been on the decline since the latter half of the 20th century and both men and women are marrying at a later age, but the decline and delay are even more dramatic among Black adults.
The median age at first marriage has risen for both men and women. In 1970, the median age at first marriage was 23.2 years for men, and 20.8 years for women. Fifty years later, those figures climbed to 30.5 years and 28.1 years, respectively.
Although there have been drastic changes in marriage patterns for all race and Hispanic origin groups, differences have been especially pronounced for non-Hispanic Black adults (throughout this story, Black is used interchangeably with non-Hispanic Black).
For all groups, the percentage of never married men in 1970 was 28.1%, compared to 22.1% of women. By 2020, these figures rose to 35.8% and 30.0%, respectively. However, in 1970, 35.6% of Black men and 27.7% of Black women were never married, but by 2020, these percentages had jumped to 51.4% for Black men and 47.5% for Black women.
While the percentage of all adults who were never married increased by 7.6 percentage points for men and 7.9 percentage points for women, the corresponding change for Black adults was more than double that, at 15.8 percentage points for men and 19.8 for women.
Similarly, the median age at first marriage for Black adults increased more dramatically than it did for the overall population.
Donalds' argument that falling black marriage rates coincided with the creation of LBJ's Great Society programs and his suggestion that the trend is starting to reverse itself as more black people re-embrace conservative values got lost in a storm of demagoguery. That's unfortunate because black progress stalled out many years ago. The National Urban League's Marc Morial says it will take another 180 years, at the current rate of progress, for black people to achieve "true equality" with whites in America:
Who among the civil rights leaders who fought for the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision would have thought it would take 250 years (70 years post-Brown, plus another 180 years according to the National Urban League) for black people to achieve equality with whites? Melissa Kearney's book, "The Two-Parent Privilege" suggests that more progress would have been made if black marriage rates had stayed somewhere near 1950's levels. That's the point that Congressman Donalds should have made.
I agree with you about the media's treatment of Donalds. There's nothing more disingenuous than putting words in someone's mouth.
As far as the marriage stats, I get it. But to be honest, I wonder about the quality of those marriages. I, too, remember when divorce was a lot less common, but too often that meant couples sticking it out for some rather toxic reasons (i.e., "the sake of the kids", "society", etc.)
Safe to say, there were a lot of unhappy marriages--dare I say, abusive?--back in the day. They made for some distinctly dysfunctional environments for kids--no doubt about it. We just don't know all of the details (and apparently, would rather gloss over them than dig too deep).
But miserable marriages were not rare. Thus, I hesitate to romanticize the state of the Black family yesterday versus today. It is not a cut-and-dried conversation.
Note that Elie Mystal wants to abolish the US Senate as well. The Nation, Nov 12, 2021. (To be fair, both sides are slouching towards bedlamic authoritarianism by dismantling constitutional safeguards: Monarchy from the so-called Right and increased federalization of the US, Santa-Anna Style, from the so-called Left. And note, "bedlamic" is not a word)
To be a progressive is to be clueless. The last thing they want to find out is that progressivism rose Phoenix-like out of the ashes of the KKK. Progressives think they aren't racists. Well, believe it or not, neither did the KKK.
Please, everyone stop using the Sambo name to depict a negative American stereotype. Sambo is a dark skinned Indian character in a children's bookl written by a yes, white British woman about a an Indian boy who outsmarted a tiger in INDIA. Please don't associate it with some American children's stories of the early 1900's: uncle...
I googled Sambo to I understand more..apparently there is a second usage for Sambo and it refers to a negative Spanish term. Perhaps that is the way some use it. Langston Hughes had a negative reaction to the children's book, not realizing that it has nothing to do with american situation. Tigers are not native to Africa or to the US, but to India
As a fan I found myself cringing for Glenn as Megyn Kelly went straight for the juguar and regurgitate some of the low points in his Confessions book. Glenn stoically did what a brilliant intellect would do, he bravely fessed-up and admitted the wrong doing. The elder Glenn Loury is a complete biological rebuild of the young Glenn Loury, and so it is for countless millions of men and woman. No doubt the Glenn Loury of today would have benefitted from better guidance and a better culture, but we rejoice that he survived to be what he is today. I will definitely buy Glenn's book. John McWhorter and Glenn Loury are naturally gifted, it is the luck of the draw.
I ended up watching the entire Megyn Kelly episode with both Glenn and Lunden Roberts and now find myself compelled to purchase her upcoming memoir as well. Two great conversations, although obviously Glenn came across as far more articulate than Lunden.
I'm curious if Late Admissions will start a trend of super candid personal reflections going forward. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, having read Glenn's biography I'm now super curious what Thomas Sowell's memoir might have revealed had he taken a similarly candid approach to detailing his life story.
Personally, I find it interesting that there are numerous parallels between Glenn's life and that of Hunter Biden, in terms of the drug use and marital infidelity and all that stuff. To me what’s most fascinating about Glenn’s life story is how he ultimately comes across as a decent human being despite the recklessness of his past behavior. Hunter Biden on the other hand comes across as an asshole.
Maybe I’m willing to give Glenn a bit of a pass because of the enormity of his intellectual contributions, but mostly I feel like what Glenn’s life story suggests is the complexity of the human experience and how narrow some of our views on conventional morality might be. I’m reminded of the conversation that Glenn had with Ian Rowe a couple of years ago where he suggested that the correlation between rates of marriage and positive life outcomes might not reflect underlying causation.
There's been a lot of talk about the importance of marriage and two parent households and other markers of conventional morality, but the more I read about exceptional but deeply flawed human beings like Glenn and others, the less certain I am that the correlation between these markers of conventional morality and success in life reflects an underlying causal relation.
In my humble opinion Thomas Sowell stands in a league with Martin Luther King, and as much as I admire Glenn Loury, he is not there yet. Glenn's Late Admissions may be cathartic for him, but I wonder if his family and friends feel the same way? I see the comparison with Hunter Biden and indeed, Hunter is an arsehole. Glenn was likewise. I am in no positiin to throw stones, by the grace of God and good luck I am not constrained to make any confessions.
Glenn has evolved into a great man, he inherited brilliance. He is doing good work.
I have one issue with Glenn, several years ago he made a speech calling into question African-American culture and the violent deaths in the South Side of Chicago. It was an impressive speech. He has returned to the overall thesis many times, but he never quite grasps the nettle. Even in discussion about that monster George Floyd, he vacillates and ends up firing from the hip. Nobody is expecting Glenn to explain dysfunctioinal black culture, but he sure has a lot to say about it.
(Also the Moynihan Report is in the late 1960s and does not describe a sudden crisis of teenagers getting pregnant and being poor single parents but something being pathological about the Black family for generations)
Essentially all Jamelle Bouie had here was that families simply having 2 parents that are married does not stand up to Jim Crow being bad for the well-being of Black families in general and I was disappointed. I was hoping to skip the Kendi story but clearly that is out of the question now.
Republicans never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Byron Donalds (R-FL) walks into the barbershop and says Black marriage rates were better under Jim Crow. He later mumbles Black marriage rates are increasing now. He credits Conservatism. The bar shop customers look at each other, “Did that fool just say Jim Crow?” Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, and Roland Martin can’t wait to discuss Donalds.
Maxwell Frost (D-FL) walks into the barbershop and says Black marriage rates are increasing. Here is what Democrats did to relieve student loan debt. Frost adds Black people are amazing. Biden will receive the overwhelming percentage of Black votes.
There were also more black doctors and teachers. Integration stole the jobs from black teachers. The black students moved into white schools where they were often unwelcome, and the black teachers were simply gone.
My eyes were opened about 10 years ago when the 1940 census went online. I was looking through the data sheets for my old home town of Enid, which was firmly segregated at that time. I wasn't really looking for info about blacks, but started comparing my familiar white working-class neighborhood with the black part of town. I found lots of black teachers and doctors and preachers, and estimated that the black part of town had about the same percentage of homeowners as the working-class white parts. Iin both areas 60% of people owned their homes.
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2014/01/class-had-different-meaning.html
“Jim Crow’s Pink Slip” details the assault on Black educators after Brown v. Board. Predominantly Black schools were often illegally closed and Black principals and teachers were dismissed. If Jim Crow led to Black unemployment, wasn’t Jim Crow a major cause for destruction of the Black family unit, as noted by the Hoover Institute?
https://lukasalthoff.github.io/jmp/althoff_jmp.pdf
Integration did not steal jobs and destroy Black families. Destruction of the Black family was done by whites practicing Jim Crow policies.
Is the argument that poverty was lower during Jim Crow or that individual poverty is higher now?
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/black-poverty-rate.html
Edit to add:
There was full Black employment on slave plantations.
2nd Edit to add:
Enslaved Black people had the benefit of learning skills during slavery.
Conservatives actually think these statements make sense
Even Robert Woodson has a video snippet voicing his agreement
The days of rational Black Conservatives like Jackie Robinson, Edward Brooke, and Colin Powell are gone. They are spinning in their graves. Each day reinforces Clay Cane’s book, “The Grift” Clarence Thomas is an honorable man who loves taking simple trips in his motor home. LOL.
Glenn, You stated that your comment, "there were higher rates of two-parent households in the Black community under Jim Crow than today" should not be controversial because it is a fact. Another fact is that the intent of LBJ's great society programs was "the elimination of poverty". The fact is that an unintended consequence of the current welfare system is that it has created more poverty, rather than less, and the financial structure of the welfare programs has been a causative factor in the disintegration of the Black family. I quote another commenter here, SJ Dubs, who implied that the demise of the Black family has created a negative effect i.e., "the tragic consequences of family disintegration". I defer to you and your research team, but I think I have been objective in coming to the conclusion that the LBJ Great Society welfare system has not decreased poverty, and has been a causative factor in the unfortunate decline in the percentage of intact Black families. The references given by Clifton Roscoe seem to support my opinion.
It's fair to point out that poverty hasn't been eliminated since the Great Society programs were created. That said, poverty rates, as measured by the US Census Bureau, are down since the Great Society programs were implemented. Here's an excerpt from a 2014 Pew Research analysis of the effectiveness of the 'War on Poverty:'
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/13/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait/
Critics note that the official poverty rate, as calculated by the Census Bureau, has fallen only modestly, from 19% in 1964 to 15% in 2012 (the most recent year available). But other analysts, citing shortcomings in the official poverty measure, focus on a supplemental measure (also produced by the Census Bureau) to argue that more progress has been made. A team of researchers from Columbia University, for example, calculated an “anchored” supplemental measure — essentially the 2012 measure carried back through time and adjusted for historical inflation — and found that it fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.
The analysis goes on to point out that the demographics of America's poor have changed over time. Here's another excerpt:
Today, most poor Americans are in their prime working years: In 2012, 57% of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, versus 41.7% in 1959.
Far fewer elderly are poor: In 1966, 28.5% of Americans ages 65 and over were poor; by 2012 just 9.1% were. There were 1.2 million fewer elderly poor in 2012 than in 1966, despite the doubling of the total elderly population. Researchers generally credit this steep drop to Social Security, particularly the expansion and inflation-indexing of benefits during the 1970s.
But childhood poverty persists: Poverty among children younger than 18 began dropping even before the War on Poverty. From 27.3% in 1959, childhood poverty fell to 23% in 1964 and to 14% by 1969. Since then, however, the childhood poverty rate has risen, fallen and, since the 2007-08 financial crisis, risen again.
Today’s poor families are structured differently: In 1973, the first year for which data are available, more than half (51.4%) of poor families were headed by a married couple; 45.4% were headed by women. In 2012, just over half (50.3%) of poor families were female-headed, while 38.9% were headed by married couples.
The analysis showed that black poverty rates are down since the implementation of the Great Society programs as well. Here's another excerpt:
Poverty among blacks has fallen sharply: In 1966, two years after Johnson’s speech, four-in-ten (41.8%) of African-Americans were poor; blacks constituted nearly a third (31.1%) of all poor Americans. By 2012, poverty among African-Americans had fallen to 27.2% — still more than double the rate among whites (12.7%, 1.4 percentage points higher than in 1966).
Use these links if you want to see more detailed and more recent poverty data from the US Census Bureau:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/black-poverty-rate.html
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-people.html
There's a robust debate to be had about the role that LBJ's Great Society programs may have played in fostering lower black marriage rates and the growing share of black children born to unwed mothers. As I said in my reply to CHARLES, a combination of cultural and structural factors seems to have been the key driver of these trends.
Thank you Clifton for pointing out how complicated it is to diagnose the etiology of current trends concerning marriage and income levels. Poverty may not be worse that it was in 1965, but the gains have been small after almost 60 years of assistance. The budgeted programs should be shrinking by now, rather than growing.
My pleasure.
I agree with you that the budgets for these programs should be shrinking, but the problem is that the demand for these programs keeps growing because of changing family structures and lower labor force participation rates for men in their prime years.
The percentage of households with children headed by single parents jumped from 7% in 1950 to 29% as of last year according to the US Census Bureau. Use this link and go to either Table FM-1 or Figure FM-1 if you want to do a deep dive.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/single-parent-day.html
This is important because households headed by single parents, but especially single mothers, are more likely to live below the poverty line than people living in other family structures.
To put the single parenting phenomena in further context, a Pew Research analysis from 2019 showed that America has more households headed by single parents than any country in the world:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/12/12/u-s-children-more-likely-than-children-in-other-countries-to-live-with-just-one-parent/
Another Census Bureau report shows that the percentage of married couple households is now at 47% compared to 71% in 1970:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/families-living-arrangements.html
The reduction in married couple households means that America has more households that need assistance than it would have if more low income people were married.
Another issue is falling labor force participation rates for men between the ages of 25 and 54. The percentage was at 97.5% in January of 1955 vs. 89.1% in April of this year. Use this link if you want to do a deep dive over at the St. Louis Fed's FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) data base:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25MAUSM156S
The combination of so many households headed by single parents, so many households headed by single people without children, and the ongoing decline of labor force participation rates for men in their prime years (25 to 54) all help explain why the poverty rate hasn't fallen nearly as much as one might have expected given the large expenditures for anti-poverty programs.
To make a long story short, this is a really complicated set of problems.
Having references to back your statements certainly adds credibility. You have put a lot of thought and work into this issue. Your statement, "households headed by single parents are more likely to live below the poverty line---", means that our country needs some introspection. For the sake of a healthy nation, should we discourage single family households? Unless some study indicates otherwise, regardless of race, the traditional family structure, on average, should result in more well adjusted and better educated children. In the long run, less violence and more prosperity for all.
The outrage over this quote has been wholly manufactured to support the damaging and unfair strawman that black conservatives believe life was better under Jim Crow, and to avoid addressing the tragic implications of family disintegration.
Byron Donalds statement was a juxtaposition of gains and losses for the black community, using the Jim Crow era as a temporal reference point.
Donalds refers to Jim Crow because the end of that era saw tangible policy gains for black Americans. A decline of family integrity that tracks from the point of those gains is relevant to a discussion where generalities and trends about black American families are being discussed.
I don't believe anyone is seriously confused about what's going on here. To paraphrase Glenn, name-calling and caricature appear frequently in the absence of a coherent counter-argument.
They were more two-parent households before crack cocaine spread like wildfire, too (circa early to mid 80s).
It is a very old talking point, and irrelevant, too. Voting for Donald Trump will not bring back stronger families as far as I can tell.
But why refer to Jim Crow to make that point? It came off like a lot of talking points we hear from Republican congressman these days: weird.
"Once Upon a Time" would have sufficed.
Hey CHARLES,
This is a complicated and contentious topic. I agree with you that Congressman Donalds' reference to Jim Crow while making a point about black marriage rates was unnecessarily provocative and probably not helpful. That said, the way he was treated during long interviews with CNN's Abby Phillip and MSNBC's Joy Reid and Al Sharpton was shameful. They did all they could to make it seem as if Donalds was nostalgic for Jim Crow instead of lamenting the sharp drop in black marriage rates that began after 1950.
Here's a link to a 2012 paper ("Historical Marriage Trends from 1890-2010: A Focus on Race Differences") that outlines the trend:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2012/demo/SEHSD-WP2012-12.pdf
It was developed by researchers at the US Census Bureau and Pew Research. Here's the Abstract:
Public rhetoric often decries a societal retreat from marriage – that it is an increasingly obsolete institution (Time Magazine/Pew Research Center 2010). The 1950s have been described as the “golden age” of marriage in the United States and marriage has declined since the 1960s (Coontz 2000/1992; Cherlin 2009/2004). In this paper, we take a longer view of the history of marriage by sex and race, describing trends among those never married at age 35 and age 45 and older, and historical median ages at first marriage using Decennial Census data. We find that the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly for men and women given the high proportions married at young ages. Race differences are particularly interesting, as black women were more often married than white women prior to World War II, yet since the 1980s, have been increasingly less likely to be married.
There's no consensus about why black marriage rates fell.
Here are links to other takes:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4850739/
https://scholars.org/brief/why-has-marriage-declined-among-black-americans
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12111-008-9062-5
Potential explanations fall into two basic categories - cultural and structural. A combination of cultural and structural factors is probably the key driver of the sharp drop in black marriage rates that began in the 1950's and continued through 2020 according to the US Census Bureau:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/marriage-prevalence-for-black-adults-varies-by-state.html
Here's an excerpt:
U.S. marriage rates have been on the decline since the latter half of the 20th century and both men and women are marrying at a later age, but the decline and delay are even more dramatic among Black adults.
The median age at first marriage has risen for both men and women. In 1970, the median age at first marriage was 23.2 years for men, and 20.8 years for women. Fifty years later, those figures climbed to 30.5 years and 28.1 years, respectively.
Although there have been drastic changes in marriage patterns for all race and Hispanic origin groups, differences have been especially pronounced for non-Hispanic Black adults (throughout this story, Black is used interchangeably with non-Hispanic Black).
For all groups, the percentage of never married men in 1970 was 28.1%, compared to 22.1% of women. By 2020, these figures rose to 35.8% and 30.0%, respectively. However, in 1970, 35.6% of Black men and 27.7% of Black women were never married, but by 2020, these percentages had jumped to 51.4% for Black men and 47.5% for Black women.
While the percentage of all adults who were never married increased by 7.6 percentage points for men and 7.9 percentage points for women, the corresponding change for Black adults was more than double that, at 15.8 percentage points for men and 19.8 for women.
Similarly, the median age at first marriage for Black adults increased more dramatically than it did for the overall population.
Donalds' argument that falling black marriage rates coincided with the creation of LBJ's Great Society programs and his suggestion that the trend is starting to reverse itself as more black people re-embrace conservative values got lost in a storm of demagoguery. That's unfortunate because black progress stalled out many years ago. The National Urban League's Marc Morial says it will take another 180 years, at the current rate of progress, for black people to achieve "true equality" with whites in America:
https://thegrio.com/2024/03/01/urban-league-state-of-black-america/
Who among the civil rights leaders who fought for the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision would have thought it would take 250 years (70 years post-Brown, plus another 180 years according to the National Urban League) for black people to achieve equality with whites? Melissa Kearney's book, "The Two-Parent Privilege" suggests that more progress would have been made if black marriage rates had stayed somewhere near 1950's levels. That's the point that Congressman Donalds should have made.
I agree with you about the media's treatment of Donalds. There's nothing more disingenuous than putting words in someone's mouth.
As far as the marriage stats, I get it. But to be honest, I wonder about the quality of those marriages. I, too, remember when divorce was a lot less common, but too often that meant couples sticking it out for some rather toxic reasons (i.e., "the sake of the kids", "society", etc.)
Safe to say, there were a lot of unhappy marriages--dare I say, abusive?--back in the day. They made for some distinctly dysfunctional environments for kids--no doubt about it. We just don't know all of the details (and apparently, would rather gloss over them than dig too deep).
But miserable marriages were not rare. Thus, I hesitate to romanticize the state of the Black family yesterday versus today. It is not a cut-and-dried conversation.
Note that Elie Mystal wants to abolish the US Senate as well. The Nation, Nov 12, 2021. (To be fair, both sides are slouching towards bedlamic authoritarianism by dismantling constitutional safeguards: Monarchy from the so-called Right and increased federalization of the US, Santa-Anna Style, from the so-called Left. And note, "bedlamic" is not a word)
To be a progressive is to be clueless. The last thing they want to find out is that progressivism rose Phoenix-like out of the ashes of the KKK. Progressives think they aren't racists. Well, believe it or not, neither did the KKK.
Please, everyone stop using the Sambo name to depict a negative American stereotype. Sambo is a dark skinned Indian character in a children's bookl written by a yes, white British woman about a an Indian boy who outsmarted a tiger in INDIA. Please don't associate it with some American children's stories of the early 1900's: uncle...
Thank you, not that the folks who want to believe otherwise can even hear you. That was one of my favorite stories as a kid.
I was raised on uncle Rehmus, and i loved sambo. There, i admit it. Sambo was fun.
I googled Sambo to I understand more..apparently there is a second usage for Sambo and it refers to a negative Spanish term. Perhaps that is the way some use it. Langston Hughes had a negative reaction to the children's book, not realizing that it has nothing to do with american situation. Tigers are not native to Africa or to the US, but to India
As a fan I found myself cringing for Glenn as Megyn Kelly went straight for the juguar and regurgitate some of the low points in his Confessions book. Glenn stoically did what a brilliant intellect would do, he bravely fessed-up and admitted the wrong doing. The elder Glenn Loury is a complete biological rebuild of the young Glenn Loury, and so it is for countless millions of men and woman. No doubt the Glenn Loury of today would have benefitted from better guidance and a better culture, but we rejoice that he survived to be what he is today. I will definitely buy Glenn's book. John McWhorter and Glenn Loury are naturally gifted, it is the luck of the draw.
I ended up watching the entire Megyn Kelly episode with both Glenn and Lunden Roberts and now find myself compelled to purchase her upcoming memoir as well. Two great conversations, although obviously Glenn came across as far more articulate than Lunden.
I'm curious if Late Admissions will start a trend of super candid personal reflections going forward. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, having read Glenn's biography I'm now super curious what Thomas Sowell's memoir might have revealed had he taken a similarly candid approach to detailing his life story.
Personally, I find it interesting that there are numerous parallels between Glenn's life and that of Hunter Biden, in terms of the drug use and marital infidelity and all that stuff. To me what’s most fascinating about Glenn’s life story is how he ultimately comes across as a decent human being despite the recklessness of his past behavior. Hunter Biden on the other hand comes across as an asshole.
Maybe I’m willing to give Glenn a bit of a pass because of the enormity of his intellectual contributions, but mostly I feel like what Glenn’s life story suggests is the complexity of the human experience and how narrow some of our views on conventional morality might be. I’m reminded of the conversation that Glenn had with Ian Rowe a couple of years ago where he suggested that the correlation between rates of marriage and positive life outcomes might not reflect underlying causation.
There's been a lot of talk about the importance of marriage and two parent households and other markers of conventional morality, but the more I read about exceptional but deeply flawed human beings like Glenn and others, the less certain I am that the correlation between these markers of conventional morality and success in life reflects an underlying causal relation.
In my humble opinion Thomas Sowell stands in a league with Martin Luther King, and as much as I admire Glenn Loury, he is not there yet. Glenn's Late Admissions may be cathartic for him, but I wonder if his family and friends feel the same way? I see the comparison with Hunter Biden and indeed, Hunter is an arsehole. Glenn was likewise. I am in no positiin to throw stones, by the grace of God and good luck I am not constrained to make any confessions.
Glenn has evolved into a great man, he inherited brilliance. He is doing good work.
I have one issue with Glenn, several years ago he made a speech calling into question African-American culture and the violent deaths in the South Side of Chicago. It was an impressive speech. He has returned to the overall thesis many times, but he never quite grasps the nettle. Even in discussion about that monster George Floyd, he vacillates and ends up firing from the hip. Nobody is expecting Glenn to explain dysfunctioinal black culture, but he sure has a lot to say about it.
(Also the Moynihan Report is in the late 1960s and does not describe a sudden crisis of teenagers getting pregnant and being poor single parents but something being pathological about the Black family for generations)
Essentially all Jamelle Bouie had here was that families simply having 2 parents that are married does not stand up to Jim Crow being bad for the well-being of Black families in general and I was disappointed. I was hoping to skip the Kendi story but clearly that is out of the question now.