Besides which country you are born in, in my view the most important factor by far in explaining disparities in all manner of life outcomes (poverty, unemployment, crime, education, you name it) is whether you were born out-of-wedlock. And since Americans are very interested in racial disparities, from time to time I post the federal government's latest data on this topic.
Late last year, the final data for 2018 were published
here (the key is Table 9 on page 25), and here's what we learn: For all racial and ethnic groups combined, 39.6 percent of births in the United States were out-of-wedlock (incidentally, isn't that appalling?). And there was as always a tremendous range among groups. For blacks, the number is 69.4 percent; for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 68.2 percent (Native Hawaiians/Other Pacific Islanders were at 50.4 percent); for Hispanics, 51.8 percent; for whites, 28.2 percent; and for Asian Americans, a paltry 11.7 percent.
But it hasn't always been this way. In 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 19 percent, less than what it is for whites now.
Does it matter? Of course it matters. It is only common sense that 1.3 million illegitimate children is a significant national problem.
Anyone who has raised a child knows how enormously time-consuming the job is for two parents, let alone one. Anyone who has raised a boy, in particular, knows that the father's role, as model and disciplinarian, is irreplaceable. Anyone who is not Murphy Brown knows that the resources in terms of time and money available to a two-parent home make the job easier there than where there is only one parent. To paraphrase George Orwell, some things are so obvious that only a sociologist can miss them.
The staggering illegitimacy rates are so central a cause of social pathologies, especially for African Americans, that one would expect the problem to be widely known and discussed but it isn't. Among academics and the media, it has long been oh-so-politically-incorrect to suggest that there might be something wrong with having children without getting married. But now the problem goes deeper than that. Over half the public, and 70 percent of those under age 35, think that no shame should attach to having an out-of-wedlock child, according to Professor Wilson.
It is also politically incorrect to point out the disparity in illegitimacy rates between whites and Asians versus blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. What is especially galling to the left is that the gap can hardly be attributed to discrimination. It is not the Ku Klux Klan that is impregnating all these women. Indeed, the rates really started to skyrocket in the 1960s that is, the same decade that the Jim Crow era ended and national anti-discrimination legislation was passed. And it is not all minority groups that have the higher rates.
A child's environment IS his or her parents. It makes an enormous difference to a child's economic well-being and his moral and intellectual development if the mother must do the work alone. When the illegitimacy rate of blacks is more than triple that of whites, there will continue to be huge gaps in the aggregate achievements and pathologies of the two groups. That is a fact, and anyone who fails to acknowledge the problem of illegitimacy while decrying social inequality is being intellectually dishonest.
https://www.ceousa.org/issues/1354-percentage-of-births-to-unmarried-womenIf the black community wants to solve issues, they need to encourage their people to get married before having children. It's appalling that Democrats really don't care about out-of-wedlock births and the undeniable fact that the mothers and children are highly likely to be sentenced to a life of poverty. This is because they don't see marriage as a critical institution to be supported or admired. They believe the unwed mother and out-of-wedlock children will be government dependent and will be more easily manipulated to vote Democrat.
