The destruction of the black family by progressives

America’s black underclass exists not because the nation is systemically racist, as Democrats claim, but because progressives’ welfare policies and the “War on Poverty” destroyed the black family.

by Richard Schulman

The claim that the United States is systemically racist is a colossal lie being pushed by the progressives who dominate the Democratic Party. It is being used to justify the looting, riots, murders, and destruction of public and private property that has engulfed the country for several months now, especially in cities run by Democratic mayors.

The false charge is reason sufficient for defeating at the polls every single Democrat who refuses to repudiate this lie and the violence it has engendered. This repudiation – let’s call it patriotic cancel culture – should start at the top with the Biden-Harris presidential ticket.

So how do we explain the higher rates of poverty and incarceration in the African-American underclass if not by white racism?

The principal explanation is to be found in government policies implemented by progressives beginning with the Lyndon Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty.” The policies wreaked havoc on the previous relative stability of the black family, leading to the present circa 70% of African-American children born to unwed mothers.

This contrasts with a 28% rate among non-Hispanic white mothers and 12% among Asian-Americans.

A culture encouraging out-of-wedlock childbearing

This is not a matter of race but of culture, a crucial expression of which is the rearing of children in a stable two-parent structure that encourages education, hard work, and individual responsibility and initiative. That is what propelled Jewish immigrants to the US to prominent positions in law, medicine, and education in the first half of the 20^th century, despite prejudice against them; and the equally spectacular success of Asian-Americans more recently.

This is not a prejudiced “white” view of black underclass culture. It’s acknowledged by prominent African-Americans, such as Columbia University professor John McWhorter. He blames the self-destructive side of contemporary black culture on the welfare policies that progressives introduced in the 1960s. These policies encouraged multi-generational welfare dependency in families with often absent fathers, headed by teenage unmarried mothers.

The main source of the destructive welfare policies was LBJ’s “War on Poverty,” intellectually seconded by two progressive Columbia University professors, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward.

LBJ’s failed $22 trillion war

Regarding this “War on Poverty,” Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation wrote in 2015 how

Fifty-one years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty. Since then, taxpayers have spent more than $22 trillion fighting Johnson’s war, three times the cost of all military wars in U.S. history. Last year, taxpayers spent more than $920 billion on 80 different anti-poverty programs. A major reason for the nation’s lack of success for the last half century has been the collapse of marriage. Marriage is a powerful force in reducing poverty…. More than two-thirds of all poor families with children in the U.S. are headed by single parents. But since the beginning of the War on Poverty, marriage has declined sharply.

African-American families were the worst-hit by the Johnson administration’s welfare policies.  In New York’s Harlem in 1925, 85% of black households had two parents. By 2015, the statistics had reversed: non-marital births for African-Americans had reached 77%. (The HHS gives slightly lower statistics of 69% for 2018.)

McWhorter is particularly incensed at the progressive ideologues who reinforced the misconceived policies of the War on Poverty by trying to use and then to promote a permanent underclass dependent on government through a guaranteed income. McWhorter writes:

Until the late sixties, welfare allowed one to eat but was very hard to stay on for very long and was harder for black people to get than whites. The welfare world we now recall so easily was born only when white activists such as Columbia social work professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward devoted themselves to bringing down the American financial system by dragging as many people, especially poor black ones, onto the welfare rolls as possible. Their goal was to bankrupt the Treasury so that the Feds would give a guaranteed income to poor people. But in the end, all that happened was that generations of poor blacks idled on the dole, getting just enough money that they were doing better than they could in entry-level jobs.

Black fathers became redundant and wandered from household to household spawning illegitimate children on black matriarchs. Social workers were encouraged to practice job preservation by keeping their clients on welfare rather than pressuring them to find work. A spurious prestige was conferred upon social workers through the creation of graduate social work degree programs taught by Piven and Cloward and their acolytes.

The Moynihan report

Yet the basic problem had been partly identified in 1965 by Patrick Daniel Moynihan, an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration. He wrote a report that made him famous but came to be widely denounced by the progressives. In the report, he

focused on the deep roots of black poverty in the United States and controversially concluded that the high rate of families headed by single mothers would greatly hinder progress of blacks toward economic and political equality. Moynihan argued that the rise in black single-mother families was caused not by a lack of jobs, but by a destructive vein in ghetto culture, which could be traced to slavery times and continued discrimination in the American South under Jim Crow. Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had introduced that idea in the 1930s, but Moynihan was considered one of the first academics to defy conventional social-science wisdom about the structure of poverty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action

Moynihan called for “a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.” He realized that the Johnson administration’s civil rights legislation and US economic prosperity by themselves couldn’t address the more important issue, the breakdown of the family among lower class blacks.

But Moynihan missed the important truth that it wasn’t slavery and Jim Crow that were wreaking the greatest damage on the stability of the black family but rather the welfare policies of the very administration he served.

The War on Poverty and its accompanying dedication to welfare rights had just the opposite effect that Moynihan sought. Single motherhood, illegitimacy, crime, and delinquency increased in urban black communities.

Ironically, when a significant effort, under Republican impetus, was made in 1996 to end black multi-generational dependency by moving welfare recipients to jobs, Moynihan, now a senator from New York, denounced the major reform in the strongest terms. He refused to believe that the pro-welfare policies of his party had worsened the problem, as they clearly had.

Unsurprisingly, however, his report singling out the breakdown of the black family “is still anathema to many on the left.” They prefer to blame “systemic racism” for the problems of the black underclass, not black culture, and prefer to mimic the worst features of black underclass culture by the present Democratic Party-backed Antifa / Black Lives Matter rioting, burning, and looting.

“Dan Quayle was right”

From the 1960s down to the present, the left has refused to recognize the central importance of two-parent families for bringing up children and providing a secure educational and economic environment for them. In 1992, the cultural left vilified Dan Quayle for his defense of the two-parent family in opposition to the glorification of single motherhood by Murphy Brown.

In one of its rare moments of reality recognition, the Washington Post published a fine op ed by Isabel Sawhill titled, “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms.” She wrote:

On May 19, 1992, as the presidential campaign season was heating up, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a family-values speech that came to define him nearly as much as his spelling talents. Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California, he chided Murphy Brown — the fictional 40-something, divorced news anchor played by Candice Bergen on a CBS sitcom — for her decision to have a child outside of marriage….Quayle’s argument — that Brown was sending the wrong message, that single parenthood should not be encouraged — erupted into a major campaign controversy….Twenty years later, Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic….

[A] wealth of research strongly suggests that marriage is good for children. Those who live with their biological parents do better in school and are less likely to get pregnant or arrested. They have lower rates of suicide, achieve higher levels of education and earn more as adults. Meanwhile, children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.”

Dr. Sawhill, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote that op ed in 2012, but how little things have changed. In 2017, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, co-authored a brilliant defense of middle-class values titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.” The cultural left, including most of her colleagues at the law school, furiously denounced her for writing that

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture….Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s…. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.

Although the values that Wax espoused were universal and common sense to those not infected by progressivism and identity politics, the New Yorker response was typical of the cultural left. Its denunciation was titled “A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again.”

Why Dems ignored the Moynihan report

Which raises the question as to why neither Moynihan nor LBJ did anything useful about the breakdown of the black family that Moynihan himself had flagged. It’s likely that they were too committed to creating a dependent black voting bloc wedded to identity politics and the Democratic Party. Moynihan later as a senator wrote a bill that forced many independent consultants and contractors to be reclassified as employees. Independent consultants and contractors are small businessmen and more prone to value their independence, invest in their tools and education, oppose tax increases, and vote Republican. Employees can potentially be herded into Democratic unions, denied deductions for business investments,  and as dependents be more likely to vote Democrat.

California has just forced the reclassification of professionals and Uber and Lyft drivers for the same reason, destroying their independence.

Dinesh D’Souza has written a scathing indictment of LBJ’s motives for his civil rights and welfare policies, titled “LBJ’s Democratic Plantation.” One of many anecdotes he retells is this one:

In the mid-1960s, LBJ nominated African-American lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When an aide suggested to LBJ that there were other qualified black jurists he could have chosen, suggesting as an alternative possibility Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, LBJ responded, “The only two people who ever heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

…The man he called a “nigger” was the nation’s most prominent African-American attorney who had argued the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.

Piven and Cloward’s contribution

The Democrats’ problem in the mid-1960s was how to replace the no-longer popular racism of the party’s Democratic base in the South with an organizing strategy that would herd urban blacks into the party and keep them there. Piven and Cloward provided the strategy. Their 1966 article published in The Nation, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” outlined a quasi-socialist strategy for organizing change by the creation of chaos. They wrote:

It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty….

[I]t is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance.

The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty/

Public assistance is largely handled at the local and state level, Piven and Cloward complained. There its visibility faces strong local resistance to expansion of recipients and benefits. We can overcome this resistance, Piven and Cloward continued, by moving it out of sight to the federal level.

Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid…would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains…in the big-city Democratic coalition…To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures.

op. cit.

Piven and Cloward didn’t get their guaranteed national income. They did, however, motivate the Democrats to massively and proactively expand welfare at the federal level. “Amendments to the Social Security Act extended welfare benefits to millions of new recipients,” political scientist Robert Albritton wrote in 1979.

That massive expansion of welfare greatly accelerated the decline of the family in the US, with black families being hit the worst of all.

What now?

As a writer recently noted in Issues and Insights,

America’s minority groups face a host of important economic issues, despite the current focus on police brutality. Indeed, when it comes to addressing inequality, economic, education and family issues are far more important than police brutality.

Following the passage of the 2017 Tax Reform Bill by the Republicans and President Trump, the economic issues were well on their way to being resolved –until China’s Communist regime deliberately allowed the Wuhan virus to infect the West. Before that infection, black unemployment had plunged to a historic low. The wages of blacks were growing rapidly and even faster than those of other social groups.

It is unlikely that growth could be restored under the anti-growth economic program the Biden-Harris team have committed themselves to.

The Democrats have also proved themselves the enemies of black urban education. Beholden to the teachers’ unions, they’ve opposed vouchers and school choice that would provide an alternative to failing urban public schools.

The destruction of the black family can begin being reversed by returning all public assistance to the states and local communities and encouraging the latter to enact or strengthen work requirements, detoxification programs, adult education classes, the easing of professional licensing requirements, and the tightening of child support requirements on biological fathers who refuse to behave as true fathers should.

And finally, in the bully pulpit category, let’s have one, two, many Dan Quayles speak up — to put Hollywood and the media to shame.

Once middle-class norms, including married child-bearing, return to the black underclass, we think the last obstacle to its full participation in US prosperity will have been removed, and it will transform itself from an underclass to a middle class.

But this will require the defeat of the progressives determined to keep blacks on the Democratic reservation as government dependents and who accuse the nation of systemic racism for the very ills they themselves did so much to create.

The Democrats were the slave-owners’ party until the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow party after the Civil War, and the family-destroying welfare-rather-than-jobs party from LBJ down to Obama and Harris-Biden.