William Raspberry / Syndicated columnist
WASHINGTON — "There is a crisis of unprecedented magnitude in the black community, one that goes to the very heart of its survival. The black family is failing."
Quibble if you will about the "unprecedented magnitude" — slavery wasn't exactly a high point of African-American well-being. But there's no quarreling with the essence of the alarm sounded here last week by a gathering of Pentecostal clergy and the Seymour Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. What is happening to the black family in America is the sociological equivalent of global warming: easier to document than to reverse, inconsistent in its near-term effect — and disastrous in the long run.
Father absence is the bane of the black community, predisposing its children (boys especially, but increasingly girls as well) to school failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship — and to an intergenerational repetition of the grim cycle. The culprit, agreed the ministers (led by Boston's Rev. Eugene Rivers III, president of the Seymour Institute), is the decline of marriage.
The concern is not new. As Rivers noted at last week's news conference, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm 40 years ago, only to be "condemned and pilloried as misinformed, malevolent, and even racist."
What is new is the understanding of how deep and wide is the reach of declining marriage — and the still-forming determination to do something about it.
When Moynihan first issued his controversial study, roughly a quarter of black babies were born out of wedlock; moreover, it was largely a low-income phenomenon. The proportion now tops two-thirds, with little prospect of decline, and has moved up the socioeconomic scale.
There have been two main explanations. At the low-income end, the disproportionate incarceration, unemployment and early death of black men make them unavailable for marriage. At the upper-income level, black women are far likelier than black men to complete high school, attend college and earn the professional credentials that would render them "eligible" for marriage.
Read the rest here:
Healing the Black Family
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