Some Blunt Talk on Race | Center for Equal Opportunity

Many African Americans have blown it. By no means all, but many. By no means only African Americans, as I’ll discuss in later, but a disproportionate number of them.

African Americans finally and rightly achieved great equality of law, and along with it much greater equality of opportunity than they had ever had, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the 1960s. But they have failed to take advantage of it.

It’s a sad irony that, at the same time something good was happening for them, sometime bad was happening, too. This is not to say that great progress hasn’t been made in shrinking various socioeconomic gaps between African Americans and other groups, but the progress could have been much greater.

To be blunt: The reason I say that African Americans have blown it is because, at the same time that they were achieving so much, they abandoned marital childbearing. At the same time the civil-rights advances were occurring, the black family started to implode, so that now 71 percent of African Americans are born out of wedlock.

And now those in organizations on the left like Black Lives Matter are blaming others for this failure by too many African Americans. Yet it is this failure that accounts for the persistence of racial disparities, not racial discrimination. For raising children without fathers results in more crime, more poverty, more unemployment, more substance abuse, more high-school dropouts — you name the social problem, and it goes along with illegitimacy, and that includes the problem of illegitimacy itself, which has become intergenerational and culturally ingrained.

And, what’s more, the persistence of racial discrimination is itself caused by the racial disparities as much as it is a cause of them. Racial stereotypes are not, alas, completely divorced from reality.

Recall the confession years ago of Jesse Jackson — yes, Jesse Jackson of all people — that if he hears footsteps behind him on a dark street he is relieved when a nervous glance back over his shoulder reveals that the two youths behind him are white, not black.

Why did this happen — why, that is, did the African American family implode at the same time as the Civil Rights Movement was triumphing?

I don’t know. John McWhorter, a decade ago in his book Winning the Race, blamed it on the hippies — or, more precisely, on the cavalier liberal attitude in the 1960s toward sexual promiscuity. It’s as good a theory as any I’ve heard. The same forces that gave us the Civil Rights Movement also gave us the Great Society, and with the latter came a decidedly anti-bourgeois mentality. But, as Irving Kristol warned, it’s a mistake to look down on the bourgeoisie, and we ignore its values at our peril.

Upper class whites were able to recover from the sixties nonsense. Lower-income blacks, not so much.

Whatever the cause of that 71 percent number, in any event, what is to be done now?

Here again, I’m afraid that it’s hard to say. You can’t pass laws against illegitimacy and promiscuity. These are fundamentally moral problems. My own view is that we need another Great Awakening. And of course that’s something else that can’t be legislated.

But the good news is that the out-of-wedlock birthrate can go from 71 percent to 0 percent in exactly 9 months without it costing anyone a dime. All that’s necessary if for African Americans — and, in particular, African American women — to will it.

I stress women not because they are more culpable. To the contrary, biology being what it is, I think it is more likely that they can be persuaded to behave responsibly than men, especially young men. And women, after all, are the ones more likely to bear the brunt of the problems of single parenthood.

I’m under no illusions, though: This message has to be carried by someone like Oprah Winfrey, or better yet whoever the younger version of her is these days, rather than an old white guy like yours truly.

And, while I’m focusing on African Americans here, let me also hasten to add that all of this is true for members of other racial and ethnic minority groups — and for whites, too.

Indeed, much is being made now of the collapse of strong families and the concurrent rise of social pathologies in large swaths of white America. That seems to be the theme of J.D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. That was also the point of Charles Murray’s earlier book, Coming Apart.

That’s all true. This is really not about race. Bad behavior leads to bad results for any demographic group, and bad behavior for any demographic group is strongly correlated with raising children in a home without a father.

* * *

Last week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the head of the Obama administration’s Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, calling on Congress to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision three years ago in Shelby County v. Holder. She wants, that is, to resurrect the “preclearance” provision in the Voting Rights Act, which requires many state and local jurisdictions to get advance permission from her minions before making any changes in voting practices or procedures.

My published response in the Washington Post can be read here:

No new legislation is needed. The Supreme Court invalidated only one provision in the Voting Rights Act, and that provision was indeed unconstitutional. There are plenty of voting-rights laws on the books to ensure that the right to vote is protected.

In every other area of civil rights law, if someone believes his rights have been violated, he has to prove it in court. That is fair, and there is no reason that our voting laws should be any different.

Liberal lawyers would prefer to be able to get their way without proving anything, simply working behind the scenes with left-of-center bureaucrats to block laws they dislike. They are not concerned about ballot integrity and use racial gerrymandering to advance their own interests.

Also, the principal bill that has been drafted is bad legislation. It does not protect all races equally from discrimination, contains much that has nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s decision and violates the Constitution by prohibiting practices that are not actually racially discriminatory but have only racially disproportionate effects.

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