Half of success in fatherhood comes from simply showing up. Absentee fathers contribute to the generational erosion of the family fabric that is almost impossible to undo.
There's a legitimate point here but if you introduce it with snarky one-liners like "Or, you know, fathers", you damage both the conversation and the community. Please don't do that. Instead, please follow the site guidelines, which include:
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I want to give this comment some kind of award! Staggeringly impressive. Did you have to have a cool-off break before writing that, or are you such a zen/ninja master by now that you could write that immediately?! Thanks again for the very inspiring modding.
Agreed, but as a black man who grew up fatherless be mindful why black fathers are absent. Many times it's not by choice. There were and still are intentional systems in place to make it difficult for fathers to get jobs, stay within the prison system, and have access to quality education. I urge people commenting to ask their black friends for their insights. I came from an inner city and graduated from CMU. The two worlds are stark and mind blowing. But in the end, more mentors at an early age can help break the cycle. That's how you can play your part.
Specifically, I understand a 1968 law put into effect the Man in the House rule. Black families had to decide if welfare would pay better than the father's job. Many left the house so the mother and child(ren) could receive the welfare payment. The Moe Factz podcast has been helpful to me in understanding these structural problems in society.
According to your first link, the rule had been in place in some jurisdictions prior to 1968, but was struck down by the US Supreme Court at that time.
To clarify: the Supreme Court did not say that assistance could not be restricted to single parents. The "Man in the House" rule said that a woman was not single if she even had a boyfriend who was not her children's father, if her boyfriend ever visited her house. That's the part that was struck down.
As for the restriction to single parents, I can certainly see the potential for unintended consequences. Paying people not to get married means fewer people will get married — just as paying people not to work, as the "welfare cliff" effectively does, means fewer people will work. I broadly support the idea of helping people who need help, but it needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't tend to trap them in their situations.
The authors of this regulation probably assumed that married couples would not be induced to split just to collect money, and that single moms would stay chaste in order to collect, and thus not have more out-of-wedlock children. So they set up a law that incentivized behavior they were trying to avoid. It's like the Marriage Penalty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty ) except worse.
So it probably wasn't a result of maliciousness but rather a lack of imagination and empathy (aka stupidity).
I struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic of single-parent (and no parent) households among blacks (or any ethnic or economic group) is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism. Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'. Those horrible blights on American (and Western) society have mostly been buried yet the numbers of black children growing up without a father has exploded. Whatever contribution systemic racism, institutional racism, conscious bias, unconscious bias, etc. (which I concede are real things) have on health of the family unit within black American culture, something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.
Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat. Stuff like our code didn't work not because our programmers wrote bad software, but because our process is broken. Those FISA warrants that were granted because FBI agents and lawyers lied need to be fixed with 'better safeguards'. Or those banks get taxpayer bailouts and nobody goes to jail because there wasn't sufficient regulation to prevent systematic fraud and excessive risk-taking. Nobody has to be embarrassed for their own behavior or held responsible for their own actions when the nameless, faceless system gets the arrows.
If you want to talk about real privilege, it's the privilege of growing up in a healthy family unit. The greatest advantage I've ever received was a loving father and mother who were there to provide support, instruction, and discipline. All children - everywhere - deserve and desperately need good, loving, present parents. It breaks my heart that's become the exception and not the rule.
> From August 18–20, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb,[10][11] which claimed:
> > For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [This drug ring] opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles [and, as a result,] the cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America.
> Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat.
People should be equally suspicious when someone argues the system is in inherently fair, because it is often used to insulate ourselves from injustice.
It suggests we don't have to worry about inequality or the messy interventions that would be required to eliminate it.
>Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now
How do you figure? Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons?
>something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction.
>How do you figure? Is it easier or harder to fight discrimination in, say, employment when, "We don't hire negroes," is stated upfront, compared to when black applicants are denied for "cultural fit" reasons?
Everywhere I've worked professionally I've had black coworkers. Everywhere I've hired considered and hired black applicants. I've had black supervisors. I've had black colleagues. I've had black reports. And this is true of virtually every professional environment I've interacted with, at least here in the South.
This most certainly wouldn't have been the case in 1950. And that confirms that such discriminatory systems aren't more powerful now than they were in generations past.
Really, I think claims to the contrary are absurd on their face.
I don't think you fully answered either of my questions. I appreciate that your limited personal experience is closer to what we would like to see, at least in your telling of it.
It appears I can't answer your questions to your satisfaction. I live in the deep South. I provided my (not limited) experience and exposure to professional environments as evidence. And that experience, and the application of Occam's razor, tells me your claims that bias and racism is more effective now that it is comparatively invisible is absurd.
The infamous Lee Atwater (advisor to Reagan, Bush 1 and chairman of RNC) quote comes to mind:
> Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
I'm not saying the people within the government are more racist than before. But the systems that the government put into place in the 60's through the 80's were specifically designed to be racist in effect without appearing racist in intention.
If you reduce funding in segregated schools, then when desegregation happens, you protest "forced busing", you're effectively keeping black kids in worse schools.
Turns out if you criminalize marijuana and declare a "War on Drugs", you can arrest a whole bunch of young black men, lock them away and give them criminal records. Then you can go on bemoaning the lack of black role models.
Or you can simply neglect to fight redlining, ensuring that it's impossible to get a house in the white neighborhoods.
Or you can institute a policy that schools whose students fail to get good test scores are penalized. I wonder what that'll do.
To preemptively respond to the argument that these policies were long ago, I like that analogy Obama gave of an ocean liner:
> Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were
Policy is about the next 50-100 years, not the next 10. If you put racist policies in to effect, people will see the effects for generations upon generations.
> I struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic [...] is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism.
I agree, but I do think it's largely the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policy. Policies that were designed in part as a safety net for single mothers seem to have perversely incentivized family breakdown.
> Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'.
Unfortunately, they are. Those clumsy relics of explicit bias were too reliant on individual antipathy, which is dissipating in a connected world, where others' experiences area available through books, movies, and the Internet.
What we have, instead, is a much more sophisticated, and less error-prone system. It's not a "convenient scapegoat," it's actually very, very inconvenient. Institutional biases are hard to change, especially when they're baked into the ends, and not incidental means.
That’s certainly true, but I’m not sure it’s a complete explanation. Jobs and education are less available in say Bangladesh than in US inner cities, and even among impoverished people families remain intact. Strong cultural and religious taboos on divorce and single parenthood play a big role in that. It’s worth noting that the percentage of white children raised without fathers has tripled since the 1960-1970s: https://images.app.goo.gl/SkTaWF9nyoZwXUbBA. That’s not a change that’s caused by institutional factors.
Of course, systematic racism impacts culture too. People in Bangladesh may be materially poorer and less educated than those in inner cities in the US. But they have standing within a social framework that institutional racism denies to African Americans.
I have a friend who switched worlds in adulthood simply because someone convinced him it was possible to do it. When he describes it, it isn't like it was a pep talk, it was more like someone telling you that you can change your own oil in your car and sends you steps. Part of that is that he was ready to hear it, and was quite smart, but if no one had said anything.
It is and it isn't. Every society has some sort of proverb like "you can leave the X but the X will never leave you" because on some level people can't undo their upbringing.
I just happened to read a story where an Asian was killed while two blacks trying to steal laptop from him https://abc7news.com/5811847
The story mentioned one suspect's sister saying " I have 4 kids and no daddy in their lives ". I simply can't understand this. One kid , I can understand. But four? ... Four (Add: non has daddy present)? I just have too many questions.
Add: I interpreted "no daddy in their lives" as they never had a daddy present ever. This could be my mistake.
Woman and man get four kids together. Man dies or dissappears for some other reason. How is that hard to understand? Or did some racial bias make you assume that all the four kids had different fathers?
Currently, no. We don't know what the situation was like when they were having kids.
The dad (or dads) might not be around for a lot of reasons. Maybe they divorced five years after the last kid was born, maybe he got arrested, maybe he died.
Four kids as a baby mama, I'm guessing. A couple with an extended family can handle four kids, but an individual who may not be all that tight with anyone who can keep an eye on the kids... Well, chances are they'll fail at a lot of important things.
>I urge people commenting to ask their black friends for their insights.
I avoid talking matters of race as much as I can, because I don't want that person to feel that they're a "black" person in my mind or view. Because if I were a black man, I wouldn't want to define me. So I don't let that define those I contact. I strive to treat everyone the same. Most of the time, it works, you CAN train yourself to treat everyone the same. If you think "black" when you see a black person, then you need to keep working at it, like everything in life. After you're done, you'll still have some level of innate subconscious racism that comes with human nature, but the key is to not actively embrace or act on it.
That said, I work with a black guy (we're both developers). His dad was never around, he is a wanderer today and he called him a deadbeat. He said something about his dad being resentful that he turned out so well, and had nothing to do with it. My colleague attributes his success to his mom.
In his case, it sounded like his dad was absent by choice. My coworker is not a deadbeat dad, has children, an expensive home and a wife. Hard worker, as you have to be to be a successful developer. I think being born with a good mind helps, as well as a stable home even if it's just a mother. A little luck (circumstances) helps all of us.
There are many, many reasons why this is the case; but they were almost all a product of racist social engineering in the 20th century. And when I say racist, I mean people whose main argument was the genetic inferiority of black people. Progressives consistently caved to their demands under threat of violence.
Showing up is hard to do when housing policy explicitly forbids black people from living within a 2 hour commute of the few places that would hire them. It's hard to do when you have to work 2 jobs because the few neighborhoods you are allowed to live in are expensive. It's hard to do when under constant police harassment.
The erosion of the family fabric of black communities in America was malicious, intentional, and far more recent than many are willing to believe (which is why this comment will probably be downvoted to hell). And there's no great conspiracy about it because it was done in the open.
> Showing up is hard to do when housing policy explicitly forbids black people from living within a 2 hour commute of the few places that would hire them.
And yes, the “progressive” Bay Area, too. For anyone who wonders why the Bay has so few black people - the house I live in on the Peninsula was built in 1948. And its original deed forbade “colored people” from living in it. This was eventually overturned, I believe in the 60s. Given the housing values nowadays, how much generational wealth have blacks missed out on due to this? It’s not as though they weren’t here. After all, they’ve been in this country since its inception. Just like whites, blacks came westward. In the Bay they specifically also helped fill the demand for US shipbuilders during WWII. But systematically denied from one of the biggest wealth generating sources America had to offer in the 20th century (Bay real estate). And this also means their descendants are not in the position to benefit from the Bay’s 21st century wealth generation source (tech).
Many people do not know this racist history of the “progressive” Bay Area.
This is exactly correct. There's a wonderful late-1990s documentary on the history of East Palo Alto called "Dreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto" that describes how the community was formed and ultimately became an incorporated city. Here is a clip that describes the discriminatory housing policies in the Peninsula that led to East Palo Alto becoming predominately black:
The sad thing is that had the original African-American inhabitants of East Palo Alto been able to buy in Palo Alto instead, they or their descendants would be multi-millionaires today given the tremendous boom in Silicon Valley's housing prices starting in the 1970s. There was only a decade-or-so window between when racial covenants became unenforceable and when Palo Alto's housing prices started booming in the 1970s due to the growth of Silicon Valley where African-Americans could buy in Palo Alto at affordable prices.
Also sad is the story of San Francisco's Western Addition, just south of the Japantown mall. Many African-Americans from the South migrated to San Francisco during WWII for the war effort and also for the war-related job opportunities that were abound in the area. Due to racial covenants, the Western Addition was one of the few places where African-Americans could rent and buy; that area had a lot of vacancies due to the unfortunate internment of Japanese-Americans who populated the area before and after the war. When WWII ended, Japanese-Americans and African-Americans lived side-by-side in the Western Addition. However, in the late 1950s, San Francisco started a massive redevelopment project where many of the old Victorian homes in the area were torn down and were replaced with public housing projects. This is also the time that Geary was widened. Many Japanese-Americans and African-Americans lost their homes during this redevelopment project. These homes would be worth a minimum of a million dollars each today, potentially more, due to their proximity to Downtown and Market Street.
Many Asians and other immigrants often come to the United States without any generational wealth and build from scratch.
An example of someone everyone knows is Sundar Pitchai. The only way out of middle class and to go upwards is education. Not by speculative real estate activities.
Yes, when you are a recent immigrant who comes with nothing, the way to go upwards is by education.
The point is that black Americans are not recent immigrants. They have been in this country just as long (if not longer) than white Americans. Therefore, it’s probably better to compare black Americans’ socioeconomic status to white Americans.
“Speculative real estate”? Not in the slightest. Simply the ability to buy a roof over your head and pass it on to your children.
FWIW, Asian immigrants, statistically speaking, basically all came well after the civil rights movement, and mostly came here without any wealth, which means they were also unable to participate in generational wealth accumulation. They also had a pretty fundamental disadvantage: they didn’t speak English.
Any hypothesis that attempts to explain the plight of black Americans needs to also adequately provide for the incredible success of Asian Americans. And, if you think it’s merely skin color, then you have to account for Indian Americans, who are often darker skinned than many black Americans, yet who out-earn white American households nearly 2 to 1.
I don’t believe any reasonable person thinks that centuries of racial violence and discrimination evaporated overnight and all barriers disappeared for black people. Personally I don’t think it’s reasonable to think experiences or impacts would be the same across different groups of minorities given that many policies and actions were specifically targeted at and impacted black Americans.
That destruction had and continues to have a lasting impact.
There are many theories on why recent immigrants, including African’s, perform better than Black Americans. The psychological impact has been well documented and might help explain some differences in achievement compared to white Americans.
I don’t disagree, but I was responding to the narrow hypothesis that generational wealth is a significant causal factor. And then trying to get people to think more like investigators, instead of just rolling with whichever story sounds good (since that is determined to a large extent by the skill of the storyteller).
San Francisco is repeatedly called out as the prime example in The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein -- an absolutely fascinating (and depressing) look at statutory racism in the 2nd half of the 20th century -- specifically because it has a reputation for being "progressive". It was pervasive across the country until well into the 80s.
I assume you've read it since he focuses on the narrative of a black man working in the shipyards; but for anyone interested in reading further on the subject, I highly recommend it.
It's not "Bay Area in the 1948" that has a reputation for being progressive. It's "Bay Area in the present" that has this reputation. And the later would generally be quick to agree that the former was not very progressive.
I once read, kids need fathers to learn interaction with people who are not their mother.
I think, this is where the "atomic family" breaks down. Only having one person for this job, is simply too high of a risk. We should go back to a bigger type of family, so kids can have more people in their early lifes that fill this role, so when one leaves, there are still many left.
The nuclear family became American dogma after WW2, and it most benefits corporations and a growth economy. Prior to this modern age most people didn't have the resources to move willy-nilly. Even during the Great Migration, people moved in large groups from the Old World to the New, landing in ethnic neighborhoods. Whole villages uprooted. While there are benefits, having no support net (in the USA), has huge downsides. If anything happens to either parent, it's extremely difficult to continue. Having abruptly become a parent last April has been eye-opening. Like bomb blast so.
'Years ago, I interviewed Kweisi Mfume, then the president of the NAACP. "As between the presence of white racism and the absence of black fathers," I asked, "Which poses the bigger threat to the black community?" Without missing a beat, he said, "The absence of black fathers."' - Larry Elder
The higher crime rates leading to higher incarceration rates is probably a bigger factor than "white racism".
Edit: Making this edit to clarify what I'm trying to say, since several responses has tipped me off to how it could be read. Being black doesn't have anything to do with committing more crimes. Higher crime rates is much more a factor of economic and family status. Both of which are negatively impacted by higher crime rates, which reinforces the cycle to everyone's dismay. Those statuses are on average worse in the black community than others, which causes a large part of the statistical difference. The causes of the difference stem from the legacy of racism and choices that were made in designing welfare programs, at least in large part. Which sucks.
A couple of notes: (1) even when adjusting for the 'crime rates' the sentencing lengths and the conviction rates for white vs black are way off and (2) the whole war-on-drugs things should be read as a 'war on people of color in all but name'.
We can argue all we want about how ineffective and/or misguided the War on Drugs has been, but that doesn't change that fact that crimes are crimes. Were some of the sentencing guidelines structured in a racist way? Maybe, I've heard people say that and don't have any evidence showing the opposite, but that is a side issue.
The money quote:
> "You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Source? Everything I've read suggests that crime rates are pretty much the same across race and ethnicity when controlling for economic status. The primary variable is contact with the justice system, i.e. getting caught.
Everything I've read also indicates that it is mostly or entirely driven by economic status. White people who grow up poor and/or with single mothers are also highly likely to end up in prison compared to the normal population.
This isn't about ethnicity, it is about economics and culture. It only disproportionately affects black people because of historical trends and welfare programs decades back that encouraged single parent homes, as was said in other comments.
>White people who grow up poor and/or with single mothers are also highly likely to end up in prison compared to the normal population.
They are, however, much less likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to lengthy terms than similarly-situated black people. To be treated like a black person in the justice system, a white person must be some combination of much poorer, much less educated, and with a much longer criminal history. It is about race and ethnicity.
Are you implying that a human with black skin is predetermined to commit crime at a higher rate? Or might there be some confounding variables, such as poverty, caused by hundreds/thousands of years of institutional racism?
Already responded to a few other similar question. Absolutely not what I'm saying. There are lots of factors driving the different rates, and black people are just on the wrong end of a lot of the trends. My original post was probably more snarky and should have had more background to what I was thinking, given how many people have asked questions like this.
You're saying that black people have a higher propensity for crime. Is it not more plausible that humans are more or less alike, and the difference is outside their control?
Black people aren't predisposed to commit crimes more often than anyone else. It is just that a higher percentage of them grow up poor and/or with just a single parent, which are factors in likelihood to commit crimes, which leads to higher incarceration rates, which just feeds the beginning factors. When you control for economic status and parents, white people have similar rates. The factors that make it more likely for an individual to commit a crime are outside of their control yes, but committing a crime or not is always an individual's decision that can't be blamed on anyone else.
When you saids "It is just that .." , did you really mean those are the only causes of the higher black crime rate? If not, what do you think the other major causes are?
I heard someone say a long time ago something along the lines that the frontal lobe develops differently between ethnic groups and that it controls your empathy and impulse reactions. I haven’t seen any research that supports this though (and did nit search for that). It would be interesting to see if this claim is supported by science.
Mostly the place where everything sucks. It is a nasty self reinforcing problem. See some of my other responses for more context.
Wasn't trying to imply that black people are natural disposed to committing more crimes, just that currently they do, from a combination of economic and social reasons.
The percentage of African-American children in single-parent homes went from 20% in 1960 to 65% in 2017. Is institutional white racism worse now than it was sixty years ago?
I also question the methodology behind those statistics. Many of them only count married parents as not being "single." My father would have counted for my sister, post-divorce, despite being a highly-ranked officer in the military who paid for her college with his GI Bill funds. So would my cousin, who is not married to the mother of his child but who is very much living a traditional domestic life with his partner and daughter.
The demonization and denigration of functional but unorthodox living arrangements is nothing new to American discourse.
Canadian, but I'm not really informed enough to answer your questions - just to point out that Canada and the USA have different racial demographics. They've got nearly the same % of white people, but Canada has a 3.4% black population vs 12.7% in the USA. (Canada mostly makes up the difference with Asian population, 14.7% vs 5.4%.)
So how come there are less black fathers now than when racism was much more prominent? Also how come we see the same problem in lower class white communities? I don't know if "institutional" racism (whatever that is) contributes to it or not but there are certainly other more prominent factors.
It is, quite seriously, heartening, as a father, to know that just 1) being there at all, and 2) trying with some amount of thoughtfulness not to screw up your kids, puts you well into the top half of fathers, by quality. You can still mess up constantly, and pretty badly, but remain better than average.
It's more about perspective, to avoid beating oneself up too much on the bad days. "This sucked, but we're still basically OK, just gotta learn and move on".
Agreed. I'm teaching my kids the things they need to be competitive - by out-thinking or out-doing the people around them. Addition: What you'll find is most of life, is people acting on unsound strategies, poor fortitude, or poor self control, or having personality preferences that are easy to predict, or thinking in group think.
Let school handle the mundane, I'm teaching them strategy, leadership, multiple scenario event planning & prediction, personality types and the strengths and weaknesses of each, multiple types of investments & investment patterns, asset strategies, the agility that creating options give you - rather than having it given to you.
I'm teaching them how to avoid the types of people and thinking that takes down people and everyone around them. The types of events that downfall a person, and how to get out of the way when people display them. How to read the market, and get ahead of it for prosperity.
These things were not taught to me by my smart firefighter father, or great mother (teacher/nurse) - but I was keen to pick up by observing the world and reading, taking stupid risks, and growing. I'm jealous of my future kids - I wish someone had handed these to me.
Might wanna throw in how to be empathetic, how to listen, not judge too harshly, generosity, environmentalism, volunteering, etc. You risk turning your kid into a one dimensional corporate ladder climber while you project your fears onto her/him.
I don't disagree. I'm currently showing them how a little effort early in life allows them significant freedoms later in life by doing literally what 'hackers' do best, take advantage of existing systems no matter if they are economic, personal, etc - and using the existing boundaries, system glitches, and exponential leverage multipliers to form the desired life they like. But I do like some of your additions...
edit: by "hackers" i mean the term for people who created their own solutions to existing systems of anytype. Not the cybercriminal definition.
That's a simple analysis to an incredibly complex issue. There are many reasons some black fathers aren't around to raise their kids. Some reasons under their control, many not. The cycle continues until underlying circumstances (societal, penal, etc) are addressed.
Yeah right it’s the government taking black men at random in the street and putting them in jail for the single reason they’re black, just to destroy the black community. It has absolutely nothing to do with the said individuals breaking laws (sometimes with the side effect of creating another father-less family in the process), which are the same for everyone. Also doing criminal acts is a choice, not something that happens by accident.
I know you think you are being sarcastic, but this very thing does happen, see stop and friskbl for example - white men on 5th avenue were not being "randomly" stopped.
Black men have been and continue to be systamaticly oppressed in the US. Black men serve more prison time than white men for the same crime. Black men are more likely to be charged for a crime vs dropped by the prosecutor when compared to a similar situation for whites.
This has been going on since litterly before the US existed when blacks were sold like animals for two centuries in america. Black people face institutional barriers to voting, jobs, loans, education and more.
> Yeah right it’s the government taking black men at random in the street and putting them in jail
Well not as cut and dry as that, but cops harassing black kids walking the streets is an old tradition of law enforcement. Mix in some stop and frisk and you have an unfair system. I remember I made friends with some black kids in high school. I went down to their neighborhood. It didn't take long for a cop to pull up and start asking questions. I never had a cop approach me before that. It was eye opening. I lived only a mile away.
> laws...which are the same for everyone.
Oh really? Are you sure about that? There are many studies showing that black people have higher incarceration rates for the same crimes as their cohorts.
Well yes, that's structural racism for you. And before you judge people for committing crimes, ask yourself: would you have abstained if you had the same life story? Do you think they would fall into crime less if they had a more privileged upbringing?
Yes, I would have abstained. Mind you, my grand parents are from the very most "underprivileged" part of France, the kind of place were half of men are dead before 50. Still, what people do there was working hard, not theft, drug and robbing the few rich around.
The problem is in large part cultural. You can see it easily with East-Asian immigrants that arrived dirt poor, yet saved and send their kids in college. After one generation they are not poor anymore. In Europe, the division are the same (White+Asian vs Black+Arab) despite difference in history (no descendants of slave). Also, education and healthcare are free and there is the welfare money. So why the results are similar? Because some value education and other don’t.
Ignoring the fact that all other things being equal, Between Blacks and Whites committing the same crime, a Black person will receive a harsher sentence....
Your perspective is 100% valid in a society that did not have several intentional attempts to punish a group of people because of their skin color.
The USA is a society with a long documented history of actions to undermine a population because of their skin color so unfortunately, your perspective is a little too simplistic for this situation.
It's a system built on discrimination, the idea that people of different color are going through the exact same thing is ridiculous. People love telling other people how to fix problems they have no idea about.
I am not sure that numbers add up to support this claim. In Oklahoma, which has the highest percentage of black people incarcerated, there is approx 2.5% of the total black population imprisoned, while over 60% of black children are raised without fathers.
Need more information. E.g. 2.5% of the total black population, but what fraction of the black father population? How many kids, on average, does each black father have?
So what's the incarceration rate for black men (or black fathers) in the typical age where they have children? (I guess ~18-35?) Seems like this stat should be publicly available.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I can't imagine it to be more than 15% of this population [and that would be pretty extreme]. If that's the case, how can incarceration be considered a major cause of these fathers "failing from showing up?" (I guess we'd need a number for that, too..)
Roughly 1 in 9 black men between 20-34 are currently incarcerated (11%). It's probably a much higher percentage that have been incarcerated in the last 3 years.
11% may even seem like a small number until you consider that not all the black men who have been incarcerated at least once in their life are currently incarcerated. 25% of black and hispanic men will face incarceration at least once in their life[0]. The incarceration is also skewed towards younger men who are one supposes potentially more likely to miss out on the formative years of their children's lives. It's also difficult for a strong family to develop in this situation imo. Life is about getting a good start and keeping that momentum going as steadily and predictably as possible.
The incarceration rate for blacks is lower than the rate of fathers not being around for their offspring. That’s a fact.
Anyone arguing that the entire problem is “we’re just locking up all these otherwise-would-be-there fathers because it’s a fun game to lock blacks up” is ignoring the reality.
I don’t have a strong opinion on it either way, but I’ve seen much better arguments that the welfare system has allowed for the higher rate of non-nuclear families. That it doesn’t take two parents to provide so the rate of single parents increased. Seems logical enough.
> Except - there is almost no cash welfare system in the US
Now; there is LESS cash welfare in the US than there was. TANIF was reformed in 1996. There is still SSI/Disability, SNAP, child support as cash or cash equivalency. I support those programs, but also recognize that it is possible government handouts have contributed to the decline of the nuclear family.
A) The laws have been specifically designed to allow targeting of certain populations (the "War on Drugs" has had a hugely disproportionate impact on non-white Americans).
The list goes on and on... "Broken windows" policing results in targeting of minority communities. Blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to be targeted under "stop and frisk" laws, despite equal (or lower) hit rates for contraband discovery when compares to whites.
If you make a whole bunch of laws that huge swaths of the population violate, and then use them to put subgroups you don't like in prison... it's not so "valid".
I'd argue that depends on 1. laws being put I to place for strictly rational reasons, 2. arrest decisions do not depend on race and 3. punishment magnitude is equal for equal crimes.
I agree with that. At some primitive level, I think we see our fathers as protector and provider. When he's not around, the pressure is really on boys to assume that role. And so it without the maturity and tools that adults have.
My father moved out when I was 14 and, although he was never far away and visited all the time, I was pretty angry about. For years. It really wasn't even his fault.
It is not just an issue for black boys, of course. Rates of fatherless homes have been rising in the US for whites and hispanics too.
It's not easy to link to on this page (unless someone can help me out), but there's interesting data about fathers being present in the lives of their children and its impact.
The beige/tan chart about 35% of the way down is what I'm referring to.
And many Black fathers are “absent” because they are incarcerated because of the “War on Drugs”. Study after study shows that minorities are given longer sentences and even stopped more than non minorities.
When drugs were affecting the “inner city” it was all about “being tough on crime”. When it started affecting “middle America” it became about “treating drug abuse as a disease” and “increasing social services.”
I'm not disputing this, at all, but have a weird observation about it that doesn't make sense.
I've been to Ft Worth a few times the last few years, and there have been protests about how police "protect and serve white folks only" each time near the area I stayed.
But what I can't get my head around is that nearly every cop I saw (near the protest or otherwise) was themselves a minority. So do we have a system where minorities arrest minorities at an unfair rate? Are the (apparent minority) white cops just arresting so many minorities that the arrest rate skews to minorities?
I have no theory on it, but couldn't help but wonder if better understanding what the people doing the arresting at (allegedly) unfair rates themselves look like would help find a path forward.
There is a legacy from centuries of white supremacy as a legal and cultural mainstay that isn’t fully understood, but certainly has a lasting impact.
One of those is internalized racism and the societal norms that often cause even black people to apply common harmful stereotypes to other black people.
Absentee fathers are more often than not absent because they got jailed in the war-on-drugs or died as collateral damage in that war. You can't show up when you're dead or in jail.
There’s a number of studies over the years that show lesbian parents have had raised more emotionally stable, socially successful adults than men.
“Fathers” full stop is an argument that agrees with what can be true in our reality.
It’s almost as if things we know to be true are often just noises our motor functions generate, and may in fact, upon reflection, be belief not rooted in truth.
I vouched your comment which was dead, but I think it's deliberately obtuse.
I think what people are speaking to is a second involved parent from shortly after birth-- which will most likely be a father/man. A second parental figure makes a world of difference, especially when confronting poverty and an educational environment that does not provide additional support.
> It’s almost as if things we know to be true are often just noises our motor functions generate, and may in fact, upon reflection, be belief not rooted in truth.
There's a whole lot of evidence that children of single parents have significantly worse educational and psychosocial outcomes, even when controlling for household income and other confounds; even when considering whether that parent remarries/a step parent shows up. The degree of involvement of the other parent is strongly predictive of the amount of harm; that is, there's a dose-response relationship.
> "I vouched your comment which was dead, but I think it's deliberately obtuse."
If a comment is dead and you think it's unhelpful ("deliberately obtuse"), don't reward it by vouching for it. It's likely going to generate even more noise. (Note a sibling comment which is is only argumentative, not moving the discussion forward.)
If you have a point to make, make it in a separate comment.
I very much doubt this because only recently has it been possible for parents of the same sex to adopt, let alone evaluate their performance as parents and generalise it. I would very much love to be proven wrong, however.
That being said, the issue here is not the gender of the parent, but rather single parenthood. A working single parent interacts very much little with their kid(s) in comparison with an atomic family.
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html