The Real Reason the Black Family Fell Apart

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0:29Coleman Hughes:See terms. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Delano Squires. Delano is a writer and public policy researcher who directs the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation, where his work focuses on marriage, fatherhood, family structure, and their relationship to social and economic outcomes. He's the author of a new book called The Vanishing Black Family, How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable. He previously spent more than a decade working in government, including on technology access and gun violence prevention.

1:08Coleman Hughes:In this episode, we talk about the breakdown of the black family in the United States. Roughly two-thirds of black kids are born in single-parent homes, a fact that has huge implications for racial inequality and a variety of other important issues. We talk about the causes of that breakdown in this episode. We discuss the role of cultural change, the role of abortion and the birth control pill, the role of the legacy of slavery, the role of feminism, and the role of economics. Finally, we talk about what, if anything, can be done to restore family structure. So without further ado, Delano Squires.

2:10Coleman Hughes:dollars a month and unlike ice cream it won't uh drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture does anyone have any cash give it a try at midmobile.com slash switch upfront payment of 45 for three months 90 for six months or 180 for 12 month plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra new customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy see terms okay delano squires thanks so much for coming on my show thank you for having me so your book is called the vanishing black family and it deals with a question that I spent a lot of my life thinking about, reading about, occasionally writing about.

2:44Coleman Hughes:And it is the disturbing phenomenon that anyone who cares about the African-American community, about racial progress, about racial inequality has to contend with, which is that something like 60 upwards of 70, you can give me the exact numbers, of black children are born in out of wedlock homes. And we know the problems that are associated with, you know, whether it's crime, you know, anti-social behavior, virtually everything bad in life is pretty highly correlated with not coming from a two-parent home. And that holds true whether you're white black purple asian anything right but we've seen this you know we we all accept it as this normal state of affairs that like yeah black americans they're just like most kids don't grow up in a two-parent stable home but as you point out in the book that hasn't always been that way and so you set out to sort of trace not only what caused this trend but what can fix it, right?

3:54Coleman Hughes:So this is an incredibly important topic. You've written a fantastic book on it, and I think we're not going to cover everything in the book, so I really recommend people just get the book. It's very readable and full of information. So well done. Before we get to it, tell me a little about you. Why do you care so much about this issue? What is your background? Did you grow up in a two-parent home yourself? And what are the connections between your life story and this project? Yeah, I mean, I did grow up in a two-parent home. My parents actually just made 45 years of marriage, the beginning of August.

4:34Myself, my wife and I, we just made 14 years. So we're a little bit behind, but thank you. But growing up in New York, I noticed a distinct difference in the lives that me and my three closest friends lived compared to our peers, like kids we went to school with, played basketball with. And at a certain point, we realized even if we didn't use the term family structure, we realized that that's what it was. All of our parents now at this point have been married over 40 years. We grew up in the same church. We grew up in households with consistent values. We grew up in that quintessential village, right?

5:08When people say it takes a village to raise a child. we had that experience and at a certain point we realized yes a big part of why we are the way that we are you know bouts of mischief aside is because all of our fathers were there and not just our individual dads but the men in our church the men in our community playing the role of um you know complimentary father, even when our biological fathers were not around. So that was probably when the seed was planted. But I think why I decided to write the book now is because I realized that family structure is by far the most consequential example of racial disparity in the country today.

5:53So you were right on with the stats. According to the CDC's final birth data in 2023, 69 % of black children were born to unmarried parents. Now for context, the national average is 40%. That alone should make policymakers take a step back and ask how we got here. Again, for context, in 1965, that national number was about 8%. So you can see how much this issue has changed. But in the black community, it's 70%. In cities across the country, in New York, the way they break their data out, it's about 75 % for how they categorize African American families. But whether you're talking about black folks from the Caribbean or native born, that number is still far too high.

6:46In Washington, D.C., it's 77%. In Baltimore, it's 83%. In St. Louis, it's about 82%. If you look at state level data in the deep south, in Georgia, 71 percent, South Carolina, 77 percent. In Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, it's 82 percent. So to be a black child born to and raised by your married birth parents through your 18th birthday today is the exception and not the norm. and all of the people who talk about racial inequity, ad nauseum, I would say, are completely silent on this issue. And as someone who worked in local government for 15 years, my last year was in the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and every morning when I was on calls with the assistant police chief, it would be the same story.

7:34Young black male, young black male, young black males, both perpetrator and victim. And I remember talking to one of my colleagues who ran the city's Office on Racial Equity, and as they were rolling out their plan, because part of what they wanted to address is the racial disparities and, you know, crime victimization, I noticed that there were no indicators around family. So they had things around incarceration, employment, education, nothing around family structure. And in D.C., more than any other jurisdiction, particularly on a state level, there is a 70 percentage point gap between black and non-marital birth rates as i said for black children 77 for white children it's 7 which is an outlier for for white children across the country but that's a 70 percentage point gap and the office of racial equity never thought to say well what's going on here is this is this an issue that we should you know devote time and attention and resources to.

8:37So I said, now is the time. And particularly in a post-George Floyd, post-BLM era, I wanted to know why the progressives that talk so much about racial inequity seem to care about equity in every institution except the institution of marriage, and in every structure except family structure.

8:56Coleman Hughes:Okay, so the first thought that comes to my mind is one of the things someone on the left might say is, okay, if we talk about the disparity in marriage between black families and non-black families, then what we're doing is stigmatizing single mothers. We are essentially telling them, you are less because you don't have a husband in the home. And because we don't want to do that, we are just not going to talk about it at all. Is that an attitude you encounter amongst progressives? Absolutely. It's one of the main reasons that people don't talk about it. And one of the things that animates my book and is a through line of it is that I'm clear that the responsibility for changing this issue rests specifically with the black leadership class.

9:48So while progressives in general, right, the DNC may say, you know what, we don't want to take this issue on. I'm speaking directly to the leaders of the NAACP, the National Action Network, National Urban League, the Congressional Black Caucus, all the black media outlets, the Root, the Griot, Ebony Essence, the black fraternities and sororities, all of the institutions that decide how cultural, political and social capital is allocated in the black community have to be called to account. But yes, this is one of the main reasons why they don't do that is because they say, well, if we hold this up as an ideal, right, the married two parent family structure, then anyone who doesn't fit this ideal, in some respects, we are, they feel that they're demonizing or criticizing.

10:35Now, part of my response to that is to say, we know how to do this in other areas. So, for instance, if you go in any urban school district, you go to Malcolm X Elementary in D.C. or, you know, PS 138, where I went to school in Queens, you're going to see banners and flags. You know, Howard University, Duke, Fisk, UCLA, University of Michigan. And you see them in neighborhoods where oftentimes parents don't go to college. and no one assumes that promoting college to all, which is what progressives typically do, and many conservatives, but definitely progressives, promote college to all. That is the default in the American public education system.

11:15No one assumes that by doing that, we are attempting to demonize the parents who did not finish school. And the reason we don't assume that is because most people understand that parents want better for their children than they have for themselves. And I think if we can make the argument for college for all, I think we can make a similar argument for marriage for all dot dot dot who want children. And that is the central thesis of my book. The book sort of flips the argument around family reconstruction away from the thoughts, feelings and desires of adults and towards the rights and needs of children.

11:52And I think that's what really sets it apart.

11:54Coleman Hughes:Well, okay. So now let's imagine a progressive that is fine talking about this issue, highlighting this issue. But their theory of why the black family has almost completely collapsed is slavery. So you list in the book a couple of the popular explanations on the left. slavery, deindustrialization during the 60s and 70s, factory jobs being shipped overseas, mass incarceration, and I think you list one other. So before we get to your explanation of how this happened, give me a little, maybe a minute or two, on each of the popular left explanations that you think are flawed. So let me start with slavery because that's the big one.

12:44Yeah. Because all the other ones flow from that. All the other ones that someone on the left would say are just a reincarnation of that one. The reason I start talking about the institution of slavery and its impact on the black family, one, is for historical accuracy. And two, because I think it's important to be clear that the institution of slavery and institution of marriage are fundamentally incompatible. Marriage comes with a set of expectations and obligations and responsibilities. responsibilities, the expectation that husband and wife will live together, sexual exclusivity and monogamy, that the husband will protect the wife and provide for her, none of which can be fully guaranteed under a chattel slavery system.

13:27But the conclusion that I draw in the book is that while slavery deformed and distorted the black family, it didn't destroy it. And I say that for two reasons. One is because you saw enslaved men and women marrying under a system that didn't actually recognized, legally recognized their unions. And two, you saw the same people search for years, sometimes decades, and across hundreds of miles to be reunited with a spouse who they had lost contact with. So I have a number of stories in the book. You're talking about people who were separated 25, 30, 40 years. So there was a desire to participate in that institution.

14:12But here's how I would connect it to the other ones that you mentioned, right? Mass incarceration, I would probably throw in war on drugs, all the things that progressives would typically include. And I'm not dismissing them outright and saying that they play no role. What I say in the Vanishing Black Family is that external threats are handled differently by communities who are in a sort of defensive and fighting posture than internal threats. So what that means, I say it sort of in plain non-social science language. If you're sleeping in your home, let's say you're a husband and you've got a couple kids, and you hear a bang at the door at 2 in the morning, you're saying there's someone who wants to get into my house and they're trying to do it in the most violent and hostile way possible.

15:03So you're going to grab something and try to defend yourself and your family because the response to an external threat is typically to fight. But internal threats, particularly when they come in the form of someone passing themselves off as a friend or an ally, are responded in a far different manner. So one of the reasons that I think you saw enslaved men and women fighting for their families is because slavery represented an external threat. And when progressives talk about the response to the different changes in social structures and policy, and again, whether that's redlining or mass incarceration, any of those things, I would put those all in the external threat category.

15:48And that's why the response to them from the progressive is to fight back. But when someone comes knocking on your door as a friend and says, hey, I got, you know, call me, welcome to the neighborhood. I have a pie that I baked for you, but it's, you know, laced with some poison. It's, oh, come on in. Because your defense mechanisms, your defense systems are down at that point. So how I would respond to the progressive who makes this argument is, one, is to frame the issue in that way in terms of how people tend to deal with, you know, pressure from from the outside versus the inside, and two, to show, and I'm not the first person to say this, that 100 years after emancipation, it was still the norm for a black child to be born to and raised by their married parents.

16:35And that was at a time in 1959, the black poverty rate was about 40%. And still about 80 % of black children were born to and raised by married parents. one generation whether you measure generation 20 year increments 25 or 30 years one generation after the rise of the welfare state and the rise of second wave feminism that was no longer the norm so so i would say just look to the evidence um it doesn't bear out this notion that you can draw a straight line from the southern plantation in 1826 to the west side of baltimore or east Flatbush Brooklyn in 2026.

17:13Coleman Hughes:Right. There's always been, I think, two big problems with the slavery broke the black family idea. So the sociologist Herbert Gutman wrote a four or 500 page book arguing against the Moynihan Report, which you talk about in the book, had asserted that slavery destroyed the black family. And he pointed out all this, all this research, all these census, census data from you know as as early as 1910 or even like 1880 showing very high marriage rates in the black community if slavery had destroyed the black family you would expect that closer in time to slavery you would see that but actually as you just pointed out you don't see it until until the 1960s right yeah so that's been one problem you see you see challenges so I want to be clear you you you still see disparities particularly non-marital births coming into the beginning of you know the early 1900s so you do see challenges and even though as I said 80 % of black children were born to married parents in you know 1960 the non-marital birth rate for whites at the time was basically was about two percent so there was still a disparity but it wasn't you didn't have this new cultural norm right where basically marriage becomes obsolete and fathers optional right but then the other problem for me has been that if you look at what slavery how slavery circumscribed the life of slaves a lot of those rules and restrictions that they suffered from the moment they were free they had a yearning to do the exact opposite and the the most obvious example is reading reading became illegal in most slave states the moment slaves were freed they wanted to learn to read extremely badly and taught themselves and any any black person who could read would have an a nighttime class teaching everyone in his community there was like a hunger to learn how to read precisely because they had not been allowed to read right and so the idea that because you couldn't get married under slavery that that would extinguish the desire that has never been obvious to me right that that would make sense as an explanation so if if slavery is not the best explanation for this deterioration of the family that starts in the 1960s what is so so it was important for me to start by saying yes that slavery deformed distorted the black family but didn't destroy it what i what i then go on to argue particularly chapters two and three in the book is that in the 1960s you have the rise of two major cultural shocks to the family um these didn't only affect black families but black families were hit the hardest one was the rise of the welfare state the massive expansion of welfare programs starting in the mid-1960s this is Lyndon Johnson's Great Society War on Poverty where you have welfare spending going from about, call it a billion dollars in 1950 to about 27 billion in the 1970s and hitting about 62 billion in the mid-1980s.

20:32So what I argue is that the expansion of welfare, welfare displaced men from their rightful role as providers, role and responsibility as providers in their home. At the same time, you have that. You have the rise of second wave feminism. And that's names like Betty Friedan and obviously, you know, Gloria Steinem names that many people would know. But it also includes the development of black feminism or womanism as a distinct political ideology. So your Audra Lourdes, your Angela Davises, your Alice Walkers. And what I argue is that second wave feminism deceived women into believing that femininity is weak.

21:15Masculinity is toxic in men, but empowering in women. Marriage is oppressive. The home is a prison and children are a burden. And I try to make that argument based on the words of feminists themselves. Now, obviously, they didn't say that that's what they're going for. But if you have a political ideology that as a feature sows discord between the sexes, it is impossible for that ideology to also be pro-family. So what I say is that you have these two cultural shocks, one that disrupts the role of the man in the home, the other one that disrupts the role of the woman in the home. And when you combine those two, that gives you the type of cultural and social energy to move the type of family structure that was at the margins into the mainstream.

22:05Now, that's aided by, again, academia. That's aided by policy where the government steps in and became the substitute father, right? The man in the home, if you will, for millions of low-income women. I quoted a woman named Johnny Tillman who when she retired was the president of the National Welfare Rights Organization. And she said in a 1972, I think it was 72, essay in Ms. Magazine, she said that welfare is like a super sexist marriage. She said you divorce, I'm paraphrasing now, your man for the man. Or you leave your man for the man but you can't divorce the new man if he treats you bad. And I think that thinking was instructive.

22:46And this is coming from a woman who wanted to get more women, particularly more poor black women, onto welfare. It's the idea that if I get a check from the government, I have some sense of financial autonomy, particularly if I'm thinking about autonomy from the father of my child. But when you believe that, you end up sinking deeper and deeper into dependency. So I think those two things were the two primary drivers that disrupted on a massive scale how men and women thought about their roles in relationship to one another, their families, and obviously their children.

23:22Coleman Hughes:so obviously you know anyone who's thought about the role of welfare in the 60s and 70s knows this but it's worth it's worth sketching the details here because just saying welfare you know broke couples up in the abstract is not quite enough right i remember my mom who grew up in the south bronx would say that she remembered welfare auditors coming around and people literally hiding their boyfriends or shoes you're right yeah because is there if there's evidence of a man cohabitating with you in the house you lose money like a material amount of money for a poor person right so tell me a little bit how welfare was structured um what effects that had and and you know what what in your estimation was the effect of that yeah so i think it's important to to think of welfare in two different eras so if you're thinking about the 1930s and the new deal right where where the aid programs for low-income families with children afdc that was for women whose husbands for instance were deceased or could not work when you get by the time you get to the 1960s the expansion of welfare um wasn't just about you know again a deceased husband or someone who was absent.

24:46It was more generally for women who fell below a certain income threshold. It also included the types of incentives that you mentioned where, one, married couples in most states were not eligible for welfare, so that was out. But also, if the mother's boyfriend spent significant time at the home, cohabitated or had relations with the mom in the home, he would have at a certain point been considered a substitute father. So this goes to the man in the house rule, which a lot of people have heard of. Now, the Supreme Court struck down that man in the house rule in a 1968 case, King versus Smith. But that type of thinking that a woman saying, if I marry this man, right, or if I live with this man, I will lose material resources that I'm currently using to take care of my family, has endured for decades, even after welfare reform in 1996.

25:46Coleman Hughes:Why did it outlive welfare reform? And can you talk about what welfare reform changed? So in 1996, President Clinton, I'm not going to try to remember the entire name of the bill, but it was a Welfare Reform Act, which strengthened work requirements for welfare. it created I want to say a five year federal time limit right so instead of being open-ended to the point where you could have multiple generations of women existing primarily on on welfare programs it limited it to five years now in many states someone could receive welfare for more than that but at least on the federal side it's only about five years the program funding for TANF which is temporary aid for needy families included provisions to promote marriage so that's one of the four goals of TANF is actually to promote marriage and stronger families now most states don't invest in that part of it but it was one of the stated goals but even after 1996 and even till today one of the things I start chapter two of the book the one on welfare with a story about dc strong family strong futures program it was billed as it's basically a universal income program and when the mayor rolled it out she said it would provide autonomy for for women and their kids the washington post did a story on the pilot phase in 2024 the women who were who were selected to participate call it about 130 of them um all black none married to you know in terms of my analysis of the data um either receive ten thousand eight hundred dollars as a lump sum or nine hundred dollars a month the story starts with a stay-at-home mom of three now typically when i see the term stay-at-home mom i'm saying okay, there's a dad, husband in the background, you know, making things happen.

27:55But it said that she was living in a subsidized two-bedroom apartment. She was on WIC, TANF, SNAP. So those are all, you know, welfare programs before even getting into this new pilot project. And it was clear to me, obviously, that the government was playing the role of husband and father. But what really struck me was not that particular profile. it was the fact that the word father was only used two times in the entire piece one when it said that the father of her three children went along with her on a six thousand dollar you know luxury vacation to florida and the second time was when it said that the fathers of a woman's two kids are no are not really involved in their lives and what i found is that these particularly they call it guaranteed income programs now, replicate the same type of dynamic as welfare back in the 1960s.

28:52The focus of the help and the resources is always on the mom and the baby. And to the extent that the father is even considered, he is sort of, you know, an appendage. He's not really a part of the family. He just exists. And sometimes in some nonprofits, they will handle the dad in a completely different program. So it's this, to me, the most lasting legacy of wealth of welfare expansion in the 1960s is not even a dollar amount that we've spent. It is the idea that the government. Both in terms of elected officials and unelected bureaucrats is ultimately responsible for taking care of women and their children, particularly low income women and their children.

29:40And I think that idea has now become a cultural norm in some neighborhoods, not exclusively black neighborhoods. But if you if you're looking at places where poverty is concentrated, and again, whether that's southeast D.C., West Baltimore, North Philly or East Flatbush Brooklyn, you're going to see places where it is clear that marriage before marriage is no longer the norm. And I owe part of that to the legacy of welfare.

30:08Coleman Hughes:Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including unlimited, is$15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash? Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. A front payment of$45 for three months, $90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy.

30:37Coleman Hughes:See terms. The most memorable gifts aren't found. They're made. Zazzle is a custom marketplace where you pick any product. A mug, a card, a tote, a phone case, and make it personal. A photo, a name, an inside joke. The kind of gift that actually fits the person. That's what 30 million customers have been coming back to Zazzle for over 20 years to find. Right now, save 25 % on your first order at Zazzle.com. That's Zazzle.com. Make it Z-amazing. Why did it hit the black community so much harder than the white community and so much earlier? I think part of it was just the poverty rates were just significantly higher in the black community in 1950s, 1960s.

31:23Again, poverty rate in 1959 for black Americans was about 40 percent. Now it dipped through the 60s and now it's about 18 percent. But that's a significant poverty rating, particularly if you're talking about the Deep South. So I think part of it is that poverty was more prevalent in these communities. Two, I do think that there's something to be said for the cultural dynamics that came out of slavery. So if you read any writing, whether in my book or in other books, you do see that, again, the disruption of the family dynamics in slavery had an impact after emancipation. So you had women who were married on paper, but whose husband lived on a different plantation.

32:09So they were used to managing a household on their own. So there was some, I think, enduring legacy of that, particularly early into the mid-1960s where this idea that black women could do and manage a household on their own was not completely foreign. I also think that poverty in the 1960s became both feminized and racialized. And by feminized, I mean it became one of the central points in the women's liberation movement was about eradicating poverty. And racialized, again, when you look at the you know disparities when it when it came to poverty rates you could see how organizations would say welfare is really an opportunity to strengthen and provide material resources to the to the least among us who happen to be you know low-income black moms you said something earlier i thought was interesting that feminism uh derided toxic masculinity in men but promoted it as a virtue

33:15Coleman Hughes:in women, which is something I noticed. And it always used to make me laugh when I was in college, because I went to Columbia, and obviously Barnard is all women's school. It's a, it's super feminist culture. And I would listen to what the activists would say, they would, you know, here's like a very silly example, but it's illustrative. Man spreading on the subway, right? This was like a big meme, right? And they would talk about how manspreading is annoying on the subway. Actually, they have a point. It is inconsiderate. If three people can fit and you're taken up two, it's inconsiderate, right?