The Real Reason the Black Family Fell Apart

Conversations with Coleman

Delano Squaries discusses his book, The Vanishing Black Family, arguing that the decline of stable black family structures is driven by modern

Key takeaways

• According to 2023 CDC data, approximately 69% of Black children are born to unmarried parents.
• Squires argues that while slavery deformed the black family, it did not destroy its fundamental desire for marriage.
• The expansion of welfare programs in the 1960s and 70s is cited as a factor that displaced men from their roles as providers.
• Second-wave feminism is identified as a cultural shock that disrupted complementary gender roles within the family.
• Squires critiques black leadership organizations like the NAACP for remaining silent on the issue of family structure.

Main topics

• Black family structure
• Impact of the welfare state
• Second-wave feminism

Notable quotes

Slavery deformed and distorted the black family, it didn't destroy it.

Conclusion

The episode offers a provocative sociological critique of how modern p

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) 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. 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. Speaker 2 (1:29) Okay, Delano Squires, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank Speaker 1 (1:31) you for having me. Speaker 2 (1:32) 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, 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, whether it's crime, antisocial 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 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? 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? what are the connections between your life story and this project? Speaker 1 (3:25) Yeah, I mean, I did grow up in a two-parent home. My parents actually just made 45 years of marriage at the beginning of August. Myself, 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. 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, where people say it takes a village to raise a child. We had that experience. And at a certain point, we realized 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, 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. So 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%. Speaker 1 (5:27) 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. In 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%. South Carolina, 77%. In Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, it's 82%. 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... 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 young 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, a 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 percent. For white children, 7 percent, which is an outlier 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? So 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. Speaker 2 (7:56) 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? Speaker 1 (8:29) 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. So 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, the 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, the married two-parent family structure, then anyone who doesn't fit this ideal, in some respects, they feel that they're demonizing or criticizing. Now, 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 DC 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 and many conservatives, but definitely progressives, promote college to all. That is the default in the American public education system. No 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. And I think that's what really sets it apart. Okay, Speaker 2 (10:54) so now let's imagine a progressive that is fine talking about this issue, highlighting this issue, Speaker 1 (11:02) but Speaker 2 (11:03) their theory of why the black family... has almost completely collapsed. Speaker 2 (11:12) 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, Speaker 1 (11:31) give Speaker 2 (11:31) me a little, maybe a minute or two, on each of the popular left explanations that you think are... flawed so Speaker 1 (11:42) let me start with slavery because that's the big one yeah 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 i start um 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, 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. But 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 legally recognize 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 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. But here's how I would connect it to the other ones that you mentioned, right? Mass incarceration. I would probably put throwing, you know, 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. Speaker 1 (13:33) 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 sort of in plain non-social science language. If you're sleeping in your home, let's say you're a husband and you got a couple of kids and you hear a bang at the door at two 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. So 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. Speaker 1 (14:12) 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 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. And 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 say, hey, I got, you