I know what the data says. Just trying to gauge what your presuppositions are. I know this is a TLDR post, but hear me out. 89% of Asian children are living with two parents in the home, while that figure is 78.6% for whites, and 41.3% for blacks (2020 U.S. Census Bureau). The stats on single-parent homes are jarring.
-63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (US Dept. Of Health/Census) – 5 times the average.
-90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes – 32 times the average.
-85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (CDC)
-80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes –14 times the average. (Justice & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26)
-71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report)
-70% of youths in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average. (Dept. of Justice)
-85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Fulton Co. Georgia, Texas Dept. of Correction)
-75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes – 10 times the average.
-71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father. [U.S. Dept of HHS)
The discrepancies between two-parent and single-parent homes is substantial. Lots and lots of troubled kids come from single-parent homes. And look at the discrepancies between the races. 47.7% higher for Asians and 37.3% higher for whites. Are you going to tell me that doesn’t play a factor in the disparities?
Now, pause and please strongly consider this for a moment. Disparities don’t equal discrimination, just the same way correlation does not equal causation. Disparities don’t necessarily mean that something nefarious is occurring. Disparities are common and natural. For example, Jewish people represent 0.2% of the world, yet they’ve received 22% of all the Nobel prizes. Kenya and Ethiopia have combined for 98 of the fastest 100 marathon times of all time, in spite being only 2% of the world’s population. Even more, the overwhelming majority of those great Kenyan runners come from the same tribe, which represents less than 10% of the nation’s population. People inhabiting cities on the coast comprise 23% of the world’s population – and 53% of world’s GDP. Geographic differences can produce disparities just the same.
Thomas Sowell has outlined one of the more surprising and intriguing disparities. “A study of National Merit Scholarship finalists found that, among finalists from five-child families,
the first-born was the finalist more often than the other four siblings combined. If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected -or assumed- when conditions are not nearly so comparable?"
Furthermore, he notes from a study conducted in the UK in 2003, that the first born received a degree 22% of the time, compared to just 11% for the fourth child – and merely 3% for the tenth child.
There are many theories as to why the oldest child has the most success, but the prevailing argument seems to be that the parents have more time to devote to the one child. As more kids are brought in, their attention is divided. The fact that twins have
lower IQ scores, in the range of 5-6 points, than singleton children in the same family, seems to reinforce this idea. Now, if there is a strong correlation between time devoted to kids and achievement in school, then it’s not too hard to believe that black population, with three in five black homes lacking two parents, is starting at a tremendous disadvantage. That is very likely the cause of disparate outcomes, as opposed to the public perception of systemic racism.
So, for the record, 22% of single-parent white homes are in poverty, while just 7% for two-parent black homes. Two-parent home are complete game-changers for kids. So yes, it is significant when you consider how many more African-American are only living with one child. The poverty rate, among households with a female householder and no spouse present, is 29.9% for blacks, 24.3% for whites, and 16.9% for Asians (2020 U.S. Census Bureau). Not a huge difference. It is interesting that the gap between Asians and whites is actually wider than the gap between whites and blacks.
Coleman Hughes, an Ivy League-educated African-American, has noted how second generation West Indian black kids have lower crime rates than African American kids. Both groups should look and talk the same. Further, he adds:
"West Indian blacks would have been virtually indistinguishable from their American counterparts. There is no better demonstration of their superficial likeness than the fact that many prominent black leaders—including Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier—were actually of black West Indian, not black American, ancestry. But despite being subjected to the same racist treatment by local whites, second-generation West Indian black families were highly successful, out-earning American black families by 58 percent, and even out-earning the national average income by 15 percent.
The second natural experiment involves comparing the outcomes of black immigrants on the whole with the outcomes of American blacks (i.e., blacks descended from American slaves.) Although black immigrants (and especially their children, who are indistinguishable from American blacks) presumably experience the same ongoing systemic biases that black descendants of American slaves do, nearly all black immigrant groups out-earn American blacks, and many—including Ghanaians, Nigerians, Barbadians, and Trinidadians & Tobagonians—out-earn the national average. Moreover, black immigrants are overrepresented in the Ivy Leagues. Though they comprised only 8 percent of the U.S. black population in the 2010 census, 41 percent of African Americans attending Ivy League schools were of immigrant origin in 1999. Five years later, the New York Times reported a finding by two Harvard professors that as many as two-thirds of Harvard’s black students “were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
Granted, neither of these natural experiments prove that culture, specifically, caused the divergent outcomes. It’s impossible to disentangle confounding variables like immigrant self-selection, demographic differences, and other unknown factors. But the results of these natural experiments do suggest that the role of systemic bias as a causal factor in the creation of unequal outcomes has been greatly exaggerated. If systemic bias accounted for as much of the variance in success as progressives seem to think it does, then it’s unlikely that groups that experience equal amounts of systemic bias would achieve such wildly different levels of success."
If you can't get the same outcomes among siblings, why should we gripe about disparities among groups with different values, different backgrounds, and different cultures? In a truly free society, equal outcomes will NEVER happen.
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