Its a negative situation though, so stating the facts about a negative situation doesn't make it bigoted. Does the absentee father/mother value family though? I think when we talk about single parents we need to be cognisant about the other half out of the picture and how their lack of family values effects their child.
Sure, I agree, and that's why I said it's not *mentioning* the sociological metric itself that's the problem, it's going beyond the statistic and applying an unsubstantiated negative generalisation to a race.
And remember, a growing portion of single family households are not from parents abandoning their families. It's more and more possible and acceptable to have children without marrying.
Unhappy438 said:
If you take households with equal income across all ethnic groups you will notice some pretty stark differences. How do we account for Pacific Islanders who have a relatively low income but also a low incidence of single parents? How do we account for Hispanics who have a similar income to African Americans but a lower rate of single parents? Why are white single parent households predominately male but its predominately female in black households? These are all question that seems to point to something beyond purely economic factors.
Do you have a source for that?
Worth noting upfront that none of those groups have had to contend with slavery, Jim Crow, formal (and ongoing informal) segregation, redlining, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, etc. (For the last two, Hispanics are worse off than white people, but nowhere near as bad as black people). This is important in the context of concentrated poverty, so not only the income of individuals or households, but also their neighbourhood and surroundings.
For example:
Neighborhood poverty threatens both black poor and nonpoor families to such an extent
that poor white families are less likely to live in poor neighborhoods than nonpoor black families. This is not an original finding. The sociologist Robert Sampson finds that:
….racial differences in neighborhood exposure to poverty are so strong that even high-income blacks are exposed to greater neighborhood poverty than low-income whites. For example, nonpoor blacks in Chicago live in neighborhoods that are nearly 30 percent in poverty—traditionally the definition of “concentrated poverty” areas—whereas poor whites lives in neighborhoods with 15 percent poverty, about the national average.*
In its pervasiveness, concentration, and reach across class lines, black poverty proves itself to be “fundamentally distinct” from white poverty. It would be much more convenient for everyone on the left if this were not true—that is to say if neighborhood poverty, if systemic poverty, menaced all communities equally. In such a world, one would only need to craft universalist solutions for universal problems.
These all very heavily overlap with raw economic factors and play a huge role in how families end up being structured. Segregation forced the breadwinners in households to move far away, redlining made it impossible for families to live close to where they work, or in areas with good schools, transport, etc. The war on drugs and mass incarceration saw massive over-criminalisation of especially black men (which goes to your last question), which has huge implications for their economic prospects. All this stuff ripples across generations and has a huge impact on families.
For example, from the article I posted earlier:
“More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their family,” the National Research Council report noted. Should the family attempt to stay together through incarceration, the loss of income only increases, as the mother must pay for phone time, travel costs for visits, and legal fees. The burden continues after the father returns home, because
a criminal record tends to injure employment prospects. Through it all, the children suffer.
This has enormous impacts on the likelihood and viability of stable marriages.
Also worth considering that single parent households themselves are a dynamic demographic. For example, black women who head up single parent households have seen their incomes and educational qualifications rise (as they come off the lowest base), for example, while black men's wages have decreased. That alone would play a role on family structures as people make decisions based on their economic prospects. It's much more possible for a single parent of any race to have a child and not be disadvantaged as much as they would have been previously.
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