Black America: A Fatherless Land of Poverty and Crime Looks to Obama for Salvation

The cruel paradox of over a half century of civil rights law in the US, is the sky-high rate of illegitimate black births -- with its concomitant high crime and poverty. This trend has been driven by the free choices of individuals within large numbers of black communities themselves, and has gotten worse as preferential treatment policies of the federal government in favour of blacks grew more prominent. Paradoxically, the farther away America has moved in time from the blight of slavery, the worse the conditions for the unshrinking black underclass appears to be.

No wonder US blacks campaigned and voted so desperately for Obama. It almost seems that this unfortunate group will need a miracle to save them from their own poor decisions.

Since 1965, through economic recessions and booms, the black family has unraveled in ways that have little parallel in human cultures. By 1980, black fatherlessness had doubled; 56 percent of black births were to single mothers. In inner-city neighborhoods, the number was closer to 66 percent. By the 1990s, even as the overall fertility of American women, including African Americans, was falling, the majority of black women who did bear children were unmarried. Today, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. In some neighborhoods, two-parent families have vanished. In parts of Newark and Philadelphia, for example, it is common to find children who are not only growing up without their fathers but don't know anyone who is living with his or her biological father.

And what has this meant for racial progress? Fifty years after Jim Crow, black U.S. households have the lowest median income of any racial or ethnic group. Close to a third of black children are poor, and their chances of moving out of poverty are considerably lower than those of their white peers. The fractured black family is not the sole explanation for these gaps, but it is central. While half of all black children born to single mothers are poor, that is the case for only 12 percent of those born to married parents. At least three simulation studies "marrying off" single mothers to either the fathers of their children or to potential husbands of similar demographic characteristics concluded that child poverty would be dramatically lower had marriage rates remained what they were in 1970. _WaPo

What kind of miracle will it take to alter the self-destructive choices of tens of millions of human beings? What kind of messiah does Obama have to be to redeem these drug-riddled, crime ridden, despairing communities from their helplessly habitual, ever-relapsing downward trends? If Obama hands off foreign policy to Hillary and others, and finds a solution to the chronic broad-spectrum depencies of the inner city communities that supported his election efforts, he will be remembered as a great president.