Babies, NO Daddies: Crime Incubator

Found at The Warrior, and worth knowing.

...You might think that an article on the Moynihan report and the black family would mention somewhere that today 72 percent of black children, up from 24 percent when the report was written, are born to unmarried mothers. You might assume that an analyst of the black family would explain that large numbers of those children — far more than mass incarceration can explain, by the way — will have at best erratic relationships with their fathers. You would expect him to show how one of the main reasons fathers fade out of their children’s lives is “multi-partner fertility” — parents who have children by a series of partners — and that multi-partner fertility is particularly widespread among blacks and incarcerated men. He might look at the research suggesting that children living with an unrelated father are more likely to suffer abuse. You would expect him to ponder all of this because there is abundant evidence that boys growing up under these conditions have less self-control than those growing up in more stable families, and most of all, because those boys are far more prone to commit crimes. You would think at least some of this would find its way into the pages of a 17,000-word piece called “The Black Family in an Age of Mass Incarceration,” but you would be wrong.  --Kay Hymnowitz discussing some BS essay by Ta-Nahisi Coates.

Nobody with half a brain suspects Coates of scholarly enterprise, of course.  It's possible that Mayor Milk-Carton Barrett reads his stuff and believes it--but it's more likely that Mayor Milk-Carton is merely coasting towards his (ill-deserved) pension.

Maybe the Original Black Panthers should take a serious look at the scholarship of Hymnowitz or Moynihan.  Who knows?  They might become fans of Kanye West.