“Twenty-one years old and six kids? That’s busy.”
I worked at a company that made a deal to take 350 people off the welfare roles in exchange for a tax break. They were practically all black men, who didn’t want to be there but were faced with loss of benefits if they didn’t take the job. Alcohol and drug use were so rife the company stopped drug testing because all of the blacks failed and none of the whites had. Therefore the test was racist.
I’d listen to the men talk and they’d enthusiastically compare how many ho’s they’d f*cked and how man kids they’d had by each. The black floor supervisor told me I couldn’t take their pictures for the company brochure because they all had outstanding warrants and women looking for them for support. (Every time I raised the camera they’d fall all over themselves to get out of the picture.)
Back before the Great Society blacks were significantly less likely to get divorced than whites. What a change the government has wrought.
“Back before the Great Society blacks were significantly less likely to get divorced than whites.”
I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do know that out of wedlock children(outside kids) and other nontraditional family arrangements were much more common among black Americans than white Americans long before the 1960’s.
Before the 1960’s, there was a lot of dishonesty towards welfare workers and other nosey authority figures who came to ask questions about things like who the children’s father was and if the man living there was the man the woman was legally married to.
There is a sociological book called “The Promised Land” that is often assigned in college history classes about the migration of blacks to Chicago that goes into detail about this. Apparently, there was always a portion of the black population in the South that lived the kind of life style we now associate with welfare and the Maury Povich show. The difference was that the people who lived like this were not so in your face about it and were a much smaller, but still significant, portion of the black population.
Some academics who have looked into this have concluded that the increase in things like illegitimate children and children by multiple partners was largely a matter of the portion of the population that had always lived this way having many more children than the get married, stay married types, rather than people who were raised in stable families going out and getting a bunch of baby daddies/baby mommas. I’m not sure which scenario is more disturbing.
Note that the % of white children who are the product of baby mommas and baby daddies has skyrocketed and is now around 30%. That’s way higher than the rate in the black community was in the 1950’s, even allowing for underreporting.