“In many of the relationships there is no bonding, physical and spiritual, and when spiced with poverty, the problem is further accentuated. Herein is the spawning ground for several societal problems; juvenile delinquency especially, no good home environment with a loving atmosphere, trouble with authority figures, not being able to cope with school assignments, peer pressure; no nutritious food –a vicious chain of events.” “True love lost among Bajans” July 16 NATION article by Philip Hunte
FIFTY YEARS AGO this year, Democrats in the United States made a historic mistake. They savagely attacked a report by federal official Daniel Patrick Moynihan that warned that the breakdown of the African-American family would make poverty more intractable.
Moynihan wrote that “from the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern Seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles”, history had shown that communities in which the family breaks down end up in chaos, with fatherless young men caught up in lives of crime, substance abuse and reckless sexual behaviour. Shunning the message while attacking the messenger, the liberal (progressive?)
Democratic Party activists dismissed the future senator’s report as “racist” and said Moynihan had no right to assume that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America. But hard experience has proven Moynihan right.
Today in America, 73 per cent of African-American children are born to single mothers, as are 53 per cent of Hispanic kids, and 36 per cent of white kids.
Children with unmarried moms are five times more likely to live in poverty, and are 40 per cent less likely to graduate from high school. Interestingly, the make-up of the prison population in the US closely matches the above percentages for children born to unwed mothers, though I am sure those who will see only the white racist oppression of blacks and Hispanics in these figures will resort to their usual myopia.
Can we not learn from so many years of mistakes? It’s not being a moral scold, much less a racist, to acknowledge the role of families in fighting poverty.
– CHARLES KNIGHTON
