The joys and benefits of the sexual revolution, we were told back in the seventies, are manifold. Joy Jones points out the absurdity of this delusion in this sad piece in the Washington Post. She writes:
I grew up in a time when two-parent families were still the norm, in both black and white America. Then, as an adult, I saw divorce become more commonplace, then almost a rite of passage. Today it would appear that many -- particularly in the black community -- have dispensed with marriage altogether.
[Y]ears back when I taught a career exploration class for sixth-graders at an elementary school in Southeast Washington, I was pleasantly surprised when the boys in the class stated that being a good father was a very important goal to them, more meaningful than making money or having a fancy title.
"That's wonderful!" I told my class. "I think I'll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children."
"Oh, no," objected one student. "We're not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers."
And that's when another boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: "Marriage is for white people."
Jones goes on to give some depressing statistics about the state of the black family in America. Then she delivers this shocker:
I was stunned to learn that a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during slavery days than he or she is today, according to sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin.
The dysfunction is primarily a black problem, but blacks are just the canary in the coal mine. They're often the most vulnerable to dysgenic social trends, but those trends eventually affect everyone:
Often what happens in black America is a sign of what the rest of America can eventually expect. In his 2003 book, "Mismatch: The Growing Gulf between Women and Men," Andrew Hacker noted that the structure of white families is evolving in the direction of that of black families of the 1960s. In 1960, 67 percent of black families were headed by a husband and wife, compared to 90.9 percent for whites. By 2000, the figure for white families had dropped to 79.8 percent. Births to unwed white mothers were 22.5 percent in 2001, compared to 2.3 percent in 1960. So my student who thought marriage is for white people may have to rethink that in the future.
The sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies reduced sex to a form of recreation, and in so doing it insured that sex would be available to men without the necessity of committing to a marriage. If women continue to favor men with sex without demanding commitment in return the statistics Jones cites will simply continue to get more dreary. Young men simply are not going to take on the responsibilities of marriage as long as the benefits are available to them for "free." As a consequence, boys will increasingly grow up in fatherless homes, and the cycles of crime and poverty will simply grow proportionately more bleak.
LaShawn Barber also has a lot to say about the topic of black marriage (Caution: She's not happy).
