Recently, I got into a disagreement with a friend of mine who told me that it was slavery and segregation that broke the Black family. I brought up Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. Both men are at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and both have made compelling cases that it was the welfare state that broke up the Black family. The evidence is there. Steele has argued that Black Americans were the first group in this nation to have a form of socialism practiced upon them by federal, state and city governments. That is quite a damning insight when you think about it.
After the civil rights victories in the 1960s, we had the Great Society and its War on Poverty, and what we saw was the shift from the pursuit of equal opportunity under the law to remedies based on race instead of the needs of individuals. When you treat a race instead of individuals, you end up with a permanent system of dependency because a race cannot lift itself up. In Steele’s view, this form of racialized socialism was rooted in White guilt — the pursuit of racial innocence by Whites — instead of Black development. This resulted in Blacks being treated not as free citizens but as a special class whose problems required permanent management by the state.
In 1960, according to U.S. Census Bureau data (Table CH-3), only 22% of Black children lived and grew up in single-parent homes. That means four out of five lived in homes with both parents. This statistic comes nearly 100 years after slavery. However, after 30 years of programs and policies of dependency, the welfare state had expanded enormously and become institutionalized. The same census data shows that the number of Black children living in single-parent homes had more than tripled. We can argue over how much of that original 22% can be traced to the legacy of slavery, but there is no argument that the astronomical increase that followed was due heavily to the welfare programs of the 1960s.
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What these programs and policies of dependency did was change the incentives around work, marriage and fatherhood. And no racial group, especially Blacks who held their families together for generations through racial oppression, could survive this onslaught on the basic values that any human needs to survive and thrive. I know this intimately. I work on the South Side of Chicago, where roughly 80% of households have only one parent in the home. I’ve never met stronger women than the single mothers I know. They often have no help, and they often fail to understand the role that their government has played in promoting this culture — one that makes it so hard financially to escape.
Steele’s point about socialism practiced upon us is not abstract here. Neither is Sowell’s analysis of the incentives at play. Federal, state and city programs have for decades offered more support when a man is absent than when he is present. When you pay a woman more for having children without a husband in the home than for having one, you get more children raised without fathers. That is not a mystery. That is cause and effect. The Black family survived slavery, Jim Crow and every other form of legal oppression. It did not survive the War on Poverty’s rules. The numbers prove it.
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Fatherlessness is the root of so much of what we see on these streets. Young men without fathers grow up looking for identity, discipline and affirmation elsewhere. Gangs fill the vacuum the state helped create. Violence follows. Girls grow up without a model of what a responsible man looks like, and the cycle continues. This is the lived result of the incentives Sowell has documented for decades. And these incentives — socialist incentives — did not exist under slavery or segregation. There was no White guilt then.
I have spent years trying to be a father figure to boys who have never had one, teaching them to look someone in the eye, shake a hand, show up on time and earn what they receive. Those are not revolutionary ideas. They are the basics that two-parent homes used to provide as a matter of course, before the government decided it knew better.
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My community center, Project H.O.O.D., exists because government programs have not fixed this, even after decades. We are in the business of helping people make the leap from a check that keeps them dependent to a paycheck that makes them independent. There’s nothing like seeing someone receive a paycheck for money they’ve earned.
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Not only that, we train people for a life in the trades. We work with mothers who have decided that they want something better for their children. We teach young men what it means to become husbands and fathers instead of just men who have children. And we help them connect with Jesus. We do all of this from the ground up, in the neighborhood, because the people closest to the problem are also closest to the solution.
Sowell is right that the breakdown was not inevitable and not primarily a legacy of slavery. It was the result of policies that treated people as dependents instead of as free men and women capable of building their own lives.
The good news is that what was broken by policy and culture can be rebuilt by faith, work and personal responsibility. I have watched it happen. A mother finishes electrician training and gets a real job. A young man decides he will not abandon his child the way he was abandoned. A family chooses marriage and stability over the short-term relief of a government program.
That is the work in front of us. Not more programs that reward the very breakdown they claim to address, but a return to the values that held families together long before the welfare state arrived. God still cares about the family. He still cares about fathers. And on the South Side, we are still betting on both.