Here’s my question.

[LadyForCamus]

I haven’t read the others yet, but I found that first article to be laden with racist insinuations. Is it just me?

because it is always best to read what you want into one of 4 citations (that include the black wall street times) and then assume the worst.. you people kill me with how you are trained to race bait each other look for key words and stop thinking for yourselves and assume the worst..

how about this why don't you post the section that seem out of sorts to you just cut and paste. rather than make a sweeping dismissal of 4 sources that all say the same thing without any real evidence of any impropriety!

Who’s dismissing anything? I just said I haven’t read the other three articles yet. I have two kids to care for, ya know. As far as the first one goes, the author’s hypothesis seems to be ‘poor black communities are poor because their families are broken, and their families are broken because black ladies just wanna have babies out of wedlock.’ In fact, that’s really the closest she comes to attributing any sort of cause to the high incidence of children born into single-parent homes in these communities. “Because they just want to” as an explanation is not only a blanket assumption, it would be difficult, if not impossible to test. She also fails to mention other factors that likely contribute to children growing up fatherless, like the disproportionately high incarceration rates and lengthy prison sentences of black men in this country. At the end of the day, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Are many poor, black families broken because of cyclic poverty and disadvantage, or is there cyclic poverty and disadvantage in black communities because they tend not to have cohesive family structures? Or, is even that question an oversimplification of the issue framed in as false dichotomy? All I know is, ‘they don’t marry before having kids because that’s just how black folk are’ is a pretty racist hypothesis, IMO.

Here’s the exact quote:

But the truth was that underclass girls often wanted to have babies; they didn’t see it as a problem that they were young and unmarried. They did not follow the middle-class life script that read: protracted adolescence, college, first job, marriage—and only then children. They did not share the belief that children needed mature, educated mothers who would make their youngsters’ development the center of their lives. Access to birth control couldn’t change any of that.

That’s an awful lot of broad-brushing and unverifiable, racist assumptions right there.