Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to my earlier post, and Ross's. Excerpt:
Social conservatives are interested in encouraging one model, and stigmatizing all others. I'm interested in encouraging practices and stigmatizing others. I'm interested in encouraging active involvement in your child's school, and stigmatizing ignoring the teacher's phone calls. I'm interested in encouraging fathers to put in as much manpower as they can summon, and stigmatizing those who walk out.My point wasn't that my family structure, then or now, should be held up as model. But that in families which social conservatives dismiss on paper, you can find the same values and behaviors that you'd hope to find in a nuclear/traditional family. Ross is effectively arguing that these families should be dismissed anyway--regardless of whether they hold the same practical values that social conservatives hold. Social conservatives are arguing for a world where people are stigmatized for being unmarried. I'm arguing for a world--and have argued for a world--where people are stigmatized for not performing the most elemental of duties.
He's right: social conservatives do argue for a world in which unmarried parents are stigmatized. Why? It's not to be mean to unmarried parents; it's to discourage unmarried parenthood. And why? Well, if you are a religious person, you could say it was because it's Not How God Intended It. If you preferred to take a more rationalistic approach, you could point out the reams of social science data, to say nothing of practical wisdom, showing that the institution of marriage is critically important for social stability because of the rearing of children (and please, let's not turn this into yet another interminable thread about same-sex marriage). Kay Hymowitz lays it out, chapter and verse, here. Excerpt:
While Americans have been squabbling about gay marriage, they have managed to miss the real marriage-and-social-justice issue, one that affects far more people and threatens to undermine the American project. We are now a nation of separate and unequal families not only living separate and unequal lives but, more worrisome, destined for separate and unequal futures.
Two-America Jeremiahs usually nod at the single-parent family as a piece of the inequality story, but quickly change the subject to describe--accurately, as far as it goes--an economy that has implacably squeezed out manufacturing jobs, reduced wages for the low-skilled, and made a wallet-busting college education crucial to a middle-class future. But one can't disentangle the economic from the family piece. Given that families socialize children for success--or not--and given how marriage orders lives, they are the same problem. Separate and unequal families produce separate and unequal economic fates.
Most people understand what happened to the American family over the last half-century along these lines: the birth control pill begat the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1960s, which begat the decline of the traditional nuclear family, which in turn introduced the country to a major new demographic: the single mother. Divorce became as ubiquitous as the automobile; half of all marriages, we are often reminded, will end in family court. Growing financial independence and changing mores not only gave women the freedom to divorce in lemming-like numbers; it also allowed them to dispense with marriage altogether and have children, Murphy Brown-style, on their own. (This is leaving aside inner-city teenage mothers, whom just about everyone sees as an entirely different and more troubling category.) Today, we frequently hear, a third of all children are born to unmarried women.
To put it a little differently, after the 1960s women no longer felt compelled to follow the life course charted in a once-popular childhood rhyme--first comes love, then marriage, then the baby carriage. Sure, some people got married, had kids, and stayed married for life, but the hegemony of Ozzie and his brood was past. Alternative families are just the way things are; for better or for worse, in a free society people get to choose their own "lifestyles"-bringing their children along for the ride-and they are doing so not just in the United States but all over the Western world.
Hymowitz goes deeper into the social science research to show that most kids who come from one-parent households do substantially worse in terms of building stable lives for themselves and their children. This stuff matters. This stuff matters a lot. Without giving too much information, the stigma of unwed parenthood has touched my own family. I know the emotional pain it can bring because people I love dearly have experienced it. I wish I could take that pain away from them. But we don't remove the pain from the innocent by tearing down a wall that was erected for a good reason. Peggy Noonan captures why we have to maintain these stigmas even as we struggle to be compassionate. Excerpt:
We have all had a moment when all of a sudden we looked around and thought: The world is changing, I am seeing it change. This is for me the moment when the new America began: I was at a graduation ceremony at a public high school in New Jersey. It was 1971 or 1972. One by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. And a pretty young girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood up and applauded. I looked at my sister: "She's going to have a baby."The girl was eight months pregnant and had had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society's disapproval.
But: Society wasn't disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother and not good for us.
The old America had a delicate sense of the difference between the general ("We disapprove") and the particular (Let's go help her"). We had the moral self-confidence to sustain the paradox, to sustain the distance between "official" disapproval and "unofficial" succor. The old America would not have applauded the girl in the big graduation gown, but some of its individuals would have helped her not only materially but with some measure of emotional support. We don't so much anymore. For all our tolerance and talk we don't show much love to what used to be called girls in trouble. As we've gotten more open-minded we've gotten more closed-hearted.
Message to society: What you applaud, you encourage. And: Watch out what you celebrate.
It seems normal to me that you would stigmatize having sex and having babies outside of marriage, while at the same time loving and trying to help those who have babies outside of marriage -- help them to do the best they have with the situation they find themselves in. That's life. Why does trying to do the latter mean you cannot insist on the former? You don't help someone deal with the consequences of wrongdoing by pretending that they didn't do wrong in the first place.
Ta-Nehisi:
Which brings me back to Rod's point that I come from a "broken family system" that "beat the odds." I find that so interesting, mostly because I suspect that if you examined the practices and norms taught in my house, in any detail, you'd never say such a thing.
Like I said, I don't know, and cannot know, how Ta-Nehisi grew up. From his own testimony, it sounds like he and his siblings turned out okay. But look: he sees no particular reason to marry. It is likely that the children he and his partner have will see marriage as unimportant too. The idea that marriage is unimportant has real world consequences when it becomes normative -- look at the high crime, poverty and social dysfunction rates in the black community in this country, where the overwhelming majority of children are born out of wedlock, and have been for a generation. The causal connection between unwed parenthood/broken families and social dysfunction cannot be disputed. That Ta-Nehisi and his family appear to have defied the odds is a great thing -- but they do not refute the statistics.
What you applaud, you encourage. Wisdom, let us attend. Having children outside of marriage should be stigmatized, for the common good. To do otherwise is false compassion.
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Re: As Emily Yoffe points out, the logic is wacked anyhow: "so you don't make enough money for me to marry you, but I guess we can have kids anyhow?" That doesn't even begin to make sense.
Actually it makes a lot of sense if you consider the fact that women (most, not all, women) are programmed by biology to want kids. And there had have been careful studies done where people actually bothered to sit down and talk to poor women and find out what they think and feel and want. Their desires aren't alien: they want families, just like middle clas people. A good husband, healthy, happy children, etc. Surely that is a desire social conservatives can grasp? But the good husbands are a rarity in their communities. So they have their kids by a variety of men, none of whom are husband material, and at least they have half of what they want. The triumph of hope, perhaps, over experience, but that's a trait of humanity, and not maybe a bad one overall.
Re: In$$ the black community, it's got historical roots that go back to slavery.
You find similar patterns among poor whites, and poor Hispanics. Though you are right: the pattern is not new. Poor people have always had lots of family woes. The difference today is our poor are trapped by an almost feudal social structure where academic degrees function like medieval titles of nobility: the necessary ticket to the middle class. Everyone else is just a serf, thrown a few bones to keep them breathing by the grandees, but otherwise kept down and out.
Re: As a matter of fact, back in the early 70s, the thing that Patrick Moynihan found so alarming about the sudden spike in illegitimacy among african americans was the fact that it was coinciding with an equally rapid increase in wages and opportunities for black men.
The 70s!!?!
That's exactly when the current socioeconomic mess began! When good paying jobs for the non-educated began drying up, an factories fled the Rust Belt cities for the South, then for Mexico.
You're not going to get an answer, because people understand perfectly well that you don't want a conversation, you want to yell.
I'm not playing that game, and I'd be surprised if anybody else did either.
Sharon's right: there is no easy answer to any of this. Unwed parenthood ought to be strongly discouraged, because it will wreck society by providing a poor psychological and emotional environment for children to grow up in. People ought to be strongly encouraged to form stable, durable bonds. Marriage is how people have done it since time immemorial. To endure the difficulties of married life and child-raising, most people need the psychological, moral, emotional and social support that marriage as a religious and social institution provides. Society cannot endure without what Philip Rieff called remissions -- "thou shalt nots" that have to be enforced somehow. I think the example of Christ, in which he showed mercy to the woman caught in adultery, but he also insisted that her adultery was morally wrong, and that she should repent of it, is the best model for us to follow. There is no formula that applies to every situation. Children should be brought up, in word and by example, to esteem marriage and despise sexual promiscuity. But we are human beings, and when we fail -- especially when that failure involves the creation of another human life -- our first duty is to mercy. We have to negotiate that somehow.
The answer is not to deny the existence of standards, or to effectively do so by acting as if they don't exist. That is neither wise, truthful or, ultimately, merciful. The rest I have to say about this topic is here.
You're the one advocating stigmatization, Rod. It's not unreasonable to ask for specifics. If you don't want to say, why did you bring it up? Several people have asked you very nicely.
In fact, why don't you explain to us exactly how you plan to fulfill your duty to stigmatize Mr. Coates. If you think stigmatizing is the right thing to do, why not share your wisdom with us benighted unbelievers?
Regarding "stigmatizing" unwed parenthood:
What if the law...
Recognized that a child born to an unwed mother is at increased risk, and therefore
(1) Required unwed mothers to demonstrate parenting competency, and
(2) Required unwed mothers to have a minimum income, through wages, child support, and family contributions, else
The state would assume temporary custody of the child until the mother demonstrated #1 and #2 above?