The demise of the black nuclear family, in America’s inner cities especially, is an enormous social tragedy, and problem, and doubtless gives rise to a host of other ills such as crime, a life spent on welfare, terrible educational outcomes, domestic violence, drug and alcohol addictions, and on and on. Certainly ‘normalizing’ out-of-wedlock births, children raised by grandmothers, and fatherless homes is part of the problem not part of the solution. Saying that a screwed-up family structure which is producing terrible social costs is just one alternative among many– that all are in effect equal– is to my mind idiotic on the face of it.
We’ve all been conditioned to “not blame the victim” and not to stigmatize innocent children, and all that. Fine. But clearly there is a huge problem. It seems to me that it is not unconnected with poverty, with incarceration rates of young black males,with the glorification of a culture of thuggery, and with the failure of the schools. But as to solutions– I have none. I don’t even know how to begin, beyond the faint hope that bringing more people up to a middle class standard of living would by osmosis bring them to more middle class values.
Or maybe I’m just being Eurocentric here! You know, trying to impose my ideas of what is beneficial on people who were formerly treated as chattle. But is responsibility to one’s children, and to the mother of one’s children, a mere cultural convention, like not belching at a dinner party?
So right– good for Romney for bringing it up. Now what does he propose? I doubt more birth control education and easier access to abortion will be on his list, so I’ll be interested to see what is.

I share Skip’s curiosity about what Romney proposes. Indeed, a small beginning, but what is the aim? I don’t have any answers either, merely questions. I’m constantly fascinated by the fact that a half-century’s worth of scholarship and practice in areas like poverty and economic development, domestic and international, has failed to produce measurable results. This is not to derogate the efforts. It is merely to wonder what we’re missing.

If we overlook the sneering put-down of matriarchal society and insinuation that the Founding Fathers considered patriarchalism a sacred principle, maybe there’s something there.

What’s going on in the black ghettos isn’t matriarchy. At most it’s a kind of by-default matrifocality, resulting from fathers being absent or unknown. If black society in America were genuinely ‘ruled by women’ I have no doubt the situation would be a lot better in terms of social functioning than it is. What we have instead is a culture in which women are abandoned and abused by men, and where the women are too powerless to prevent, and too often often complicit and compliant with, that abandonment and abuse.
It strikes me that the situation is somewhat similar to that of the urban poor in English cities during the latter half of the 19th century. There was extreme poverty in the urban ‘rookeries’, rampant crime, unstable family structure, high unemployment, political disenfranchisement, and much hand-wringing among bourgeois Victorians about ‘the criminal class’ and ‘fallen women’. The criminal justice system was brutally harsh and strongly class-biased. It took many decades of social and political reform, the rise or organized labor, and a realignment of the economic system to gradually improve the condition of the English working poor.
In contemporary America where the very existence of class has been denied as a article of political faith, and where the industrial job base of the past has been virtually destroyed, it’s far less clear where a solution might lie.

Feminism gave men every dream they ever wanted. Completely free sex. Literally free.
Way to go girls.

You were paying before, Donny? Maybe you can file for a rebate.