More than 75 percent of African-Americans are in the middle or upper class in 2005. Among those who make up the 24.7 percent in poverty, the overwhelming majority are unmarried women with children. Family structure is the alpha and omega of poverty in America. You cn slice the statistical pie in a thousand ways and still come to the same conclusion. For example: In 1995, the poverty rate for married couple black families was about 8 percent.
In the same year, the poverty rate for families headed by white single women was about 27 percent. As David Eggebeen and Daniel T. Lichter we rote in the American Sociological Review, “Children from female-headed homes are five times as likely to be poor as children in two-parent families and nine times s likely to be in deep poverty.” Maggie Gallagher, massaging the data a bit more to include a comparison with families that start and remain intact, yielded this statistic: “A child that is born out of wedlock is 30 times more likely to live in poverty than a child that was born in a marriage and whose parents stayed married.”
The prisons are full of African-American youths. … But not just any African-Americans crowd the prisons. The prisons are dominated by males raised without fathers. And while the illegitimacy rate among Americans at large is frighteningly high at 25 percent, it is stratospheric among blacks at 68 percent.
Mona Charen, “Black poverty isn’t about white racism,” Conservative Chronicle, 26 October 2005
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