Filed under: News, Race and Civil Rights
Just in time for Thanksgiving discussions, across America comes more SMDH news about the black community, including the risk of the Republican resurgence gerrymandering more black folk into political obscurity, an 18-year-old being beaten to death at an Atlanta house party, and the comparatively pointless bantering over Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls.
But now here comes a brand new statistical kicker that will only serve to leave more people shaking their d**n heads and giving ammunition to those who hate us: black babies are now born out of wedlock at a rate of 72 percent.
Okay, scared yet?
The government statistic, echoed by a post the other day here on BV, reflects an increase of two percent over just last year. But when we pull out our skepticism app for our brains, we find that was a loaded statistic then and it's a loaded statistic now that you can't trust.
Now, facts are facts and figures are figures. But my nose leads me to question all things I read before I believe them out right. First, the statistics come from the Centers for Disease Control, and there is no evidence to dispute them, however there are more numbers to look at than just the one focused on in the articles that seem to be burning up the blogosphere.
Secondly, and this is something I presented a year and a half ago, when we look at the number of out-of-wedlock births in the black community, figures like these seem to count a raw number of live births, but do not account for the total overall drop in these births.
As I explained in the article, in 1960, black women had an average of 153.5 babies per 1,000 women, by 1988 the number was down to 82.6 per 1000 in 2005 it was 67.2 per 1,000. To follow up on those figures, in 2008 the birthrate for black women had gone up only to 71.2 per 1,000.
So in 50 years, black women are having an overall 46 percent fewer children.
The dramatic decrease in birthrates does follow a nationwide as well as Western society trend in which women in wealthier nations are choosing when they will have children, if at all. But it means something specific for our community in that during the time since black birthrates were at their highest, the prison industrial complex which 1 in 4 black men will see the inside of in their lifetimes has expanded to 2 million people, disproportionately black. Meawhile, the American manufacturing complex that employed so many black men after World War II has decreased sharply (without any replacement in academic or technical training) leaving the black male unemployment rate at just 50 percent.
More prison and fewer jobs equals fewer men that make suitable husbands for women of childbearing and rearing age. So families that would have existed in the traditional nuclear sense have decreased. Thus 72 percent of the women who actually go through with a pregnancy are not married.
So the statistic does not mean 72 percent of black women have babies out of wedlock? It is erroneous to even suggest that.
The number indicates that 72 percent of the babies actually born to the black women who have them are born outside of marriage. Additionally, far too many people suggest that those children will all be wayward ghetto urchins destined to sponge off taxpayers through their childhoods. But it does not give an indication of the income levels of the children, what percentage are being raised with their dad in the picture, nor quantifying it with high black infant mortality rates.
Now I'm not arguing that we don't need fathers in the home. We need them now more than ever, but the one thing that makes being a father easier is not part of the equation: employment and its supportive cousin, education.
Marriage is not beneficial to men who cannot support a family and don't have the education or skill to get such a job and when you have a population as marginalized as the black American male, a culture of irresponsible behavior and a cavalier attitude toward traditional values becomes prevalent and self-perpetuating over generations.
Hence, baby mamas, baby daddies and 30-year-old grandmothers.
My point? The economics of the black community is the underlying root to all of this. We can throw statistics out all day. We can weep about boys with pants hanging low. We can lament about girls being loose. We can run to ministers and ask them to pray us out of this rut. But none of it will work until our community looks inward to focus on the micro- and macroeconomic issue that affect how we live and behave.
Those are numbers I'm willing to crunch.