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12/11/2008: "An Enduring Crisis for the Black Family"

In 1965, a young assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan stumbled upon data that showed a rise in the number of black single mothers. As Moynihan wrote in a now-famous report for the Johnson administration, especially troubling was that the growth in illegitimacy, as it was universally called then, coincided with a decline in black male unemployment. Strangely, black men were joining the labor force more, but they were marrying - and fathering - less.

Unfortunately, those warnings were as prescient as they were reviled. Civil rights leaders, worried about reviving racist myths about black promiscuity, objected to what they viewed as blaming the victim. Feminists were inclined to look on the "strong black women" raising their children without men as a symbol of female autonomy. By the fall of 1965, when a White House conference on the black family was scheduled, the Moynihan report and the subject had disappeared.

Through the power of his own example, Obama presents a chance to revive what Lyndon Johnson called "the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights." Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," conveys the economic, emotional and existential toll of growing up fatherless, and he has spoken movingly of his determination to ensure for his own children a different life. Yet tackling this issue won't be easy. When Obama gave a Father's Day speech lamenting "fathers . . . missing from too many lives and too many homes," Jesse Jackson was so incensed that he said he wanted to castrate Obama. Still, painful as the subject is, the alternative is far worse: racial inequality as far as the eye can see.

[ It is certainly odd how black men took to abandoning their families when they had more rights. Those unaware of this historical fact like to say that discrimination against blacks has brought this to be - when the facts show that when blacks were slaves they were much more family oriented. Obama is doing the right thing in attempting to set a good example. The biggest opposition he faces here seems to be from those keen to accuse anyone who identifies this as a problem as being racist. Jesse Jackson was furious with Obama for this reason. If blacks would establish family values they would better appreciate their need for a geographically separate culture in which their identity could be protected, nurtured and they would rule themselves.]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120503088.html