Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Families Without Fatherhood

Young black men are "crying out for fathers" to provide stability in their lives, MPs have been told.

Community worker Reverend Les Isaacs told the Commons home affairs committee there was a "very high proportion of absent fathers" in the black community.

This was having an "enormous impact" on boys and young men, he added.


Damn right it is.

London mayor Ken Livingstone's equality adviser, Lee Jasper, said the crime rate was "toweringly disproportionate" within the black community.

Damn right it is. Could thse two things by any chance be related ?

Shaun Bailey, of youth organisation My Generation, said all the evidence showed children who grew up in married or two parent families did better at school and were less likely to end up in prison.

He said the lack of positive role models for young black men and the "promotion" of irresponsible sex they were exposed to was having a negative impact.

He called on the authorities to do more to promote marriage.


Across the Atlantic :

"It is easier to attack me than to deal with some hard facts. Here I go again, but let's look at the facts. One hard, unforgiving fact is that 70 percent of [U.S.] black children are born today to single mothers. This is at the heart of the breakdown of the black family, the cornerstone of black life for generations. Some of these children without two parents may turn out just fine, but most add stress to the lives of their grandparents, neighbors, police and teachers who have to take up the slack for absent or bad parents. It is easier to attack me than to deal with the hard fact of a dropout rate now at about 50 percent nationwide for black and Hispanic students. The average black student who gets a high school diploma today is reading and doing math at an eighth-grade level. Even with a diploma, that young person is ill prepared to compete for entry-level jobs or for a college degree."

Juan Williams quoted at Booker Rising.

Exactly the same considerations apply to white people - it's just that in the UK the Afro-Caribbean community has the highest proportion of fatherless kids. But the natives are catching up fast. You can read about the links between single parenthood and crime here (Families Without Fatherhood, by the great Norman Dennis, pdf file) and here (Experiments In Living, Civitas).

3 comments:

Guessedworker said...

The black way of life is what it is. In the ante-bellum South and, to a lesser extent, in pre-1965 America generally the stability of the black family was underpinned by religious faith and by the order of a white-dominated society. When blacks were released by civil rights and modernity from these two controls their natural sociobiology was given freer reign.

Today, blacks in the West live the family template of the African village - brief child-rearing by extended family, women breeding from an early age and thence-forward with multiple, detached fathers. It struggles to adjust to Western society and the pathologies we associate with black existence are the consequence.

In essence, it is a failure on our part to accept that human differences exist or have any meaning. As with everything else in the liberal worldview, we are wrong.

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile.....in Kingston, Jamaica.............

Laban said...

But GW, today underclass whites AND underclass blacks live the family template of what Robert Whelan called a warrior culture :

"We have created the classic conditions for the emergence of a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; and male status determined by combat and sexual conquest."