And growing up in New York City, my friends and I, we would often wonder why our experiences, and this is in early to mid-90s, why our lives look so much different than our peers, kids we went to school with, played basketball with, hung out in the neighborhood with.
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And eventually we came to the conclusions that our parents were married.
Not only that, but we had a community of men around us, men we knew from, mainly from church, and that our parents were sort of impressing their spiritual values, their Christian faith and beliefs on us at an early age.
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And it was at that point that I realized that family structure actually matters.
And then from there, my other personal experiences and professional experiences, I first got my start writing with a website called Black and Marry with Kids.
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I was actually the only single writer at the time.
This is true, but I would write things like, Do Nice Guys Really Finish Last? and five things every man needs to know before he gets married but the creators of that website Ronnie and Lamar Tyler wanted to provide more positive images of black families so I shared that vision and so from there I just I saw the need for this particular you know area of research and I should note I met my wife at their third documentary screening so there's a personal benefit To me, as well.
So, yeah, so it was a mix of personal and professional that made me interested in this.
And I'll read you a quote from your report where you say this: put simply, the black family is in a state of emergency, and there are only two choices about how to respond.
The first is to accept the disappearance of marriage and two-parent homes as the norm, both now and in the future.
The second is to marshal the resources and capital needed for reconstruction.
Sure, I think oftentimes you hear in politics: you know, 70% of black children are born to unmarried parents, and that is true.
And it's been that way for the better part of almost 30 years.
But one of the things that doesn't get discussed as much is that this norm has just been accepted, it's become the status quo.
And if people believe that fathers are important, then they have to believe that marriage is important.
And if they believe that, then the only responses to the status quo is: one, as I said, to leave it as is and just allow marriage to be obsolete and fathers to be optional, or to do the hard work of rebuilding.
And when I talk about marshaling resources, I'm talking about political capital, social capital, cultural capital, financial, spiritual capital that has to be marshaled first and foremost within the black community and particularly within the black leadership class.
And then to harness all of that and to point it right back at this particular problem if we want to see anything change over the next three generations.
To your point, there's been a slight uptick in the last decade or so.
I think the numbers are lower because starting in the 1960s, when the original Moynihan report came out, we started to see the traditional black family structure begin to unravel.
Now, I would certainly argue that the traditional black family has always been on a weaker footing, and this is where Moynihan and I, in some of my writing, would point to the legacy of slavery, where you have two institutions that are fundamentally incompatible.
So there's always been some challenges there, but starting in the 1960s, you start to see this explode, and you can see how even when poverty was higher, more black children were born into, you know, born to married parents.
So since then, over the last 60 years, what you've seen is that marriage rates have completely cratered in the black community, have declined significantly.