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on how to keep the government open after midnight. | |
| The House is not scheduled to hold votes this week, but members could be called back to the Capitol by House leaders if a shutdown occurs. | ||
| President Trump and congressional Republican leaders met with Democratic leaders at the White House on Monday, but no agreement was reached. | ||
| You can continue following the state of the government shutdown across the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We are discussing a report on the state of the black family with Delano Squires. | ||
| He's a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| Delano, welcome to the program. | ||
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Thank you for having me. | |
| So before we talk about the report, talk about what your interest is in this subject of the black family and how you came to it. | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| So, I mean, part of it is just personal experience. | ||
| My parents have been married for over 40 years. | ||
| 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. | |
| Our fathers were in the home. | ||
| 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. | |
| I didn't think of it that way because I was still fairly young, but all throughout my life I've carried that with me. | ||
| And not just, obviously, for black families, but for all families, that family matters. | ||
| Children do best when raised by a married mom and dad in a loving, low-conflict household. | ||
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So that's really the genesis of it. | |
| That's where it starts. | ||
| 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. | |
| Which is a weird place for a single guy to be writing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let's talk about the report itself. | ||
| 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. | ||
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Yes. | |
| Elaborate on that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I want to ask you about why this is, but first let's go through some graphs. | ||
| And this is from the OOJP.gov, and this is about living arrangements of children living in the United States. | ||
| So this is a government website. | ||
| And this has a graph going back to 1971. | ||
| And these are the percentage of children living in two-parent homes. | ||
| This top line here, the dark one, is white kids. | ||
| The one in the middle here, the light blue, is Hispanic. | ||
| And then this bottom one, the red one, is black. | ||
| It goes here from 1971. | ||
| The black line is at the bottom. | ||
| But it does, I mean, starting in about 2008, it looks like it is trending back up. | ||
| So first explain why it's so low to begin with and why you think it might be trending back up. | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| So today, roughly about 45% of black children are raised in a two-parent home, and about 45% are raised by a single parent. | ||
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Those numbers have ebbed and flowed over the years. | |
| 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. | ||
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About 35% of black adults today are married. |