Excerpt from Yonoson Rosenblum’s Mishpacha editorial (thanks to Avigdor Peretz!):
BLM’s “SYSTEMIC RACISM” rhetoric, which neatly divides the world into immutable categories of white oppressors, irremediably tainted with racism, and black victims, offers nothing in terms of addressing the real problems of the black community. As Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution writes, the greatest problem facing the black community is not victimhood, it is too many black boys growing up without fathers.
At least two-thirds of black children fall into that category. The absence of fathers is the best predictor of trouble ahead whether for blacks or whites. Children without fathers are 20 times more likely to end up in prison, 20 times more likely to drop out of high school, 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders, and nine times more likely to be institutionalized. And the list goes on.
The single motherhood rate in the black community was 22 percent in the 1960s and approximately 73 percent today. Economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has written, “Centuries of slavery, generations of Jim Crow did not destroy the black family. One generation of the welfare state did.” A collateral effect of the Great Society programs was to render fathers extraneous to financial support, and to create incentives for their absence.