Lie #2: Rising Out-of-Wedlock Birthrates are the Real Problem in the Black Community
But lying about black crime is a relatively minor-league obsession for conservatives when compared to their much more hysterical fixation on the supposed “crisis” of out-of-wedlock childbearing among black women, or what they prefer to call “illegitimacy.” Mention racism or discrimination in front of any right-winger and you can almost count the seconds — and you won’t be counting for long — before they deflect the discussion onto the topic of overly fertile black women and their culturally defective tendency to have babies outside of marriage.
And yet, here too, the claims are fundamentally dishonest, although in this case, the dishonesty may be less deliberate and more the result of a simple inability to understand what data does and does not say on the subject.
So, for instance, it is undeniably true that
72 percent of all African American babies born today are born to unwed mothers; and it is also the case that this percentage is nearly double the rate that obtained in 1970, at which point only 37.5 percent of black children were born out-of-wedlock.
However, this figure does not mean what conservatives seem to think it means. While the right uses this data to insist that black women and their male partners — and the larger culture from which they come — are increasingly irresponsible, the reality is, even though the share of out-of-wedlock births as a percentage of all black births has nearly doubled, the actual rate of births to unmarried black women has fallen dramatically. If these seemingly contradictory realities appear confusing to you, it’s not your fault. Almost no one explains it: some because they don’t understand what’s going on, and others because they have a political motivation to lie.
Here’s the deal. According to the table linked above — the same one that points out the 72 percent figure for the share of black births out of wedlock — the birth rate for unmarried black women
fell by nearly a third between 1970-2010, from 95.5 births per 1000 unmarried black women at the beginning of that period, to only 65.3 births per 1000 such women by the end of the period. Among black teenagers, 15-19 (almost all of whom are unmarried),
birth rates have plummeted since 1991, from 118.2 births for every 1000 such women to only 51.5 births per 1000 women in 2010. So just twenty years ago, black teens were having 2.3 times more children per capita than they are today.
From 1970-2009, black teens, ages 15-17, cut their birthrates by 60 percent, while 18-19 year olds reduced theirs by a third. As a result of this apparently positive cultural trend — but one that conservatives ignore — the black teen birth rate is at an all-time low. In other words, and whether we look at teens or adults, unmarried black women are
already doing exactly what conservatives would have them do: namely, have fewer children. This means that if we are to view out-of-wedlock childbearing as evidence of some cultural pathology, black culture must be steadily getting healthier and
less pathological, rather than more.
So what about that 72 percent figure? The reason that the
share of births that are out-of-wedlock has increased to 72 percent as opposed to the prior figure of 37.5 in 1970, is because although births to black unmarried women have fallen considerably, married black couples have cut back even
further on childbearing. So if
married black couples are having far fewer children than before, and are cutting back even
faster than single women, the overall percentage of births that are out-of-wedlock will rise, owing nothing to the supposedly irresponsible behaviors of single black folks. One could bring down the 72 percent figure just as easily by having married black couples each have 10 kids, as by lecturing single black women to do what they’re already doing–only
faster! Needless to say, most white conservatives are hardly keen on increasing the black population, so it’s unlikely they’ll be counseling black husbands and wives to go all
Duggar Family anytime soon, even though doing so would absolutely slash the percentage of black births that are out-of-wedlock, even if single black women didn’t change a thing about their own procreative activity.
Interestingly, while unmarried black women have actually been cutting back on childbearing, unmarried white women have been dramatically
increasing theirs. In 1970, unmarried white women had fewer than 14 babies for every 1000 such women, but by 2010, for every 1000 unmarried white women, there were 44.5 babies begin born. In other words, while unmarried black women were reducing their own birthrates by a third, similar white women
more than tripled theirs. Even if we only look at non-Hispanic white women, since 1991, the birth rate for such women rose from 24.4 per 1000 non-Hispanic white women to 32.9 per 1000 such women in 2010. In other words, in only 20 years, the birth rate for unmarried white women rose by a third, even while the rate for unmarried black women consistently fell. So
which culture is trending towards crisis?
