According to the left, there’s nothing that can’t be explained by racism or white supremacy. To hear them tell it, systemic racism, white supremacy, and the legacy of slavery can explain any racial disparity that exists in America today.
To accomplish this, the real causes of these disparities have to be ignored and covered up. On Father’s Day, CNN tried its best by reporting that “Black fathers are often portrayed as absent or distant, but that isn’t what most people experience, according to both data and Black dads themselves. Such biased portrayals are often based on who is telling the story.”
CNN found itself mocked in Twitter’s Community Notes for deliberately distorting the reality that fatherlessness is endemic in the black community. According to data from the 2021 census, 64 percent of “black or African American” kids live in single-parent families.
Black fathers are often portrayed as absent or distant, but that isn’t what most people experience, according to both data and Black dads themselves. Such biased portrayals are often based on who is telling the story. https://t.co/7Rtw2Bna9R
— CNN (@CNN) June 18, 2023
Why does this matter? Because the lack of fathers in families, regardless of race, is a problem.
As the famed conservative writer Thomas Sowell explained, “If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on ‘the legacy of slavery’ with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.”
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“Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began,” Sowell continued. “Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black ‘leaders.’”
What happened? Well, in 1960, most black children were raised by two-parent families. After thirty years of the left-wing welfare state, a majority were being raised by single parents. CNN wants to perpetuate the myth that racism is the root of all the black community’s problems, not the lack of stable two-parent households.
You don’t even have to take my word for it.
“Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” then-Senator Barack Obama said in 2008. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
Obama may not have dared connect the rise of fatherlessness to the welfare state, but he was still willing to acknowledge the problem of fatherless in the black community. If only he had still cared about the problem when he took office and used his position to fix it.