No, Welfare Does Not Harm Black Families

A response to conservative arguments critiquing my article "Half of Black Students Can Barely Read."

Rates of welfare funding on the left against rates of single-parent households by race on the right. They don't correlate whatsoever. Source: Wikipedia

My article on Black student reading proficiency generated a lot of interest from all over the political spectrum. Many teachers contacted me to say that phonics in the curriculum was phased out and thus is responsible for poor literacy rates. Whether its the primary cause of racialized differences in proficiency I’ll dispute, but studies and real-world examples does indicate that the phonics method results in better english proficiency for children.

There was broad agreement about single-parent households being the cause of poor Black student outcomes. Incidentally, I debated a UC Berkeley integration researcher on single parenthood and race; he had reacted to an older article of mine. It’s a good listen and healthy discussion.

However, I received criticism about what I attributed as the cause Black poverty and single parenthood. In particular, this response article in the conservative publication Washington Examiner, disputes my explanation for the high rates of Black single parent households and instead blames welfare.

The author, Conn Carroll, first takes issue with my citing America’s nuclear family culture as a cause for the lack of family support for low income children.

First of all, how does American culture discourage multi-generational families? How does discouraging multi-generational families increase single-parent rates? And when did this discouraging of multi-generational families begin exactly?

So, you ever notice in American cities that homes built before the 1930s were often large-sized homes? During this time, families encompassed more than just the nuclear family-unit. Families even absent a father or mother acted as a unit of uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents and friends living together. And the census measured this phenomenon well.

Due to suburbaniztion and women leaving industrial work post-World War II, there was a sharp rise in the nuclear family unit. This family unit depended on a man to earn money while the wife remained at home. Marriage rates skyrocketed post-war and divorces dropped. The era of mass manufacturing led to significantly smaller houses to fit nuclear families.

But the nuclear family, modeled as the All-American family, was flawed. Where before a single mother could depend on extended family living with her, nuclear families created an absence of support. Remember, prior to the 1970s, women had access to only low wage labor. Oftentimes they were not entitled to financial privileges like opening a bank account or buying a home. These conditions led to the necessity of “welfare” to compensate broken nuclear families.

(Welfare is in air-quotes because the government subsidized wide swaths of white people into the middle class — explicitly at the exclusion of the Black Americans — in post-World War 2 and New Deal-era housing, education and employment policies. So welfare refers to meager payments poor people or old people get such as food stamps, child support or healthcare.)

One of the reasons that minority groups of immigrant ancestry — including Africans — do well in the United States is that they tend to live in multi-generational households; imported from their non-American culture. This is also why household overcrowding is such a severe problem in Hispanic-heavy communities. Because Latino families are cramming themselves of many generations into single-family bungalows built for a nuclear family.

Now, lets address Carroll’s explanation for the rise of single-parent households being fueled by welfare. He’ll start with a common conservative argument of implying Black families before the 1960s were whole and prosperous, prior to the rise of welfare.

Despite rampant racism and a lack of protections from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, marriage rates for young black men and women were similar to those of white men and women right up into the 1960s.

In the 1940s and 1950s (see Table I.I), young black women were actually more likely to be married than young white women. This began to change in the 1960s when an eight-point gap opened up between white and black women. Then something happened in the 1970s that led to an absolute cratering of the black marriage rate. By the end of the 1970s, just 22% of young black women were married compared to 43% of white women. And the black marriage rate has never recovered.

It’s true that Black marriage rates were high in the 1940s and 1950s because that’s when the nuclear family program took off. People were financially encouraged to get married, especially Black people, who were engaged in a mass-migration away from farm work in the south, and to the city where multi-generational families could not be maintained.

These higher marriage rates were not indicators of better morals, as conservatives often claim, but of financial necessity. Black women, confined to the lowest domestic employment such as maids and housekeepers in the north, would not have been able to survive without a husband.

Carroll continues:

Well, in 1968, in a case called King v. Smith, the Supreme Court struck down so-called “man in the house” rules. These were admittedly racially enforced policies by states used to disqualify black mothers from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. . . With “man in the house” rules gone, the new test for benefits became marriage. If single mothers wanted to keep their benefits and enjoy a romantic relationship, they had to refuse to marry the men in their lives. King v. Smith essentially forced single mothers to choose between welfare and marriage. And as the welfare state has grown, more and more mothers chose welfare.

Firstly, that’s one way to look at that ruling. Another way is that Black women (and all poor women) no longer had to marry men who may have been abusive or just unlikable in order to live. This is something conservatives frequently misunderstand. Divorce rates in the 1970s and onwards didn’t spike because of food stamps and loose morals. Women had gained reproductive and economic freedoms that didn’t require enduring awful men.

Secondly, and more importantly, the conservative idea that single-parenthood was primarily caused by the rise of welfare isn’t substantiated — hence the absent of a source in the article. The rise in single-parent households was primarily product of abortion, contraceptives, fair employment and changing divorce laws, which empowered women to not be tied to a man in the event of a child or during sexual activity. Prior to the sexual and gender revolution of the late 1960s, impregnated women (who averaged 19 years old in the 1960s), were often obliged to marry their husbands in “shotgun marriages.”

But even I was admittedly wrong to over-emphasize the impacts of incarceration on Black single-parent rates. Yes, they contribute to single parenthood, but it’s not a main contributor. Neither is welfare and studies have overwhelmingly rebuked the significance of welfare.

Even absent research and just looking at funding, rates of single parenthood don’t track or correlate at all with welfare funding (see gallery up top). Moreover, out of wedlock births were already higher among Black people than whites in 1960 — before LBJ’s war on poverty. Note, Carroll blames single-parenthood on a court ruling in 1968, so that doesn’t explain the racial gap visible since 1960.

Clearly the racial gap was a product of poverty. Poor households are 2.5 times more likely to be headed by a single-parent than middle class households. A significantly larger share of Black people were and are poorer than the share of white people. Black middle class makes less than the white middle class. Poor white people are three times as likely to be in single-parent households compared to their middle class counterparts, versus poor blacks who are twice as likely.

So this blows the conservative arguments out of the water. Single parenthood is a poor person problem. Its high frequency in the Black community has existed since we’ve had records of marriage rates, long before welfare, because it’s obviously a byproduct of slavery and its subsequent poverty. Black men had too weak employment to take care of children and Black women had no rights — creating an environment rife for single parent households that perpetuates to this day.

This is the truth; arguments about welfare or Black culture or whatever are ideological, emotional responses unsubstantiated by evidence. And they’re as old as the United States itself.

Carroll, predicting I’d cite welfare funding, pivots to various public programs:

It is true that the real value of AFDC cash payments has shrunk over the years as inflation has risen. But the number of other programs working-class families use has exploded: food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8 housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and Affordable Care Act subsidies are all designed in a way that cut off benefits to single mothers if they want to get married.

What evidence suggests the Affordable Care Act has contributed to the rise of single-parent households? Single parent households are on the decline since the passage of the largest healthcare reform law in 2010-2011. During the pandemic, the expansion of the child-tax credit led to the largest drop in poverty in recent American history. The author just throws out a bunch of public programs and says: see! These expensive subsidies (its just 19% of the federal budget, including Medicaid) are rewarding people for being single!

There isn’t a sole correct answer to the cause of the rise of single-parent households, but the ‘welfare’ argument is certainly at the very bottom of the totem pole in credible explanations.

Lastly, and this is important: single parent households are clearly worse for raising children than dual parent households. But there’s no reason that a child in a single-parent household should have to turn out as a low achieving student. Some research has found that the American single-parent being synonymous with poor is an American thing, because our welfare is small and indecent compared to northern European nations with living standards superior to our own.

So yes, American nuclear families were a mistake that necessitates welfare. Research has found that multi-generational Black households results in children with higher cognitive ability. But our country is made for nuclear families. Yes, dual parents are primary predictors of success for children, but welfare is not why Black and Native American families have higher rates of single-parent households. American poverty, fundamentally racialized since the era of slavery and Jim Crow, is.

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