WEEKEND READ: Is it White Privilege to be Married? (Part 1)

“White supremacy … is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland. And I’m not just saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say this wherever I go.”

President Joe Biden commencement address at Howard University.

We hear a lot today about “white privilege”, “white fragility“, “systemic racism”, and “white supremacy”.  Some have gone so far as to claim math is racist.

Not long ago the Smithsonian Institution made some claims about certain human traits that anyone can choose to have, but was presumed to be white and therefore bad.  Some of those traits included the use of logic, being on time, politeness, and marriage.  Not bad traits at all, we think.

To ascribe characteristics to people on the basis solely of white skin color is truly racist because there can be vast differences among Caucasians.  We should judge others by their behavior. So, we have the irony of those complaining about racism being the biggest racists of all.

There is an old observation once recorded on a T-shirt that went something like this:  I want my mechanic to be German, my chef to be French, my policeman to be English, my lover to be Italian,  my doctor to be Jewish, all organized by the Swiss.  There are variations of this you likely have seen.

It implies some ethnic groups have discernable characteristics but all of the above could be “white.”

We wrote an article not long ago called “Systemic Racism Is Bogus” and our survey of reader activity shows it was the most-read piece in the history of this publication.

Because this seems to be both a hot and delicate subject, we thought we would add a bit more depth to what will likely be an ongoing dialogue.

In the past article, we mentioned that many things in life can make for differences in outcomes and that different outcomes cannot be narrowed to one thing like skin pigmentation.

Income differences are a good proxy for different outcomes, although some may object.  Whatever you might think, more income usually means more opportunities for education, healthcare, recreation, life experiences like travel, and resources for raising children.  In short, a better life.  A happy life may be something different. Resources can help with happiness but there is no guarantee.  And even with tragedy, more resources make the trauma easier to survive.

Of course, it may be that the cart is being placed before the horse.  There likely are habits and attitudes that predate the achievement of wealth. For proof, we all know about lottery winners and others who receive a monetary windfall and soon are bankrupt and miserable.  And we all know rich people who are not very bright and can be truly awful, often trust fund babies or the spoiled offspring of some dynamic entrepreneur.  However,  those who earn their wealth, usually work very hard, are tenacious, and are intelligent.

Because blacks in our society do not do as well as white people, the left and the Democrat Party believe it is the fault of white people. Strangely, this has become more intense after the nation elected our first “black President”, even though he was of mixed race.

At one time, in one area of the country, white people and their government held down black people, but Jim Crow as a policy has been gone for about 60 years.  Today’s racists act as if it never ended and that things have gotten worse.  Many are now actively hostile and hateful of white people and wish to confiscate their wealth.  They seek collective guilt for the actions of some white people, many years ago.

Now we have a new treasury study that actively promotes the idea of taxing stocks heavily because stock ownership is largely a white thing.  The redistribution of wealth from those who earned it to those who have not motivates Democrats.  The production of wealth for everyone seems lost to them.

The idea of reparations or use of the tax code to racially distribute money is spreading, and even being implemented in some California jurisdictions.  It is Marxism with a twist.  Redistribute wealth for racial reasons, not class reasons.  Let’s call it anti-white communism.

Blaming white people for everything now seems in vogue.  The ever-trendy communist actress Jane Fonda recently declared that global warming is caused by white men, even while China puts more C02 in the air than all the industrial countries of Europe and North America combined.  She says white men should be jailed for their “crimes.” Besides being a traitor, that woman has never been very bright.  But, she has the collective guilt thing going very well.

She represents a growing and dangerous social trend. While whites, in general, are being pilloried, white men in particular seem to catch the most venom.  That is truly perverted since they invented most of the things that make life prosperous and comfortable today.  Fonda represents the fusion of radical feminism, cultural Marxism, environmentalism, and racism.

It is worth mentioning again that whites are only in the middle of the income spectrum with Asians at the top of the income heap.  If whites have rigged the system, why did they rig it so they come out average?

In addition, we showed that where you live, how much education you have, whether you are married, and how old you are,  make more of a difference than race.

But decisions about where you live, attitudes towards education, and intangibles like grit, courage, and determination, are formed largely in the family unit.

As to the latter, we just read The Two-parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married And Started Falling Behind.  It is written by an MIT economist named Melissa Kearney and is published by the University of Chicago Press.

The book is fairly short, less than 200 pages, but it includes references to a lot of studies on the problem of falling marriage rates and the tremendous growth of one-parent families.

Early on she states she has studied the problem as an economist for a quarter of a century and she has come to a firm conclusion:

“I can say with the utmost confidence that the decline in marriage and the corresponding rise in the share of children being raised in one-parent homes has contributed to the economic insecurity of American families, has widened the gap in opportunities and outcomes for children from different backgrounds, and today poses economic and social challenges that we cannot afford to ignore-but may not be able to reverse.”

The rest of the book just goes about to support that statement. And for the most part, she supports her argument well.

She finds that two-parent families, of biological parents, have the best results for children.  She uses metrics like their future marriage success, educational achievement, disciplinary records, incarceration, wealth accumulation, and other metrics.

Divorced couples do well too, but step-parents, statistically speaking, do not do as well as biological parents.

Parents who cohabitate, a relationship that was popular at one time, do not come out very well. Despite all the talk about “we don’t need a piece of paper”, the fact is cohabitating relationships are much more unstable than marriage.

The “worst” family structure, is a single female-headed household.  Single male-headed households do somewhat better than female, but still considerably worse than two-parent households.

In this sense, she sounds like a conservative, in that she finds the family unit critical to the outcomes of children and the future of society.

However, she sounds like a liberal in other passages, urging more government programs.  This was odd since there is a large section on government programs and they show they are a poor substitute for a two-parent family.   Head Start and other government programs seem to lose their effect in just a few years.

She also sounds like a conservative in that she shows the single female household is especially poor at raising males, and that the presence of a father is very beneficial to children of either sex and to the support of the mother.

Gee, I remember something in the 1970s about “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Yet she makes no comments on feminism.

You don’t suppose feminism has had any influence on marriage patterns, do you?  Maybe if you constantly degrade men as “toxic” and rage against “patriarchy”, it might influence some attitudes.

Here it really gets strange.  All that feminism in college has trickled down to the lower classes, but highly educated people marry and stay married at the highest rate.  It is almost as if the college-educated simply repeated the feminist answers without conviction to pass the test, but people at the lower economic rung have taken it seriously.

One of the big problems she describes is the lack of marriageable males among the poorest.  Women often conceive a child with a man that they determine is not fit to be a husband or father.  That decision alone is puzzling. But where do the good men come from to become marriageable partners?

Some don’t make enough money, some are in prison, and some just don’t live up to “expectations.”  She does suggest though that men are shaped often by their fathers and by male role models. Do we need a university-funded study to know that?

In other places, she sounds positively Trumpian, suggesting that exporting all the manufacturing jobs to China has left the less educated men in this country unable to support a household. This is true no doubt, but she does not speak much about education reform and technical or trade schools.

Then she sounds like a liberal when she opines that government programs have not encouraged single-parent households.

Here she seems to differ from Thomas Sowell.  Sowell notes that black families were fractured by slavery and that marriage patterns were disrupted.  But after slavery, and even during Jim Crow in the South, blacks tended to marry at higher rates than whites.  That was true until the early 1960s, when “Great Society” programs kicked in and reduced the incentive to marry.  Indeed, benefits can be lost in some cases if the woman marries.

Sowell also shows that similar payment systems in England gave rise to a white underclass that mirrors many of the dysfunctional characteristics of black families in America.  Dependency on the government is color blind.  It is no surprise unmarried females are the backbone of the Democrat Party.

Maybe this proves whites are indeed at fault after all…specifically liberal and progressive whites that run the Democrat Party.  They designed and run the programs that breed dependency and they run the tax laws and regulations that stifle economic growth and job opportunity.