Are You Spitting Me?

[Belsnickel]

(06-20-2019, 08:14 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: The biggest answer is really simple and it doesn't have anything to do with racism (though that is still possibly also a smaller answer): Make two parent households.

People more likely to live in a house? Two parent households.
People more likely to get a college degree? Two parent households.
People more likely to be middle class or higher? Two parent households.

If you look at the numbers of two parent households out there, it directly matches with pretty much all indicators of wealth and success. Having either two parents bringing in income, or one parent brining in income while another is able to focus on the child's development and welfare is a huge advantage, and also leads to more being passed from one generation to the next. Asians are first, whites second, hispanic/latino third, natives/inuits fourth, and african americans (a far) fifth on having two parent households. That list lines up with those indicators pretty clearly.

So if you really want to change things for the better for african americans, convince them to make two parent households. They are currently only doing so about 33-35% of the time compared to 76-77% for whites and 84-85% for asian/pacific islanders. That's an enormous difference.

That's a chicken and egg thing, though. Are people more likely to be successful coming from two parent households because two parent households are more common in more successful racial groups, or is it really the household status that is the cause? What you present is a correlation, which doesn't mean it isn't a factor, but also doesn't show enough evidence to be causal. You can't say it is the bigger issue because there is no evidence to support that it is.

Edit: Sorry, continued to think about this. One of the reasons for the large difference in household type for the black community is rooted in the institutional racism in the criminal justice system in the United States. So many black males are in the corrections process, at much higher rates than the white community, and often it is because of laws created specifically to target the black community back in the Jim Crow era or things like the War on Drugs. So, racial discrimination in the justice system is even another confounding variable in the equation looking at household type as the issue.