200 years and out? - how welfare benefits have contributed to the number of single parent black families since the 1960s - Column

National Review, April 4, 1994 by Ed Rubenstein

NEW study of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century censuses shows that black children have always been more likely to be raised in broken families than white children. "Single parenthood among blacks has nothing to do with welfare," says the author of the study, University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles.

Nothing? The figures unearthed by Mr. Ruggles himself indicate that while broken families have long been more common among blacks than among whites, their explosive rise followed the Great Society.

The share of children under 15 who lived without one or both parents hovered around 30 per cent for blacks between 1880 and 1960, compared with 10 per cent for whites. The racial gap remains after accounting for more frequent early deaths among black parents.

At the outset of World War II, the black illegitimacy rate was slightly below 19 per cent. It rose slowly for the next quarter-century. In 1965, with rates in the high 20s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous memorandum predicting that illegitimacy would lead to a breakdown of the black family and urban society.

By 1991 illegitimacy rates had reached 68 per cent of all births to black women; the inner-city figure typically exceeds 80 per cent. White illegitimacy is rising too. In 1991, 22 per cent of all white births were to unmarried mothers.

They are not Murphy Browns: only 4 per cent of white unmarried mothers are college grads. Indeed, Labor Department statistics show that 44 per cent of births to poor white mothers are illegitimate, compared with only 6 per cent for white women above the poverty line. Clearly, the gap between white and black illegitimacy rates has less to do with culture than with differences in income and the corresponding attractiveness of welfare.

President Clinton's plan for "ending welfare as we know it" would limit AFDC eligibility to two years, requiring recipients either to work or to perform community service in return for benefits. Rhetoric aside, there is little sign of commitment: the Administration itself predicts that only 130,000 welfare recipients, or less than 3 per cent of the adult caseload, will have joined the work program by 1999. But no matter how tough and comprehensive it becomes, workfare cannot reduce the underclass as long as illegitimacy rates remain at their current levels. An alternative plan, prescribed by Charles Murray, is to terminate AFDC and all other forms of public support to unwed mothers.

In Murray's plan, a young mother would have to enlist help from her parents, boyfriend, siblings, neighbors, church, or charities. The prospect of canvassing for support will dissuade many adolescents from having babies, and persuade many who co to put their babies up for adoption.

More importantly, the pressure placed on relatives and the community will resurrect the social stigma which historically contained illegitimacy. It will, in Murray's words, "make an illegitimate birth the horrific act it used to be, and getting a girl pregnant something boys do at the risk of facing a shotgun."

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