The Fatherhood Factor: The Worst Systemic Injustice in America is One the Left Ignores

November 3, 2020

The Fatherhood Factor: The Worst Systemic Injustice in America is One the Left Ignores.

If you ask someone on the left about urban poverty, he will likely blame systemic racism. And it’s certainly true that vicious racism has been common in American history. However, Census Bureau data on other nonwhite races (and, increasingly, black immigrants from Africa) don’t paint a picture of a systemically racist America in the 21st century, at least with regard to the economy.

Nonwhite persons from all over the world come to the United States and excel, in some cases spectacularly so. If the American economy were systemically racist, Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and others wouldn’t have higher per-capita incomes than white Americans have. Their success is strong evidence that the American free-market system, in 2020, is wide open.

What do these immigrant groups have that the urban poor do not have? Engaged fathers in intact families that stress education, no sense of entitlement from the state, and a belief that achievement is possible. They didn’t grow up in the culture created by the sexual revolution and the welfare state, a culture that considers fathers unimportant in the lives of children and that treats lifelong welfare dependency as normal.

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The Best of Charles Burris

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] retired teacher who taught history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.