RACE, GENDER, FAMILY STRUCTURE, AND POVERTY
Poverty is linked to family structure, with two-income couples doing better than single mothers. But it is also deeply connected to institutional ways that race and gender are handled in America.
Regardless of the reasons, the growth in the number of female-headed families with children is a significant cause of the increase in child poverty. The combination of low-wage work with the changes in family composition has been highly detrimental. A family with only one wage earner—especially a woman, who still earns 77 percent of what a man earns—is going to have a difficult time. And, although with many individual exceptions, the statistics leave no doubt that children of single parents—for economic reasons, if nothing else—face longer odds for the future.
Working on issues of poverty in the mid-1960s, I saw the prospects for progress in the context of that era. We were still riding the wave of postwar prosperity despite the Vietnam War and the competition between guns and butter. We could still feel the wind of the civil rights movement at our back despite the civil unrest in our cities. We thought Richard Nixon was finished politically after he was defeated in his run for governor of California in 1962. To us, Watergate was merely a garish real estate development on the Potomac. The 1960s turned into a tough decade as it wore on, but we were still confident. Few, if any, foresaw the profound changes in both the economy and the structure of the American family that would greatly complicate the fight against poverty. I certainly did not.
Discussing such metamorphoses in the American family gets into muddy political waters. The changes have been sensationalized and used to blame the poor and especially women of color. But they are big and important, with major policy implications.
Between 1970 and 2009, the percentage of families headed by women with children under eighteen doubled—from 12.7 percent to 25.4 percent. For African American families the numbers rose from 37.1 percent in 1971 (the first year the statistics were broken down by race) to 52.7 percent in 2009. Most of these increases occurred during the 1970s.
Reflecting these changes—and coupled with the increase in low-wage jobs and consequent difficulty for a single mother to support her family—the proportion of poor children under eighteen who lived in female-headed families rose from 24.1 percent in 1959 to 55 percent in 2010.
UNMARRIED WHITE AND HISPANIC MOTHERS
Paralleling the increase in the number of female-headed families has been the increase over the last seventy years in births to unmarried mothers of all races and ethnicities. The rate of births to unmarried women in the United States rose from under ten per thousand women in 1940 to more than fifty per thousand in 2006. The changes cut across lines of race and ethnicity, although the increase occurred almost entirely among women who did not have a college degree.
The pattern is similar across most of the developed world. From 1980 to 2007 in the United States, the percentage of births to unmarried women went from 18 percent to 40 percent. The United Kingdom’s percentage went up much more, from 12 percent to 44 percent; the Netherlands’ from 4 percent to 40 percent; France’s from 11 to 50 percent; Iceland’s, with the highest numbers in both years, from 40 to 66 percent; Japan’s from 1 percent to 2 percent.
In 2007, the United States ranked seventh out of fourteen countries examined by the National Bureau of Health Statistics, which suggests that the changes were certainly not the unique result of American social policy. On the other hand, unmarried mothers in other countries are more likely to be living with the fathers of their children than is the case in the United States.
The numbers are much higher historically in the African American community, and consequently discussion of this issue has always had a racial component. But however surprising to some, the unmarried birth rate among African American women has actually decreased since 1970, from ninety-five per thousand women to seventy-two by 2006.
White rates went from about fifteen per thousand women in 1970 to almost forty in 1998. The white rate went to under thirty in 1989, when Hispanics were first counted separately. Unmarried birth rates among Hispanic women, counted separately since 1989, went from about 90 per thousand women to 106 in 2006. Thus the growth in the rate of unmarried births in the United States over the past thirty years is almost entirely attributable to changes among whites and Hispanics.
TEEN BIRTHS DECLINE
The overall trend in teen out-of-wedlock births has been downward since 1991, when it was 61.8 per thousand. It hit 34.3 per thousand in 2010 and is now at the lowest level ever recorded. There were 409,840 teen births in 2009. Teenagers accounted for 23 percent of nonmarital births in 2007, down from 50 percent in 1970. The percentage drop since 1990 has been largest among African Americans, from one hundred per thousand unmarried African American teens to fifty-four per thousand in 2010.
Trends in the percentage of births that are out of wedlock are a significant and telling way to look at the problem. By 2007, 39.7 percent of all births were to unmarried women. Again, the increased incidence of nonmarital births cuts across lines of race and ethnicity, and should be a matter of concern regardless of race. Nonetheless, the percentage of births to unmarried African American women remains a particular concern. In 2009, 72.3 percent of African American children were born outside of marriage, compared to 24 percent in 1965. The trend among Hispanics was from 37 percent to 42 percent over the same period, and among whites was from 6 percent to 24 percent.
Why the number of out-of-wedlock births was—and still is—so much higher in the African American community is not definitively answered by research. The allegation that low-income African American women have children in order to get on welfare or to get an increased welfare payment is hard to maintain in light of the declining level of welfare payments from the early 1970s onward. At the same time as births outside marriage were increasing, beginning in the 1970s, welfare benefits went down steadily relative to inflation in nearly all states. And the increase in the benefit that came from having another child was in almost every state so small that it only threw the family into deeper poverty.
A partial explanation that makes sense to me is William Julius Wilson’s “marriageable male” hypothesis, one which applies especially to people living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty (including high-rise public housing). Beginning in 1973, with deindustrialization occurring in the broader economy and affecting workers across the board, employment and wages of African American men, numbers which had been on the rise since 1945, took a nosedive; at the same time, the disproportionate incarceration of African American men began its steep climb. Women kept having children, but because the economic prospects of the children’s fathers were so bleak, they did not marry nearly as often.
One reason why so many African American women are coping on their own in raising their children is what the criminal-justice system does to the men of the community, especially in the inner city. The massive and unnecessary imprisonment of African American men is preventing two-parent families from forming and destroying others on a large scale. Prison time takes away what could be productive and parental years by putting men behind bars with long sentences, and it jeopardizes the future because it blemishes their employment prospects so severely. In fact, poverty rates would be considerably higher if incarcerated men were counted for purposes of poverty. Ex-offenders, with their high rates of unemployment, drive up the current poverty number.
When compared to the trend since 2000, what happened in the late 1990s is particularly interesting. The last half of the 1990s was the only time since the early 1970s when there was noticeable real growth in both employment and real wages among lower-income families. Unmarried births declined among African American and Latino women during that period.
That was also a time when welfare became less available due to the effects of the 1996 law. Some argue that the decline in unmarried births was due to the decline in the availability of welfare, whereas others credited the improved employment climate. The events of the past decade support the argument that variations in employment are the most important factor. Unmarried birth rates went up again during the middle of the past decade, but welfare did not become more available. The variables that did change were the availability of jobs and the level of wages.
Analysis of the research literature tells us that there is no clear explanation why unmarried birth rates among African Americans have historically been higher than those among whites, but the impaired economic situation of African American men since the mid-1970s is an especially noteworthy variable in the statistics.
Regardless of the explanation for the disparity, it is imperative that the issue be addressed. Conservatives say it is entirely a matter of personal responsibility. Some liberals seem to be in denial that there is actually an issue at all. But the consequences are undeniably troubling.
The solutions are not simple. The aim is to postpone childbearing until the partners marry or establish a long-term commitment to each other and have a realistic economic approach to making it work. Hackneyed slogans, shibboleths, or bumper-sticker simplicities will not suffice: improved educational and employment opportunities are critical, as are criminal-justice reform and strategies to build healthy neighborhoods. But programs at the community level that stress postponing parenthood and that support responsible parenthood should it still occur are essential as well, although, granted, messages about the wisdom of delaying parenthood are more likely to be heeded in a world in which there are viable escape routes out of poverty.
Issues of race and gender are at the heart of the public debate about poverty. Such subjects are not new, but they appeared in new form over the last four decades in the use of welfare and the criminal-justice system as race-related political issues.
MOST POOR PEOPLE ARE WHITE
The fact that the largest number of poor people are white is almost never mentioned. Ronald Reagan’s fictional anecdote about a Cadillac-driving “welfare queen” pervades and pollutes our political culture. Everyone knew he was talking about African American women. Millions of Americans instinctively associate “poverty” with “black.” This matters. The white majority is less likely to support safety-net programs if they think only or primarily blacks will benefit.
Here resides the hot button. It is of course true that there is a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latinos in poverty. The question is, “Why?” The debate divides, roughly speaking, into two camps. One says the problem is basically structural: a paucity of good jobs, terrible schools, the cradle-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately incarcerates poor minorities, race and gender discrimination. The other postulates that the overriding problem is with individual behavior and failure to take responsibility—attributable to “bad parenting” and ensuing individual failure, wrongheaded public policy, or both.
Because it is the image many have of American poverty in general, the continuing concentrated poverty in our inner cities is at the heart of the debate. Comparatively speaking, the numbers for urban venues are not large, encompassing perhaps 10 to 12 percent of the poor. But because these ghettos are even more disproportionately black and brown than poverty in general and because it is associated with media images of crime and children born to unmarried women, it shapes political debate and impedes efforts to craft broader solutions.
There is no question about the behaviors and the statistics. They include not only out-of-wedlock births and street crime, but also dropping out of school, gang violence and violence in the home, and drug and alcohol abuse, as well as the drug trade. The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed to the “breakdown of the black family” in his famous (to many, infamous) report of 1965, eliciting a fusillade of unremitting flack. The result was that respected researchers steered a wide berth away from research on inner-city behaviors for more than two decades, until William Julius Wilson tackled the issue in his 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged.
Wilson and others (including me) argue that the basic facts are the result of too many poor people living in the same place—concentrated poverty. The increase in concentrated urban poverty resulted from the migration out of most middle-class residents, sparked by the unrest of the 1960s and the new protections against housing discrimination in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and played out against the broader tableau of the growing scourge of low-wage work. Public policy, too, played a significant role, in both what it failed to do and what it did all too well. The failures were neglect of schools, lapses in helping people prepare for and find work, and lack of support for neighborhood-revitalization strategies. What public policy did all too well was to lock up the men of the community. What it did about welfare (before 1996) was a mixed bag. It did provide income to families that had no other source of support, but it failed to help (and push) recipients to get and keep jobs.
RACIAL POLITICS
The new racialization of the politics of poverty coincided with the 1968 election of President Richard Nixon. He supported and signed important legislation expanding food stamps and creating housing vouchers and Supplemental Security Income, and also proposed a guaranteed minimum income. But, important as all these were, his overriding political focus concerning race was in a different direction, one that had significant implications for poverty.
The real focus of the Republican Party with regard to race appeared in its “southern strategy” to capture the South. The new political reality was that overtly antiracial policies like those of George Wallace and his ilk had become unacceptable. As a result, Republicans needed strategies that would communicate their racial slant without speaking in racial terms. Criminal justice and welfare were perfect vehicles.
The GOP appealed to white southerners (and others around the country) by advocating law-enforcement policies that would disproportionately lock up black (and Latino) men and by harping on welfare. We have only to remember Reagan’s “welfare queen” and the Willie Horton commercial that was run to discredit Governor Michael Dukakis during his 1988 presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush. (For those readers who don’t remember or who weren’t yet born, in 1988 Willie Horton absconded from a prison furlough in Massachusetts and committed assault, armed robbery, and rape. Lee Atwater, the brilliant political operative of then–vice president Bush, produced a political advertisement attacking Dukakis’s furlough policy and showing Horton’s picture. Horton was African American, and the racial message was not lost on voters: a vote for Dukakis would endorse not only being soft on crime but also a look-the-other-way posture toward the specter of violent black men preying on white communities. Three years later, when Atwater was dying of brain cancer, he apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the 1988 campaign.)
With regard to criminal justice, street crime, in fact, was on the rise, and it had a visible racial element. I was youth corrections commissioner in New York State in the mid- to late 1970s, and I saw it firsthand. My theory was that the containment of the inner-city unrest of the 1960s had plugged the outlets young people had for political protest, and that with no channels to express grievances, especially against the police, the continuing anger had erupted into sometimes-violent street crime.
As noted earlier, the number of people receiving welfare benefits had increased greatly in the 1960s and become an important lifeline for inner-city mothers and children in the 1970s and thereafter. The increased presence of African American women and children on the welfare rolls served up juicy political fodder.
The response to street crime was to lock up African American and Latino men for longer and longer periods of time—including the thousands of men who committed low-level drug offenses—and to engage in the politics that went along with all of that. And it was clear that at every stage, from arrest through sentencing, African American and Latino men were (and still are) treated more harshly than were whites committing identical crimes.
The history of welfare is intertwined with that of criminal justice. The men were locked up, and the women subsisted on welfare. Attacks on welfare and tough rhetoric on crime were staples of Republican political campaigns from the 1970s on.
Criminal-justice policy changed greatly over those years, whereas welfare—though it was a favorite target for attack by President Reagan and also was the subject of numerous welfare-to-work initiatives at the state level in the 1980s, as well as a modest federal reform in 1988—had remained substantially unchanged when President Clinton took office in 1993. By then, there were 14.3 million people on welfare—disproportionately women of color and their children. With the changes in welfare embraced by Clinton, the rolls shrank by 2007 to well under five million people, but most former recipients did not escape poverty. Single mothers who neither have a job nor receive welfare assistance now constitute, with their children, a substantial percentage of those in extreme poverty.
SIMPLISTIC APPROACH
The mantra of the Right is, at best, simplistic. Single mothers, they say, should have jobs and/or get married. It is true that getting a job without getting married is possible for most people in good times, but even then, the problem is getting a job that at the very least gets the family out of poverty, especially if the woman has not graduated from high school (and, increasingly, even if she has). “So,” the mantra continues, “they should get married.” The point seems to be that then there will be two possible income earners and everything will be hunky-dory.
We do want to make marriage more feasible. Children tend to do better when two parents are under one roof, and two wage earners do make things easier, but it shouldn’t be the case that the only route out of poverty is to get married to someone who also has a job.
Jobs should pay enough so a single parent can support a family with two or three children on one job, a daunting challenge when a quarter of the jobs in the country pay less than $11 an hour. Single mothers work, in large numbers. The biggest problem is that the jobs don’t pay enough to get them out of poverty. Besides, there is a rather serious problem of where to find a marriageable man. So many men are in jail or are ex-offenders who face almost insurmountable barriers to finding remunerative work. Marriage—which is a basic human instinct for most people—is not always achievable.
Welfare receded as a political issue after the 1996 law was enacted, but the hostility against it still lurks just below the surface. It is time to recognize the racialization of welfare and criminal-justice policies for what they are doing to impede progress against poverty. The story of our economy and its negative effects on people of all races must take center stage, but the institutional racism embedded in our welfare, criminal-justice, and education systems needs frontal attention as well if we are going to make real progress in reducing poverty and creating the kind of society we say we want.
Adapted from So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America.