There has long been a lot of hysteria among US elites about children born “out of wedlock.” Every since the 1965 Moynihan Report’s claim that black families were failing because of the pathology of single motherhood, policy makers and pundits, not to mention more than a few sociologists, have been running around screaming the sky is falling. “Illegitimate” children are the problem, not poverty, lack of access to anything like universal education, health care, not to mention those crazy European things like state-subsidized childcare.

All of this was a way of displacing the structural poverty of many black Americans onto the “lax morals” of the black mother. Which worked pretty well since nearly all of these pundits, policy-makers, and sociologists were white and it was far easier to explain black poverty as a them problem than actually acknowledge just how much structural racism remains…

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