Should We Be Worried about the Declining Black Marital Birth Rate?

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
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It is difficult to understand the current changes in the black family because many different things are happening at the same time. Many people know that the percent of black births that are out-of-wedlock is very high, but few people know that there are three different reasons why this is the case.

Most people probably know this one: there is a large number of black single parent families. But one rarely hears discussions about the other two: the low black marital birth rate and the high rate of black adults who are single and without children. If married black women had babies at the rate they did in the past and single black adults married and also had babies, the percent of black births that are out-of-wedlock would drop significantly because there would be many more in-wedlock births.

It is important to realize that the “percent of births” is not a birth rate. The birth rate is the number of births for every 1,000 women in a specific category. The last marital birth rates calculated by the National Center for Health Statistics were for 2002. In 2002, the black marital birth rate was 64.9 births for every 1,000 married black women. The white marital birth rate was 88.2 for every 1,000 married white women. The black marital birth rate was 23.3 births less that the white rate. In the past, the black marital birth rate used to be higher than the white rate. Because there is such a low number of births among married black women, the percent of births to unmarried black women is especially high.

The percent of women ages 18 to 44 who were not married and have no children is higher for blacks than for whites. By my calculations from the American Community Survey, in 2006, 32.8 percent of white women in this age range were single without children. There were 6 percent more black women in this category, 38.8 percent. As recently as 1990, only 29.3 percent of black women in this age group were unmarried and without children. Last year, scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported that these single adults living alone were making up a larger share of the black middle class.

The changes in black family structure are far more complicated than most people realize. Few people know that there are three separate factors producing the high percent of births that are out-of-wedlock among blacks. Is the low birth rate for married black women a good thing or a bad thing? Should we be concerned about the increase in single black adults without children? We haven’t asked these questions because there has been more hasty assumptions than serious data analysis about black families.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Criminal Justice Reform Is Pro-Marriage, Pro-Family

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Barack Obama delivered another masterful speech Sunday. The news report I saw made it seem like he merely did an impersonation of Bill Cosby, but he was more subtle and sophisticated than that. Nonetheless, it was a speech that Cosby would be proud of since it did endorse Cosby’s arguments.

Obama said that yes black communities needed more jobs and better schools and that past injustices did play a role in the absence of fathers in black homes, but that black people could not use those things as excuses. He said that black men should not be languishing in prison when they should be out looking for a job.

There are too many issues here that should be unpacked and discussed for me to deal with all of them at this point, but I’ll tackle a few.

The injustices are not only in the past. Our current criminal justice system is biased by race and class as I illustrated last week in “Whites, Blacks and Illicit Drugs”. If we had different criminal justice policies there would be fewer black men in prison. We need to work to eliminate the race and class biases in the criminal justice system. We need to expand opportunities for drug treatment. We need to use alternative, community-based sentencing for certain non-violent offenders. If we had elected officials who were committed to reforms of this sort, there would be more black men available to be the fathers that Obama and Cosby would like to see.

This is a very real issue for black women in the poorest black communities. Even the conservative (by my standards) scholar Isabel Sawhill admits that “for certain subgroups of African-American women” she “did find a shortage of eligible men” for them to marry.¹ We simply can’t improve the rate of two-parent families in the poorest black communities without dealing with the present racial injustices in our criminal justice system.

Obama argues that blacks should not use issues like the lack of jobs, the high rate of poverty, the high degree of economic inequality as excuses for the absence of men in black families. But there is a growing body of research that identifies the lack of jobs, poverty and economic inequality as important causes of the higher rates of crime in black communities.² If we want to keep black men out of prison, we will also need economic policies to address these issues.

The economic development of poor black communities is also important because black men who are unemployed are probably less likely to marry. Poor black women are probably not interested in marrying unemployed black men. Unemployed black men are probably reluctant to marry if they cannot contribute financially to the household.

The more education one has the more likely one is to marry.³ The issue of the separate and unequal education that black students receive is, again, not simply an excuse. If we improve the educational attainment of blacks, we will likely increase marriage rates.

If Obama wishes to increase the marriage rates in black communities, he needs to (1) recognize the racial disparities in our criminal justice system as one of the current injustices facing black America, (2) institute policies that lead to good jobs for blacks, and (3) improve the quality of black schools. Is Obama able to recognize the importance of these policies? Will Obama be willing and able to deliver them, if he does?


References
1. Isabel V. Sawhill, “The Behavioral Aspects of Poverty,” The Public Interest, Fall 2003, p. 88.

2. Eric D. Gould, Bruce A. Weinberg, and David B. Mustard, “Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States: 1979-1997,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 84(1), February 2002: 45-61; Stephen Machin and Costas Meghir, “Crime and Economic Incentives,” Journal of Human Resources 39(4), Autumn 2004: 958-979; Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan, and Paul Hirschfield, “Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116(2), May 2001: 655-679; Morgan Kelly, “Inequality and Crime,” Review of Economics and Statistics 82(4), November 2000: 530-539.

3. David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, “The Uneven Spread of Single-Parent Families: What Do We Know? Where Do We Look for Answers?” in Social Inequality, Kathryn Neckerman ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 3-77.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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Whites, Blacks and Illicit Drugs

[From the Daily Voice.com]

It is easy to be misled about the reality of race and drugs in America. Movies, television shows, rap music and the incarceration statistics could lead one to believe that drug abuse and drug dealing are far more common among blacks than among other groups.

Occasionally, however, some news reaches the general public to suggest that this might not be the case.

So far this year, 95 San Diego State University students (PDF file) have been arrested for drug dealing and possession. The picture one gets from looking at the arrested students--and the school student newspaper did provide pictures--is radically different from the picture in much of America's popular culture. The arrested students look like middle-class California--white, Hispanic, Asian and black--with blacks in the minority.

This large number of arrests is the result of a special focus by the University police, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the San Diego County District Attorney's Office after the death of a white student from a drug overdose last year. Although San Diego State University may be rare among universities in seriously pursuing illicit drugs on its campus, it is by no means the only university with drug users and drug dealers. As the president of the University stated, "Drug use is a concern on virtually every campus in our country."

When a white student was arrested at New York University for dealing drugs in 2004, a spokesperson for that university concurred. "The issue of drug use by college students is an issue that institutions of higher learning confront on a daily basis," he stated.

Contrary to the popular stereotype, drug use surveys like the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show similar levels of drug use among blacks and whites. If whites across the country use illicit drugs, they have to get them from somewhere. Criminologists are convinced that most whites get them from other white friends and acquaintances.

At San Diego State, apparently, many students purchased their drugs from other students. In the Washington D.C. area, my neck of the woods, police recently arrested students from some of the region's elite, predominantly-white high schools for allegedly selling marijuana to other students.

We have every reason to believe that blacks and whites use drugs and deal drugs at roughly comparable rates but the black incarceration rate for drug offenses is about ten times the white rate. For men, the disparity is about twelve times the white rate. Black women are incarcerated at about five times the rate of white women.

These disparities mean that white youth involved with drugs are much more likely to have opportunities to rehabilitate themselves and then get on with their lives. For many students at universities like San Diego State, they can use drugs or deal drugs and still end up in later years as respected adults in the American middle class.

For the many black youth who have similar levels of drug involvement, they are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. For these black youth, a criminal record makes the prospect of finding a good job--or any job--very difficult. Black youth who are incarcerated carry that scarlet letter of a criminal record for the rest of their lives.

If we want to change this lopsided racial disparity in drug incarceration there are two options. We could begin to police predominantly white high schools, colleges, workplaces and neighborhoods searching for drugs as intensively as we police poor black communities. Drug dragnets like the one at San Diego State University would have to become the rule rather than the exception.

The second option is that we rethink the whole idea of the "war on drugs." A recent report by the Sentencing Project states that we've arrested 31 million people for drug offenses since 1980. These arrests have been disproportionately in lower-income black communities, yet I doubt there is a poor black community where we can say the "war on drugs" has been won.

There are many advocates at the Sentencing Project, the Justice Policy Institute, the Drug Policy Alliance, Common Sense for Drug Policy, Efficacy and other organizations with ideas for a new approach to the issue of illicit drugs. After two decades and 31 million arrests have failed to solve the problem, isn't it time to consider another approach?


Copyright © 2008, TheDailyVoice.com, Inc.

Quotes on Race and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

An Economic Policy Institute Event

Race, Ethnicity, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

June 12, 2008, 2:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, Suite 300, East Tower
Washington, D.C. 20005

Moderated by
Dr. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy
with presentations by
GRACIELA APONTE, National Council of La Raza
DEBBIE BOCIAN, Center for Responsible Lending
WILHELMINA LEIGH , Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
DEDRICK MUHAMMAD, Institute for Policy Studies
GREGORY SQUIRES, George Washington University
RSVP here.
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Fraud has been rampant in the sale of subprime mortgages.--Economist, March 22, 2008.


An analysis for The Wall Street Journal of more than $2.5 trillion in subprime loans made since 2000 shows that as the number of subprime loans mushroomed, an increasing proportion of them went to people with credit scores high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.

In 2005, the peak year of the subprime boom, the study says that borrowers with such credit scores got more than half -- 55% -- of all subprime mortgages that were ultimately packaged into securities for sale to investors, as most subprime loans are. The study by First American LoanPerformance, a San Francisco research firm, says the proportion rose even higher by the end of 2006, to 61%. The figure was just 41% in 2000, according to the study. Even a significant number of borrowers with top-notch credit signed up for expensive subprime loans, the firm's analysis found.--Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2007


Even with risk controls, the neighborhood minority share is consistently significant and positively related to subprime share in both years. Furthermore, the neighborhood educational level is consistently significant and negatively related to subprime lending.-- Paul S. Calem and Jonathan E. Hershaff, and Susan M. Wachter, Housing Policy Debate 15(3), 2004.


Only 20 percent of subprime loans in 2005 were made by banks or thrift institutions, two entities that are supervised by federal regulators. More than half (51 percent) were made by unsupervised mortgage companies, and 29 percent were made by the more lightly supervised subsidiaries of supervised lenders. --The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studites


In 2006, more than one-half (52.9 percent) of African Americans and nearly half of Hispanics (47.3 percent) who acquired home-purchase loans had subprime loans. This is in contrast to the fourth (26.1 percent) of counterpart white borrowers who acquired these loans.38 Almost a third (31 percent) of American Indian or Alaska Native homebuyers also purchased homes with subprime loans.----The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studites


African-American women, who represent half of African-American home purchase borrowers, are particularly vulnerable. In fact, there is evidence that subprime lenders charge black women and Latinas higher rates and fees than same-race men and white men, again, regardless of income and across all loan types. --Anita F. Hill, Boston Globe, October 22, 2007


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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