Basil Kimbrew, the Broken Black Family, and the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

I am currently receiving emails from Basil Kimbrew, the chairman for the California friends of the African-American Caucus

 

I have received a great deal of information about local and Los Angeles County politics because of this e newsletter.

 

Some of the messages sent through the listserv, however, do not serve anyone, but rather perpetuate unwholesome ideas. In a Valentine's Day E-blast,  Kimbrew shared the following:

 

 

Add caption

 

In the above cartoon, a black man is chasing a black woman. Nine months later, the same woman, now pregnant, is chasing the man. Is this what love us really all about? Men getting women pregnant, then men running from women? Is the legacy of African-Americans in our country?

 

At this time, it is the current cultural sentiment.

 

Why is Mr. Kimbrew releasing these offensive cartoons?

 

The fact is that among African-American communities, there is a high propensity of illegitimate births.

 

In 2012, Roger Clegg reported in The National Review:

 

Yesterday the federal government released its latest figures on births in the United States, including out-of-wedlock births. The numbers are very close to last year’s: 72.3 percent of non-Hispanic blacks are now born out-of-wedlock; 66.2 percent of American Indians/Alaska Natives; 53.3 percent of Hispanics; 29.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites; and 17.2 percent of Asians/Pacific Islanders. That’s 40.7 percent overall: a disaster.

 

This is indeed a disaster.

 

Black conservative columnist Walter Williams was unsparing in his criticism of dysfunctional black communities, asking the hard questions about the ongoing societal issues plaguing these communities:

 

Though racial discrimination exists, it is nowhere near the barrier it once was. The relevant question is: How much of what we see today can be explained by racial discrimination?

 

Williams then lists the same devastating statistics:

 

In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today it's close to 70 percent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children lived with the biological mother and father. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. Herbert Gutman, author of "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925," reports, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents." Also, both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.

 

The breakdown of the black family has caused the massive eruption of disease, dysfunction, and death among diverse black communities.

 

Coupled with the dramatic breakdown in the black family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black illegitimacy rate in 1940 was about 14 percent; black illegitimacy today is over 70 percent, and in some cities, it is over 80 percent.

 

What has caused this breakdown? Williams dismisses the "Slavery did it!" argument because even during the nadir or race relations in the 1920s, black nuclear families were stable, and in some cases healthier than white families.

 

So, where does this culture of easy sex and illegitimacy spring from? Does Kimbrew's inappropriate Valentine have something to do with it? Not the cartoon, but the accommodating attitude about sex and pregnancy outside of marriage.

 

What has caused this attitude? Patrick Moynahan, then a Secretary of Labor, noticed the following correlations:

 

Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order.

 

Women were getting onto welfare. The sad fact remains, however, that Monihan then blamed slavery and Jim Crow Laws for this ghettoization of the black family.

 

The real culprit is the welfare state. Woman would get welfare payments if they had kids but did not get a job or have a husband. Single mothers giving birth to kids and not raising them sets up children to be uncivilized, uncultured, unable to grow into strong men.

 

Discoverthenetworks.org outlines how the Welfare State destroyed the black family:

 

The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s contributed greatly to the demise of the black family as a stable institution. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among African Americans today is 73%, three times higher than it was prior to the War on Poverty. Children raised in fatherless homes are far more likely to grow up poor and to eventually engage in criminal behavior, than their peers who are raised in two-parent homes. In 2010, blacks (approximately 13% of the U.S. population) accounted for 48.7% of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% of arrests for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery. Also as of 2010, the black poverty rate was 27.4% (about 3 times higher than the white rate), meaning that 11.5 million blacks in the U.S. were living in poverty.

 

The Welfare state is the major culprit. During the Watts Riots, which exploded at about the time that Democratic Governor Pat Brown asked rioters "Don't you have enough welfare?" One the black men shouted back "We don't want welfare! We want jobs!"

Welfare was a big problem then in African-American communities, and has enabled a culture of fatherless children growing into rudderless adults without love, guidance, or opportunity.

The fact that Mr. Kimbrew thinks this marriage-less, family-less pathology is funny -- that is truly disturbing, and suggests that he is  not being a friend to the African-American caucus.

Even a liberal defense attorney could not run away from the bad values in some black communities, and public welfare as the direct cause of this break-down. He wrote all of this acknowledging that his comments violated every tenet of political correctness.

Part of the problem is that underclass black women begin having babies at age 15. They continue to have babies, with different black men, until they have had five or six. These women do not go to school. They do not work. They are not ashamed to live on public money. They plan their entire lives around the expectation that they will always get free money and never have to work. I do not see this among whites, Hispanics, or any other people.

If Mr. Kimbrew is a friend of African-Americans, he needs to stop making fun of illegitimacy, stop promoting this soft bigotry of low expectations, and call out the government for promoting this illicity behavior of easy illegitimacy among certain black communities.