Is it racist to state that the percentage of Black single-mother households in America dwarfs that of any other racial or ethnic group? Justin Phillips thinks so. The Chronicle’s race propagandist says anyone who points out this inconvenient fact is “recycling tired stereotypes and paternalistic viewpoints.”
But the actual facts prove otherwise. Some 64% of Black children in 2021 were raised in single-parent families, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Here are the comparable figures for other races/ethnicities:
Asian and Pacific Islander: 16%.
Hispanic of Latino: 42%.
Non-Hispanic White: 24%.
American Indian: 49%.
Well, by Justin Phillips’ standards, maybe the Annie E. Casey Foundation is racist. But I don’t think so. The Baltimore-based philanthropy has a long history of liberal engagement with communities of color, working in the areas of child welfare, foster care, and criminal justice reform. When President Obama launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” program designed to “keep high risk young men of color on the right path,” the Annie E. Casey Foundation was one of the founding philanthropies that funded it.
Maybe Obama is a racist. One never knows!
My beef with Justin Phillips and race-baiters like him is that they never, ever find anything to criticize about behavior in the Black community. You’ll never hear Phillips decry Black single motherhood. You’ll never hear him tell Black youths in Oakland to get rid of their guns, go back to school, and straighten up. Instead, when Phillips is confronted with the awful fact of criminal behavior among young Black men, he trots out the usual excuses: it’s “racism” that made them do it, or redlining, or killer cops, or greedy landlords, or—well, the whole gamut of excuses they always turn to.
But back to single-mom Black households. I could recite fact after fact proving that kids raised in poor households led only by a mom are at higher risk of imprisonment and poverty than those raised in two-parent households. But you know that. So does Justin Phillips, although once again, if you press him on the topic, he’ll tell you that racism is behind every imprisonment of every Black person. He might have to take a pretty complicated route to find racism at the bottom of the murder of four individuals in Oakland last week, but I’m sure he can do it. That’s his job: everything bad that happens to Black people is due to racism. Nothing is ever a Black person’s fault.
Look, we all are members of various identity groups, but we don’t all make excuses for our compatriots the way Phillips does. I’m a Jew, but I’m highly critical of Israel’s conservative government. I’m gay, but I don’t reflexively defend every dumb LGBGTQ person. George Santos, who’s gay, is a corrupt moron who should be thrown out of Congress immediately. David DePape, the “non-binary” maniac who attacked Paul Pelosi, is a vicious, violent criminal who should spend a long time in jail. But if you made George Santos and David DePape into Black men, I’m sure Justin Phillips would be writing their defense in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, blaming their behavior on, yes, racism.
Steve Heimoff