The Family and Its Enemies

The basic point of this article in The Wall Street Journal by Walter Williams is a pretty obvious one, but unfortunately, it is one that has become so hard to assert in the hyper-sensitive race culture in which we live today, where any criticism is twisted into an indicator of a sinister, latent racism on the part of the observer, which results in the delegitimization his point. As a black man, Williams has a little more room to speak candidly about the state of the black community in America today, that is, until Jesse Jackson calls into question Williams's "blackness."

Even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren't permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father. During Reconstruction and up until the 1940s, 75% to 85% of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women. "The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do," Mr. Williams says. "And that is to destroy the black family."