I can guarantee this is whitey's fault. I did some work for a 68 year old black lady out of Detroit this week. Simple stuff, hang a ceiling fan, install a heater. Her music is Motown and Nat King Cole. While I worked, and during the lunch she made for me, she laid out how the white man is keeping her people down. Ex: Chemistry is whitey's mojo = crack epidemic, etc. I kept my mouth shut because I'd rather watch a train wreck than argue philosophy. And she makes a great tuna salad.
One point she brought up was the welfare problem. If there's a man in the house the Mom doesn't get a check. That was designed to destroy Black families. Y'know, from her perspective, that's hard to rebut.

Funny you post this Amy.

My therapist told me that when she worked in the social services field she would place blame where blame was due and got fired multiple times for it or her colleagues would get really angry. Victims are not always victims, especially when involving their own children.

I had really really bad parents, one told me he would never tell me if I was making a mistakes, and didn't care how my life ended up. Oh but by the way "we dont like the way you are living and your only destiny is begging someone to give you a minimum wage job"

But I had money to go to good therapy very young. My psychiatrist told me when she first met me she was shocked as I was just "a baby "

My friend on the other hand didn't have good money to go to therapy and she had to rely on social programs. After revealing she was raped her first therapist asked her if she wasn't dating men cuz she was a lesbian. Huh? And it was her mom who put her in that situation to get raped, but that wasn't addressed either, despite going to therapy together.

"If there's a man in the house the Mom doesn't get a check."

I get it, that many blacks see it as whitey's fault. But really, it's about choices, and maybe those choices need to be made unmistakably clear.

Stop sending checks for nothing. If you want a check, you're going to go sweep the streets, scrub graffiti of walls, clean public toilets, pick up litter, or whatever.

Mom's on welfare have implants. If the implant mysteriously disappears, no welfare checks. Existing kids go into child-care while mom works for her check. Some of the moms will be doing child-care, under qualified supervision.

If mom doesn't like it, she could always get a job herself. Or get a man in the house who has a job, so she can take care of her own kids.

Somebody's got to pay for my 15 kids.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bavou_SEj1E

There are cases where kids are in homeless shelter with their parents through a combination of bad breaks. Unemployment, add in a vehicle breakdown, a depressed economy and/or some other conditions. It happens. Take a guess what, thopse parents will do the best they can to get out.

Then you're left with a Dasani. But then if you bring in CPS or something similar and take the kids out the bad situation the government is bad guy.

I once worked at an orphanage as a security guard. The kids were generally happy, clean, fed, and safe. The orphanage was closed down because it wasn't a "proper home environment" and the kids would better off in a foster homes. Yeah, right.

I was kind of a doormat in my early 20s

Amy,

That is the first thing you have written that I really have trouble believing.

I missed that the link to the Moynihan report was from 1965. I hadn't realized that the disintegrating black family was already so apparent 50 years ago. What a huge indictment of the government's social policies - in 50 years all that has happened is that the worst fears of that report have come true.

@JimP: I hear you about foster care. Statistics are difficult to come by, and reporting is in any case unreliable, but I wonder how much abuse happens in foster homes.

Anecdote: I worked with a woman who grew up in a foster home. She was taken away from her parents because her father was having sex with her. When she was placed in a foster family, her foster father had sex with her. As a kid, she just figured that was what fathers did.

Social services really liked this foster family, because they could reliably be counted on to take in another child every few years. They never noticed the pattern: the family was ready to take in a new girl about the time the last one reached puberty...

@Amy Re:your childhood. Gee, that sounds familiar.

Nice to see another Happy Mutant succeeding. . .

A local charter school, the lifeline for many other poor parents and children, advertises its "rigor and excellence"; Elliott sniffs that it sounds "exclusive."

Of course no one who works for the New York Times would ever, ever send their own children to any sort of "exclusive" school.

How can you have children by a deceased wife? I mean, I thought necrophilia was pretty gross to begin with, but I didn't realize corpses could be impregnated, too!

"I believe in homosexual necrophilia," said Michael in dead Ernest.

Love this blog post, love you people.

"It focused on the deep roots of black poverty in America and concluded controversially that the relative absence of nuclear families (those having both a father and mother present) would greatly hinder further progress toward economic and political equality."

Well...

BTW: Amy, please note that they said "father and mother"... The problem is NOT that other configurations weren't considered.

"BTW: Amy, please note that they said "father and mother"... The problem is NOT that other configurations weren't considered."

Still beating on that strawman, I see. I wish you would go back and find Amy actually saying what you imply here.

You will be looking for a phrase saying, "two parents of a single gender are superior to a mother and father".

Amy has never said that. You have invented that position.

"You will be looking for a phrase saying, "two parents of a single gender are superior to a mother and father".

Amy has said on several occasions that same sex unions are just as good at parenthood, as traditional families.

Crid disagrees. So do I.

The Dasani case is certainly a low bar, because even a same sex stable couple or an Orphanage, as Jim pointed out, would be better than either of her two dysfunctional parents, but nothing is better for boys especially, than having a stable two parent family with both a dad, and a mom in the house.

"I missed that the link to the Moynihan report was from 1965. I hadn't realized that the disintegrating black family was already so apparent 50 years ago. "

Oh yeah. I remember it being widely discussed in the early '70s. By 1970 a lot of the big-city slums that we're all familiar with today were already well established, and many of them have changed little since then. Of course American cities always had slums, but prior to 1960 or so they were not slums like we have now: most people lived in two-parent families (with some children in orphanages), violent crime was about the same as in other parts of the city, and there were neighborhood stores where groceries and essentials could be purchased. The decline had begun with the advent of AFDC after WWII, but it didn't really get under way until that first generation of welfare babies grew up. The females were incentivized to marry the government, and the males, deprived of any family role or any moral guidance, turned to crime. Little has changed since then.

"Amy has said on several occasions that same sex unions are just as good at parenthood, as traditional families."

Please provide the quote. Amy, is this your position?

I recall discussion where the term "can be", was used. It was also pointed out that tens of thousands of heterosexual couples failed to raise children properly, and that homosexual parents are forced to rise to the challenge of raising a child together because of their different circumstances. The failure rate of heterosexual parenting does not seem to make it a particularly high bar.

There has been little logic applied to these comparisons.

As I recall, its 'studies show that kids of same sex parents do just as well'

Given how much MORE effort same sex couples have to do to get kids, it stands to reason they would put i the same level of effort in raising them.

Also as Rad pointed out, you have a a small minority of less than 5% of the population being compared to damn near everyone else, of course the numbers are not well compared