O/T Political Rants & Raves - Page 46

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RPK -- A common error is to assume that correlation (especially over time) is showing cause and effect.  The classic example is the odd correlation between average hemlines and stock market prices -- it doesn't actually mean they are related.  Grad students are warned not to fall for the trick of trying to prove their theories with autocorrelation.  This means they should not find two factors that both grew over time and suggest one caused the other.

Over time in the post WWII periods many, many demographic and economic forces occurred, but they did not all cause one another.

For example, the labor force participation rates of married women increased dramatically after WWII -- but that was not caused by povery policy enacted during the 1960s.

On the other hand, I think there are good reasons to believe that AFDC (which was more generous for families with lower incomes -- how could it be otherwise?) drove poor men away from their wives and children.  Many of them were black in northern cities.  I am not denying that many of the impacts of social welfare programs (in fact, may of the impacts of evern perfect social welfare policy) did (and would) hurt the family structure of the poor.

You should be careful about your historical assumptions, however.  Many people seem to think that black rights marched upward linearly from the Civil War to the present day, but this is not at all true.  Blacks had greater political power in the Deep South, for example, in 1870 than in 1960.  Reconstruction, Hayes-Tilden, Jim Crow, and so much more set blacks back time and again in many places in the US.  The state of the black family in America in 1880 does NOT say that racism cannot be cause; tragically, it says that in many ways racism was worse in the 1960s (during political turmoil that threatening white southern ways of life) than it was in the 1880s (when whites were "redeeming" white rights -- that was the word white southern politicians used for it in the 1870s through 1890s).

Overall, I think the problem is very complicated.  But linear historical assumptions that underlie much of what passes for sociological analysis is hopelessly off base.  That's not to say that you and others do not have some points to make.

I must add that any social analyst who points to statistics showing the declining marriage rate of black women during a period when the incarceration rate of black men shot up astronomically (grossly out of proportion to the arrest rate of black men) -- without admitting that the latter has quite a bit to do with the former -- is very deficient, on both scholarly and moral ground.

Is the insidious implication that black women don't want to get married?  Is this supposed to be an ugly suggestion that black women maintain different moral standards from mainstream society?  I think this is very ugly and quite preposterous.

Is the US is completely out of line with the civilized world on this and so many other matters.   We incarcerate far too many people of every color and creed, but blacks remain victims of a racist penal system.   The power elite does what it can to maintain power, and with historical phase it finds new ways to do it.   In the past few decades we have seen the incarceration rate of black males skyrocket at the same time that the crime rate has plummeted.

And then people blame black women for not marrying at the same rates as white women.  (I wonder if these same folks are willing to argue that a women's color has nothing whatsover to do with the color of the men she can meet, date and marry?)