Remember this?
Well check this out. Now truth be told we’ve been heading down this road for a while now…and as usual the trend hits vulnerable populations first, then spreads outward. The key here is the historical piece. How long has marriage really been the norm? What types of circumstances make this possible? For all this talk about teenage birth rates, it wasn’t really that long ago when the average mother was a teenager. Also interesting is the way that the argument shifts to structural causes when black people aren’t the focus. When it’s us, it’s usually cultural. We don’t get married because we’ve got something wrong with our culture that doesn’t value marriage.
Right.
I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve certainly seen conservative types talking about rising illegitimacy rates among both blacks and whites as a sign of something wrong with the whole country’s values and culture.
It sure seems like a terrible trend. I’m not sure what all went into creating it–economic pressures at the bottom, perverse incentives from poverty programs, the pill and abortion, greater mobility so you can escape a lot of social pressure, whatever. But it’s a disaster for kids who get raised by someone who’s not ready to do the job, with no support.
while my experience with marriage is ‘limited’, i am product of the ideals entrusted in me by my father and grandfather. the fundamental theme was that family and honor are the most important factors that define who you are.
i don’t believe it is a white thing, poor thing, regional thing, or ‘symbolic of the times’. it is a fundamental reflection of a lack of self-worth and a lack of hard work. technology and legal minds have afforded us an ‘escape’ to everything if we ‘fail’. what many miss, especially those my age, is that failure is part of the equation. working hard to embrace, learn, and progress from that failure are what make relationships of all kinds fortified.
many of my young black professional brethren look at marriage like a business needing a rock solid business plan. life is not planned and it will derail. ultimately, the spotlight will be cast on you, by you, to decide if the decisions you’ve made will define you or push in a different direction.
my fore-fathers have taught my that it is never honorable to regress. marriages should be founded on these principles.
we wrote about ‘relationships’ in general on our site.
here’s one way to think about it.
take 100 couples from different class segments of the country. some of them decide to get married (and stay married). some of them don’t.
if class has no influence on this dynamic at all…then we’d expect the relationship between class status and marital status to be non-existent.
if class DOES have an influence then we’d expect to see either a positive relationship (the higher the class the larger the percentage of married couples within that class) or a negative relationship (the opposite of above).
if we DO see a class relationship–and in this case it looks as if we do–then there are two explanations for it. one explanation–yours–is cultural. the higher your class the higher your sense of self-worth, and work ethic.
another explanation is that there are larger political and economic factors that make marriage easier to manage for some groups of people and harder for others.
i believe that if we were to go back 150 years, we’d see low rates of marriage among “working class” and poor whites (enslaved africans couldn’t marry), and high rates of marriage among people with loot. this causes me to believe that technology is not necessarily a factor. and while self-worth may be low among the poor and working class, it is not apparent to me that this should in and of itself translate into lower rates of marriage.
i see what you’re saying. i think most of my disagreement comes from my experience with being from an upper class neighborhood.
my dad was the first to go to college, i was the first grandson, so i wouldn’t consider our family as being ‘born’ into a higher class.
in that same light, however, there are many of my friends who come from broken homes because of the influence the atmosphere that their class affords them. more money, bigger houses, country clubs, one household trying to outdo the other has cast the spotlight of the most influential members of the family (the children) to believe that these are the important factors.
while it can be argued that the poor may have lower rates of marriage than those who are rich, i do not think it is because of class. i do think it is because america treats its poor like sh*t and continues to jack-knife the divide between the have and have-nots through golden parachutes and corporate tax breaks. ultimately, the idea of self worth is juxtaposed to income brackets, volvo’s, and children on the soccer team.
what IS lost is that people who have that are in just as bad shape!
so i offer, what other factors could it be?
to me, it is a fundamental lack of honor for one’s self purpose and lack of emphasis on the importance of a sound family structure.
marriage isn’t a yellow-brick road. it’s the foundation for the home that should be able to resist the storms of life…and it is hard.
“i do not think it is because of class. i do think it is because america treats its poor like sh*t.”
and the second is not related to the first?