Chicago’s mayoral candidates may seem like they’re paying attention to the plight of the black community when they talk about crime, more money for city schools, and tough job prospects.
But they won’t talk about the uncomfortable issues. Like fathers who’ve gone missing. Or kids who can’t read. Or the hair-trigger violence that’s fueled by low self-esteem.
There’s more that’s off the table: merit, achievement and excellence.
To progressives who celebrate black victimhood, these assertions will seem to be way over the line. They’re not.
Because if you won’t talk about births to unmarried mothers, kids raised without fathers and students who are functionally illiterate, you’re skating past the root causes of today’s troubles. The numbers are eye-popping: 8 of every 10 black babies in Chicago are born to an unmarried mother. Only 1 in 10 black students in Chicago Public Schools can read at grade level. Four of every five Chicago murder victims is black. And seven out of every ten known murder perpetrators in Chicago is black.
The data is hiding in plain view.
Who is born to unmarried mothers?
The city must face up to the troubling legacy of broken families. It’s at the root of neglected child development and violence. More than 82 percent of black births in Chicago are to unmarried mothers. That’s far more than among any other racial group, and it’s been that way for decades.
There are single fathers and mothers who do a heroic job of raising their kids. But too often for children raised by unmarried mothers, the consequences are dire. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Paul Amato reported that on the whole, children born out of wedlock do worse on a wide range of outcomes.
They “reach adulthood with less education, earn less income, have lower occupational status, are more likely to be idle” or “not employed and not in school.” They are also “more likely to have a non-marital birth (among daughters), have more troubled marriages, experience higher rates of divorce, and report more symptoms of depression.”
In contrast children in married households on the whole enjoy a more stable environment that leads to better outcomes. Census data shows that marriage provides financial stability for parents of all races. Blacks in particular experience the biggest financial gains from marriage. Unmarried black mothers with no spouse have a median income of just $35,000, while married black couples with children earn a median income of nearly $95,000. That’s 173 percent more.
Latasha Fields is a married black mother of four who lives in Chicago’s Washington Heights neighborhood on the South Side. Now long married and with four kids, she had her first child out of wedlock when she was 17. She took college classes in business management, got hired at a property firm and worked her way up to property manager. She also met Ron Fields. He’d been raised by an inattentive mother and dealt drugs starting in sixth grade. As a young man he had trouble finding good work but finally settled on a trade as a barber. He met Latasha through their church. Visit their home and you’ll see how seriously they impart and enforce rules of conduct for their children.
Latasha says, “The greatest youth program is the family. Restore the Moms and Dads if you want to help society.”
She’s not the only black parent in Chicago voicing a message of empowerment through attentive parenting. One more of many is Chicago artist Rahmaan Barnes. He waited until age 36 to become a dad. He’s married to the mother of his young daughter. He accents, passionately and in rich detail, the crucial role of black fathers in child development and socialization.
Barnes says, “I had my mind made up already when I was 13 years old that I was going to be doing this,” building a career as an artist. “That came from having elders [his step-father, an uncle] around me. They cared. They cared about my future. They wanted to see me have a chance and they knew that me having a life goal and a path would give me a chance.”
The themes raised by Fields, Barnes, and other parents in committed marriages are commonly spoken of day-to-day in Chicago’s black communities on the South Side. Yet most local politicians today won’t touch any of this. Not publicly.
It wasn’t so long ago that one prominent black Chicago politician dared to go there. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama called out absent black fathers and said they have to step up: “…if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
Risks for children with only one parent at home are of course not confined to blacks. Births to unmarried mothers is also an issue among whites and Latinos. In Illinois cities like Decatur, Rockford, and Waukegan – 50 percent or more of white births and 60 percent or more of Latino births are to unmarried mothers.
But the problem is most acute for blacks.
The problem of one-parent homes is also interwoven with illiteracy and systemic learning deficiencies. That becomes even more evident when looking at disappointing reading and math data in Chicago’s public schools.
Who can’t read?
Kids who can’t read are destined to struggle and many may become criminals, victims, or both.
In Chicago’s public schools, results aren’t encouraging for any racial group, but blacks by far suffer the worst scores in proficiency. Just 1 in 10 black students can read at grade level. In math, it’s even worse. Only 1 in 20 is at grade level. All the more reason parents must help fill the void.
Too many apologists will assert that public schools need more money. But the reality is CPS already spends a staggering $29,000 per student for utterly dismal results. It’s not the money.
What’s also staggering is that city officials and candidates don’t challenge the dismal reading and math results in Chicago’s public schools. It’s all a game, played with the future of the city’s children. Kids can’t read, but 100% of CPS teachers were evaluated as “excellent or proficient” in 2021. Worse still, CPS graduates 83 percent of its students from high school and Mayor Lori Lightfoot celebrates it.
It goes even further. Take a look at the CPS web page on equity. Instead of pushing for better results, they choose instead to highlight and promote an activist video titled “How Can We Win?” It asserts blacks can’t win; and endorses looting and burning to vent frustration. We wrote about it back in August of 2022. And it’s still there on the CPS “equity” page.
But when 9 in 10 black public school students in Chicago can’t read, there’s no denying something is badly askew. Parents can’t depend solely on schools to educate their children.
The good news is, talk to black community leaders on the South Side and you’ll often get an earful about how black parents have to commit to each other and their children. And read to their children, and introduce words, ideas and experiences that spark their development.
Who gets murdered or wounded?
Eroded family structure and neglected child development pave the way for black-on-black violence of outsized proportions. The data is overwhelming.
Blacks are 30 percent of Chicago’s population and 24 percent of Cook County’s. But 79 percent of homicide and non-fatal shooting victims in Chicago from 2019 to late 2022 in Chicago were black.
What about the perpetrators? In 2022 alone, more than 75 percent of all convicted murderers in Cook County were black, according to a database kept by the Office of State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. That’s in line with more long-term data. From 1991 through 2011, blacks were more than 70 percent of the known murder perpetrators charged, according to the Chicago Police Department data.
Excuse-making for Chicago’s violence – so much of it black-on-black – runs rampant. Mayor Lightfoot does it. She said, “violence is the expression of poverty.” Columnists also make excuses, arguing peak violence of the 1980s and 1990s means there’s no real problem today. 697 murders in 2022 or not.
But nothing grants someone the right to kill, unprovoked by any mortal threat to his own safety.
Not being broke. Not being mis-educated. Not being angry. Not feeling wronged.
In 2021 the head of the University of Chicago Crime Lab testified to the U.S. Senate that three-quarters of Chicago’s shootings were tied to arguments. She stated, “the vast majority of murders in America are not motivated by money, robberies, or wars between gangs over drug turf. They are most often the result of an argument that spins out of control…”
‘Nobody’s got time for a person who can’t read and can’t count’
“Diversity” and “equity” have trumped merit and achievement. Traditional standards of writing, grading, and teaching are now called “racism and white supremacy.”
South Side Chicago native Glenn Loury was the first black tenured economist at Harvard and now teaches at Brown University. Loury recently said,
“We’re in the twenty-first century. The year is 2023. The country is changing and changing and changing. Tens of millions of non-European immigrants are making lives here. The politics of this country, the Hispanics are a more significant ethnicity than the blacks in the long term when you think about ethnic pluralism in the country. The Chinese are coming, the world is changing. Globalization. Nobody’s got time for a person who can’t read and who can’t count….I think this is shtick. ‘We were enslaved. We are black. We are owed something’ is a house of cards.The idea that, perpetually, you would warp American institutions to favor people who were not excelling on the merits because of these kinds of second and third-order claims about exclusion and racism? It shouldn’t happen and it won’t happen.”
Chicago’s political agenda is hostile to real equality through color-blind accountability. Too many in Chicago’s political class are neutral or hostile to the idea that parents should be married and that they should focus sharply on child development. That disaffection for – and distancing from – marriage has done great harm to blacks and to young black males in particular.
Parenting isn’t a job, it’s a passion project. There are no do-overs.
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