The National Divide Centers on ‘I Do’

In the debate over the reauthorization of the landmark 1996 welfare law, conservatives are talking about marriage. And talking, and talking. “The conservatives are on an absolute tear about that,” says Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “They just never stop talking about it.”

Liberals and many moderates believe that marriage is a good thing, but they worry that every federal dollar spent on “pro-marriage” initiatives is one less federal dollar for other anti-poverty and pro-family measures such as efforts to prevent teenage pregnancy. Besides, isn’t the government getting a bit pushy when it begins pressing people to get hitched?

Still, if the unfolding welfare debate shines a spotlight on marriage, that will be a good thing because marriage is displacing both income and race as the great class divide of the new century. Fresh data from the 2000 census show that fewer than a quarter of American households consist of married couples with children and that the number of single-mother families grew nearly five times faster in the 1990s than the number of married couples with children.

The good news is that the illegitimacy ratio for blacks stopped rising in the 1990s; the bad news is that it stabilized at more than triple the illegitimacy ratio of 1960. Today, about two-thirds of all black families are headed by a single parent (usually the mother), and a majority of all black children live in fatherless households.

So is this just one more manifestation of the nation’s enduring race problem? Until the 1950s, blacks were more rather than less likely than whites to be married. If race is the problem, why did marriage collapse in so much of black America even as Jim Crow and segregation were dismantled and as blacks began entering the economic and social mainstream? And why is the trend similar among whites?

By some estimates, 60% of all American children born in the 1990s will spend some significant portion of their childhood in a fatherless home. Moreover, the great engine of single parenthood is no longer divorce, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s; it is the rising share of births to people who never marry to begin with. Research by the ton finds that children raised in single-parent homes are at greater risk of poverty, school dropout, delinquency, teen pregnancy and adult joblessness.

All those problems disproportionately affect blacks, but before you decide that race rather than marriage is the active ingredient in the witch’s brew, consider a few other points. First, poverty correlates more strongly with a family’s marital status than with its race. According to Census Bureau data, a two-parent black household is more likely to be poor than is a two-parent white household, but both are far less likely to be poor than is a mother-only household of either race. In other words, if you are a baby about to be born, your better odds are to choose married black parents over unmarried white ones.

Second, recent research finds that, dire though the consequences of single parenthood often are for black children, the consequences tend to be even worse for white children. “The consequences of family disruption are smaller for disadvantaged black and Hispanic children than for disadvantaged white children, both in terms of percentage points and in terms of proportionate effects,” write Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur in their 1994 book, “Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps.” They add that a middle-class income is no shield: “The chances that a white girl from an advantaged background will become a teen mother is five times as high, and the chances a white child will drop out of high school is three times as high, if the parents do not live together.”

Ominously, in her research Saw-hill finds that more American children today than in the 1970s have either very good or very poor life prospects, and fewer are in the middle. “There is a bifurcation in children’s life prospects that threatens to divide the U.S. into a society of haves and have-nots,” she writes.

Suppose, as all this evidence suggests, that what afflicts America is no longer first and foremost a poverty problem or a race problem but rather a marriage problem. Then neither income-based remedies such as welfare nor race-based remedies such as affirmative action will hit the mark. But what might a marriage-based remedy look like?

“We don’t have a clue how to get people married,” Sawhill says. Theodora Ooms, the director of the Center for Law and Social Policy’s marriage resource center, agrees. “This area is so new for social policy that we have no track record of research, demonstrations, evaluations,” she says. “We’re jump-starting the public policy debate” before either science or the public is prepared.

Still, the only way to find the right answers is to start asking the right questions. Every day, it becomes clearer that the old lenses of poverty and race are out of focus. The welfare reauthorization debate is a chance to begin looking at the world through a better pair of spectacles.