One hundred years after the end of slavery, black nuclear families were the norm, and most black children were raised in a home with a mother and father present. Today, neither is true.
The racism-explains-everything line of argument ignores or plays down cultural factors that are far more likely to be driving social inequality, as evidenced by the fact that nonblack populations in the U.S. and abroad with no history of slavery or segregation exhibit many of the same characteristics of the black underclass in America.
The book’s essays “demonstrated that the social problems of America were not primarily racial in origin—in the sense that the black population was disproportionately disposed to them because of either inherent defect or the historical injustice they had undoubtedly suffered—but because of the culture and mores that a proportion of that population now espoused,”…