A Myth about African-American Marriage
[Trivia: can you name all 4 of Adele’s studio albums?]
Sometimes I hear people cite the dehumanizing and anti-family practices of American slavery as the origin of the current tragic state of African American marriage. I’ve seen this repeated in print by serious historians. But it’s a myth.
I don’t want to dunk too hard on this mistake, since generally it’s voiced by people who at least have the cojones to correctly identify the traditional (biologically-rooted) family as a good thing and its disintegration as a curse whose negative effects are hard to overstate in scope or severity. That’s partly why I’m not naming said serious historian. (And also maybe because the specific piece I recall reading I read 5 years ago and I can’t now relocate it.) But it’s just not serious history—it’s not even history properly attempted. This error correctly identifies Point A, the active assault on the African American family during the slavery era, and Point B, the low rates of marriage and astonishing rates of illegitimate births (in the neighborhood of 77%).
But you can’t just draw a straight line connecting those two dots. African American marriage after 1865 (the end of the Civil War) hovered around a pretty healthy norm, and not until sometimes after the Sexual Revolution did problems materialize. Don’t take my word for it; I can show you.
One statistic demographers consider is the median age for first marriages. As one frank Insider piece from 2013 put it, “men and women are waiting longer than ever to get married for the first time” because “Far more people are living together” and “With the use of birth control, choosing not to get married didn't have to mean choosing between abstinence or unwanted pregnancy.” (Higher median ages don’t necessarily spell trouble—the historian David Hackett Fischer pointed out that the New England Puritans has remarkably high such ages, yet high rates of eventual marriage and illegitimacy rates near or at zero—but the causes driving them in today’s case are clear, and troublesome.)
And how do those phenomena break out in different American racial subsets? Census data here (aggregated and plotted by a Census worker for a 2012 conference paper) shows that
You had higher first ages for men and women for the 60 or so years represented here before the post-War shakeup. I’d speculate that the slightly higher ages here have more to do with poverty and/or education than the post-Sexual Revolution causes, but regardless, the significance is that all these ages are stable, and it’s noteworthy that the main driver is that men marry older, regardless of race—not so since 1980.
Another statistic looked to is the percent of demographic subsets who never marry (especially looking after some age of established maturity, like 35, here). What do those numbers look like?
Yikes.
It’s tempting to craft a narrative that connects the slavery-era anti-family policies directly to the social collapse most (77%) African Americans find themselves born into today. The story seems to write itself, and after all, it’s common enough to see people draw straight lines to colonial or early American practices or circumstances concerning African Americans to their present-day realities.
But that’s not how it went down. And whether people make this mistake because it just seems so first-blush plausible, or because they’re trying to demonstrate how attuned they are to the status of present-day African Americans as victims because of white people, it’s an unhelpful error that completely ignores all hard evidence.
Incidentally, connecting more of the threads laid out here, I came across one Brookings Institute report that raised the topic of the skyrocketing illegitimate births and said,
Efforts by social scientists to explain the rise in out-of-wedlock births have so far been unconvincing, though several theories have a wide popular following . . . Yet another popular explanation is that single parenthood has increased since the late 1960s because of the change in attitudes toward sexual behavior. But so far social scientists have been unable to provide a convincing explanation of exactly how that change came about or to estimate in any convincing way its quantitative impact. In recent work we have been able to provide both.
The paper even gets around to the policy idea (which has been floated in the wake of the repeal of Roe and the potential for the outlawing of abortion in many parts of America) that
It has been suggested that measures should be taken to make fathers pay for the support of their out-of-wedlock children. While probably difficult to enforce, such measures give the correct incentives. They will make men pause before fathering such children and they will at least slightly change the terms between fathers and mothers. Such measures deserve serious consideration.
That 1996 report was co-authored by our current Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen.
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Answer: Adele Adkins has released albums entitled 19 (2008), 21 (2011), 25 (2015), and 30 (2021). All told, they sum to 95. The fact that they’ve been coming out after increasingly longer gaps means that that sum, over time, hasn’t skyrocketed the way it otherwise might have.