Historically black and family strong: Championing the two-parent home at HBCUs

I have spent more than a decade promoting the importance of marriage and strong families in the public square. But according to one “scholar” at George Mason University, my decision to speak at Hampton University’s 42nd annual black family conference makes me little better than a modern-day Exalted Cyclops.

Bethany Letiecq, a professor in George Mason’s College of Education and Human Development, recently wrote in the Journal of Marriage and Family:

Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. … But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States.

This is how our nation’s credentialed agents of intellectual chaos often speak. They specialize in soggy word salads that have no cultural or academic value.

This is also why it’s so vital for one of the country’s most influential historically black colleges and universities to focus on work that helps couples sustain marriages and build strong families.

Most people would assume that every academic and institution of higher learning would share similar goals, but that is not the case. Christina Cross is a black Harvard sociology professor and one of Letiecq’s research collaborators. She wrote an op-ed in the New York Times several years ago in which she argued that black children don’t benefit as much as their white peers from being raised in two-parent homes. She claimed that access to resources, not family structure, is the key to positive outcomes for children.

Progressive social commentators have become increasingly dismissive of agency and slavishly committed to outsourcing racial uplift. They seem to think bigger government and better white people are viable strategies for solving every social ill.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

I have never read a headline in the New York Times, the Atlantic, or Vox that said, “I Have Five Kids by Five Men and Love Being a Never-Married Baby Mama.”

A black father and mother in southeast Washington, D.C., have far more responsibility for doing the necessary things to give their child a better life than a government bureaucrat or white woman in Wisconsin could possibly do to improve the conditions of their lives.

That’s because all human beings must contribute to their own flourishing. No one can be carried to a better life, especially when every life starts with the one man and one woman who decide to create a child.

Given the connection between family structure and social outcomes, the message from the intellectual class to the public should be an encouragement to put marriage before baby carriage. It’s certainly what journalists, professors, and pundits do. I have never read a headline in the New York Times, the Atlantic, or Vox that said, “I Have Five Kids by Five Men and Love Being a Never-Married Baby Mama.”

Many progressives have a nasty habit of — politically speaking — living “right” but talking “left.” They embrace the norms they criticize as being rooted in “white supremacy,” but when they put pen to paper, it’s always to defend things in the public square that they don’t practice in their private lives.

About 70% of black children are born to unmarried parents, and 45% live with a single mother. The people who claim to care about race and social outcomes should be spending more time talking about marriage and family structure and less time attending Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racism lectures.

Increasing the number of children who are born to married parents is a definable, tangible, measurable, and achievable goal that is directly tied to positive social outcomes. On the other hand, destroying “white supremacy” is hard to envision when the term itself is used to describe everything from objectivity to good writing skills.

I am grateful that Hampton University is willing to use its time, talent, and treasure to speak honestly about the importance of marriage and fight for the black family. Let’s hope other HBCUs will follow. I look forward to seeing progressives freak out when a room full of “white supremacists” come together in support of black families.