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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Shhhh. Don't say unpleasant truths like this too loudly. Fathers are different than mothers, and the genders are not interchangeable? American black culture is broken and dysfunctional and creating a significant share of its own problems? We must go on pretending that such things cannot be! Besides, that's just, like, your opinion, man! What's this based on? Math? Like, that's a western white supremacist patriarchal construct! I'm reporting you and anyone who agrees with you to the thought police. Maybe they can convince you it can only be the guns causing this problem. Fatherless criminals from dysfunctional homes who join street gangs don't kill people, guns do!

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Unfortunately, bringing up these issues gets you labeled as "racist" and shouted down. If it's anything outside of the official narratives, it's deemed incorrect and not worthy of debate. So how do we move past this nonsense that saying anything about race is "racist"? Ultimately, we need more discussions like this in public spheres. The question is how do we move from "winning at all costs" politics to the "betterment of society"?

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After my many decades of full-time employment ended, I got a part-time seasonal job, three seasons a year over six years, in a children's farm in NYC that saw upwards of 4500 visitors per day during the busiest times and mostly serving NYC public school children. Most of those children were minorities and many came from the poorest neighborhoods.

What I saw, I saw consistently, season after season, year after year. So my generalizations are based on that. I started off every tour by asking for the cooperation of the grownups, and especially that one of them should be stationed at the very end of the group of kids so when I saw that person, I knew I had everyone with me. It was important that we moved on my prompts so the kids got to see and do everything.

If I had a tour group including white fathers, my day was pretty wretched. Those daddies were the feeblest collection of manhood I'd ever seen, and they couldn't keep the kids together.

If I had a tour group including black mothers, my day was pretty wretched too. They took the tour guide as an antagonist whose instructions were an insult to their autonomy.

If I had a tour group including black daddies, I was in paradise. They recognized the logic of my request immediately. They kept the kids in order without yelling. I only needed to catch one of the fathers' eyes for them to get everybody moving behind me again. They were an absolute joy to work with and it was very clear how good it was for the kids.

Now--about the teachers? Most of them regardless of ethnicity were appallingly bad. But the black entirely female teachers? They were often quite vicious to the little black boys, shaming them and sometimes grabbing them roughly for behaving exactly like little children thrilled to have a day in "the country." Those were the teachers who *apologized to me because the children were "bothering" me with questions.*

After that job, I no longer had quite as much contempt and loathing for HS thugs. School itself was the gangster factory. The littlest kids full of enthusiasm and affection in kindergarten and 1st grade had learned, by third grade, that most grownups didn't give a damn about them and should be entirely ignored.

You really had to see it. Nothing I wrote can convey the reality.

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Interesting that the BLM Marxists were also against the nuclear family. Almost like they instinctively recognize that their political power emerges from black criminality, which in turn requires broken families to foster.

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Let me introduce you to (my) fiscal-sink hypothesis. Governments under-police localities which are fiscal sinks—are localities which are net drains on revenue. Single mothers mean high welfare/low revenue localities, so are under-policed, so have high homicide rates.

In much of Latin America, there are no-revenue urban localities due to lack of formal land ownership.

A high rate of African diaspora, especially African ex-slave diaspora, population makes a locality more vulnerable to under-policing, but it is the under-policing of localities (due to them being fiscal sinks) that is the problem. Single-motherhood tracks being fiscal sinks.

https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Figure out why black families are disproportionately likely to have no father present as compared to other racial demographics...

Lyndon Baines Johnson.

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Watch your six. l. You’re starting to sound like Thomas Sowell.

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Apr 21, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

I love it how just about everybody here wants to discuss solutions, as if they had the power to implement them... but nobody wants to really dig in to how it got to be this way. Was it all just honest mistakes and unintended consequences? Is this a self-entrenching "wicked problem" that just spiraled out of control? Or do you suppose it might have been engineered? Means, motive, opportunity?

I ask not so much because I can't take off my tinfoil, but more because it seems to me that any real steps toward real solutions to problems of this nature and scale would require a grounded analysis of their cause. Different causes will necessitate different approaches. Otherwise, I feel it's pretty tasteless subject matter for speculative "if I was Emperor" style wankery.

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Apr 20, 2023·edited Jan 29Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Well, the biocalvinists would still attribute this to genetics. They'd say that the cause isn't the fatherlessness, but that the kind of men who won't stick around tend to provide poor genetic material.

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

It's a manifestation of a machismo / dis culture, that, as you say, has limited countervailing force in the form of fathers or father figures. And the mothers and sisters seem to prefer this manifestation of "manliness" because of their own warped honor code.

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Apr 21, 2023·edited Apr 21, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Daniel Patrick Moynihan came to much the same conclusion in 1965 while serving as an Assistant Secretary for Labor under President Lyndon Johnson when he published “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.”

In now what is now commonly known as The Moynihan Report, Moynihan urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the Black family, arguing that the real cause of the American Black’s troubles is not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the circumstance that the structure of the Black family is highly "unstable and in many urban centers. . .approaching complete breakdown." This is so, stated Moynihan, because of the increasingly matriarchal character of American Black society, a society in which a husband is absent from nearly 2 million of the nation's 5 million Black families and in which, too, some 25 per cent of all births are illegitimate. Moreover, Moynihan pointed out, children, especially boys, who grow up in fatherless homes tend not to adjust to this country's essentially patriarchal society, particularly when their problems are complicated by poverty and racial prejudice.

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Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a big factor back in the day. Government agents would go into homes to check to see if Dad was home. If so, no more government money.

And based on my rumor mill, there are quite a few single moms that aren't truly single. Dad is just using the grandparent's address so they can be unmarried for welfare purposes. Change the economic incentives and the number of Dads at home will bump up rather quickly.

So step one to stop the problem is to make Glenn Beck cry: have an unconditional citizen dividend to make the jump from welfare to work much easier. This dividend would replace the child tax credit, the earned income credit, and the standard deduction for wage earners. Welfare programs should be cut by the value of the dividend. The actual cost to the government would be thus quite small. The reduction in the enormous marriage penalty among the very poor would be huge.

Step 2 would be to replace the tax free nature of employer provided health insurance with vouchers for everyone which have the value roughly equal to the tax savings of professional class workers. This would decouple employment from health insurance, making life much easier for part time workers, day laborers, and seasonal workers.

Step three would be to enforce the national picket line to bring up the "market" minimum wage. Tax imports by the same amount we tax domestically made products. Don't provide the citizen dividend to guest workers.

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

This is good stuff. Lorenzo From Oz recently came to precisely the same conclusion by comparing rural vs urban black violent crime rates:

https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances

Rural blacks have much higher rates of intact families, and violent crime rates comparable to whites.

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Apr 20, 2023·edited Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Mr. Campbell, I deeply respect your work because you ground it so solidly in the data. If we, as a society, are consciously avoiding the data because it does not line up with our view of how we want to world to work, we will never have the world that we want to live in.

I have no reason whatsoever to disbelieve any of this analysis. But what is the next step? I have seen other work that demonstrates a causal link between single mother families of all demographics due to the unintended consequences of federal and state welfare policies. Under many programs, folks lose benefits if they get married. I believe strongly that folks are not poor because they are mentally deficient. Lower income folks are no different than other demographics in that they respond quite well to economic incentives of all sorts. So if the incentives are in place to punish marriage, guess what the result will be? But assuming this is true, how do we fix it?

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“First, it was the last good year the FBI has data on, because they changed their data collection scheme in 2020 to make it so burdensome that half the police agencies in the country stopped giving them data.“

Of course the woke activists and journalists would leave some thing like that tidbit out.

https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/la-times-bicycle-stop-report-may

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

After reading the first few lines I was going to recommend RCA's old blog post. Then you linked to it.

When I was researching/debunking the lead crime hypothesis, I found an article on crime rates by IQ, in Sweden. Large cohort size, not much racial confounding:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0041783

They found that dropping IQ by 15 points doubled the violent crime rate.

So, we do have a B/W gap of ~15 points in the US (for whatever reasons). But the crime ratios aren't 2X, they are more like 6-10X. It seems like even the people who believe in genetic differences need a better theory.

I like your theory. Though I suppose you also need to establish that the marriage gaps cause higher crime, not that both are secondary to another factor. And you might want to look back in time to see if crime ratios increased as marriage broke down. Marriage rates were much higher 60 years ago, but I think the crime ratios were similar.

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