Socialism and the Decline of the Black Family

Is it an important benefit to keep families "intact"? How important. The poverty rate for married Black couples is 6.5%, White single parent families is 16.7%. Having two parents is more important than your ethnicity. (Souree Satista)

Socialism and the Decline of the Black Family

Children need fathers, but social fragmentation gives an advantage to those who seek centralized power.

By Jason L. Riley, WSJ

July 7, 2026

By now it’s clear that Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York last year over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was less a fluke than a harbinger.

Noncoastal socialists have racked up congressional primary victories against establishment Democrats in Colorado and Pennsylvania. They’ve won state and local contests in Kentucky and Georgia and are on the ballot in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. These far-left candidates aren’t hiding their extremism. They want punishing taxes on the wealthy to fund “free” daycare, healthcare, housing and college. Some oppose private property and prisons, while others view border security as unnecessary and racist.

Conservatives are right to be concerned about the impact on our free-market capitalist system if enough people with such views are elected to positions of power. But socialism’s impact on the traditional family structure is no less concerning. Children from intact families are more likely to finish school and avoid poverty. The absence of fathers is strongly correlated with teen parenthood, drug addiction and involvement with the criminal justice system. The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that “every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men” and that civilization “depends upon social inventions that will make each generation of males want to nurture women and children.”

But socialists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dismissed the traditional family as a tool of oppression that advanced the patriarchy by exploiting the domestic labor of women. Similar thinking informs today’s politicians and policymakers who want to expand the welfare state to address economic inequality. For them, nuclear families in general, and fathers in particular, were an obstacle to central planning schemes. Ultimately, the state is promoted as the best provider and dads are seen as superfluous, if not part of the problem. The upshot is that preserving the family and its autonomy is less important to socialists than preserving their own ability to tell other people how to live their lives.

One of the real-world experiments with this approach is the black family, which has been in disarray for more than a half-century and is the subject of an important new book, “The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable.” The author is Delano Squires, a black husband and father who focuses on marriage and parenthood at the Heritage Foundation. He spent more than a decade employed by the District of Columbia in a program aimed at reducing gun violence. The book offers something many others can’t, which is scholarly analysis alongside the astute observations of a practitioner who has lived and worked with the people he’s discussing.

Mr. Squires contends that many of the social and economic problems in low-income black communities stem from the sad fact that some 70% of black children are born to unwed parents and nearly 45% live with a single mother. “Progressives talk a lot about racial disparities in household incomes but never seem to include family structure in their calculations,” he writes. Asians are the highest earners, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Similarly, Asians have the highest marriage rates, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Maybe it’s no coincidence.

Politicians, journalists and academics typically blame the state of the black family on the country’s history of slavery and segregation. Mr. Squires believes that ugly history has played a role, but not a decisive one. Following emancipation, one of the first things black people did was seek out spouses and children from whom they had been forcibly separated during slavery. A project called “Last Seen: Finding Families After Slavery” has compiled thousand of ads taken out in hundreds of newspapers nationwide between the 1830s and 1920s by former slaves searching for loved ones.

Between 1890 and 1950, black men and women married earlier and were more likely to be married by 35 than their white peers, Mr. Squires writes. That suggests black attitudes toward marriage and child rearing today are the product of incentives and circumstances that developed long after the end of slavery. “More than 70 percent of black children were born to married parents in 1965—a century after the abolition of slavery,” Mr. Squires writes. “Today, only 30 percent are. This may seem counterintuitive to most people, but the facts are clear: The black family was more intact after three centuries of chattel slavery than after three generations of the federal government’s ‘war’ on poverty.”

Mr. Squires’s Christian faith and deep understanding of the role that the black church played in the civil-rights victories of the 1950s and ’60s informs his view that too many black religious leaders have since lost their way. Still, he believes that blacks, including faith leaders, “not white liberals,” ultimately must drive the effort to restore the black family. Socialism isn’t the answer.