Anonymous #3 11w

wait what😭 what was that policy called? like what do i look up to learn about that?

5

Anonymous #6 11w

War on Poverty, starting during the Lyndon Johnson era. The intention was to provide support to single mothers. The result was families splitting up or choosing not to get married in order to collect better benefits, because you got more money as a single mother with an absent babydaddy than if he married you and provided for you.

13

Anonymous #1 11w

but its not funny...

-4

Anonymous #7 11w

if it was humor then it would need to be funny

-3

Anonymous OP 11w

And you think a middle aged woman being so upset by her 1st world minor inconveniences she feels obligated to discuss it with the manager is funny? Everything is funny to somebody and there’s somebody out there who’s upset by it. Humor is the proliferation of pointing out (and often exaggerating) the truth in a comical way to draw attention to the point.

20

Anonymous OP 11w

Maybe your dad just never explained humor to you 🤭

1

Anonymous #8 11w

More blame lies w Nixon’s war on “drugs” while feds deliberately pushed drugs into black neighborhoods & arrested men over possession, pushing it into overdrive by Reagan through tough on crime policies working in tandem w private prisons to basically just find any reason to arrest ppl so they could get more slaves into the system. Fathers being in prison doesn’t exactly make raising future fathers easy. Wealth also plays a role, black:white single mother% is very similar when accounting for it

6

Anonymous OP 11w

“Ok guys let’s not joke about anything that someone might not find funny”… oh wait. There’s nothing left to joke about

5

Anonymous #10 11w

So you can be funny/humorous without making fun of peoples experiences. its called punching up instead of punching down... wild concept i know i suggest you look it up.

-4

Anonymous #3 11w

This is just blatantly false lmao, you people will believe anything that validates your delusions

-1

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

War on drugs didn’t help, but statistically is a lot less to blame. Before the war on poverty, only about 25% of black children grew up in single-parent households, afterwards it rose up to 75% of kids. Whereas only about 2% of black men are incarcerated (even if you narrow it to high risk groups like men in their 30s, that number only gets up to about 5% in prison). Which is still really high compared to other groups, but comes nowhere near accounting for 3/4 kids not having a present father.

10

Anonymous #8 11w

I shit my pants in 5th grade

0

Anonymous OP 11w

It’s usually punching sideways.

4

Anonymous #8 11w

That doesn't account for the point I mentioned about wealth, which is intricately connected to crime & unstable family units globally for our crony capitalist system. Blaming the post 60's jump in single moms mainly on welfare ignores the massive economic shift of deindustrialization that's affected a lot of this country (including the white working class, opioid crisis, etc) & to a lesser extent the role of the sexual revolution around the same time with the linked decrease in shotgun marriages

1

Anonymous #8 11w

Working class unionized manufacturing jobs started vanishing from inner cities (more black populated) the same time as the war on poverty. This effect then spread out from inner cities across the country with the peak of deindustrialization, the peak of the war and drugs, and the height of tough on crime policy wither private prisons in the 90s. The ability for working class men to be stable breadwinners collapses with that, destroying marriage rates

1

Anonymous #8 11w

So treating that 75% number like 1 input/output makes no sense. The 2-5% of black men being incarcerated is only about men in prison *right now* which misses out on a lot of how mass incarceration actually breaks a community down. A father doesn't need to be behind bars for all 18 years of a kid's life to disrupt the household, even a short sentence can break a family permanently. The study I'm linking shows that lifetime imprisonment risk for black men was 33% during the peak years of the WOD

1

Anonymous #8 11w

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10662370/

1

Anonymous OP 11w

“I want to be able to punch them, but they’re not allowed to punch back.”

8

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

Well I didn’t dispute the point about wealth because it’s not incorrect. And I agree, the outsourcing of industry devastated a lot of fathers’ ability to be sole providers for their households. The main difference that WoP welfare plays is that without it, you would just have two married working people providing for a household instead of a sole breadwinner, but with it dad moves out and stays unmarried so mom can collect an extra check.

1

Anonymous #8 11w

Over the last 20yrs, as aggressive mandatory minimums were rolled back, the national incarceration rate for Black men dropped by 44%, w lifetime risk dropping to 1 in 5. Guess what followed? The % of Black children living w single moms dropped from 75 down to 64%. But on the point of wealth if you look at low-income brackets across the board, single-headed households are common regardless of race

1

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

Okay, but even if peak at peak WoD, 33% of black men spent some time in prison at some point in their life, that still means 2/3 of black men never went to prison in their life, but 3/4 of black kids being raised without a father. So men being in prison is neither the majority nor even the plurality reason that they’re not marrying or taking part in raising their kids.

1

Anonymous #8 11w

If we control for socioeconomic status, liquid assets, and generational wealth, the statistical disparities in family structures between demographics are really similar. Overall the economy with deindustrialization, the feds being pretty blatantly racist, and the culture changing via the sexual revolution were more impactful than the welfare imo, which I’m not disputing as being a factor, just listing it as more of a secondary one than a primary one

1

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

It is the reason why *some* men are absent. But it’s not the big gamechanger that single-handedly fucked the country

1

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

Yes, single-headed households are up across the board, because war on poverty was not exclusive to black people, it affected all poor people. But it affected black people disproportionately, because black people were disproportionately living in higher poverty rate.

1

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

And yes, these statistics still illustrate my point, because dropping the black incarceration rate by nearly half, only lowered the absent father rate from 3/4, to still 2/3. So as I said, it’s a factor, it’s not The Number One factor.

1

Anonymous #8 11w

That assumes we’re looking at the WoD as the only factor, which we’re not, we’re looking at different factors working in a combinatorial way to result in the crisis. Culture isn’t a vacuum, things build up like a snowball rolling down a hill and people copy things in their environments. Poor white people have dealt with deindustrialization and the culture change too, and it shows in the data with single parent rates in that strata too. Black people being more poor (coming out of Jim Crow) and

1

Anonymous #8 11w

Having the gov succeed sicced on them to destroy the family unit will obviously result in worse circumstances. If a guy sprains an ankle and another guy breaks his leg, which one will take longer to heal and fully recover from? It’s a snowball storm event of many things that have to be untangled and will take time to improve as long as we as a society try to improve them

1

Anonymous #8 11w

For the 3/4 down to 2/3 of kids not having a father, that assumes there’s a 1:1 ratio of father to kid, when 1 father could easily be leaving 3 or 4 kids behind instead of just 1, explaining that metric. Also, mass incarceration wasn't spread out evenly, it often targeted specific urban blocks. If you pull a third of the young men out of a single neighborhood, you destroy the marriage market + economic baseline for that entire community, that hits households where the dad didn’t even go to jail

1

Anonymous #8 11w

Also do you agree with me then that welfare was not a driving factor of the situation then compared to the ones I listed? Bc my impression is that you were saying welfare was the main factor, which I disagree with, so that's why l've been saying all this. I am not here to defend LBJ’s record Imao

1

Anonymous OP 11w

“Waaaahhhh, I’m being victimized by jokes again!!! 😭😭😭😭”

1

Anonymous #7 11w

Ha, dark humor, cause black people. I get it!

-2

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

No, I disagree, because poverty itself does not inherently cause absent fatherhood. Families can be poor, and still have a father present. And we know this, because statistically, that used to be the case. Statistically, under peak Jim Crow era oppression in the first half of the 20th century, black people still had lower rates of broken homes than they do today.

1

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

What specifically flipped, which turned poverty into a driving factor of broken homes, which statistically lead to a skyrocket in absent fathers (ACROSS ALL RACES, but disproportionately affecting those with higher poverty rates) was the government modifying the welfare system to give additional money to single-parent households.

1

Anonymous benjamin.rush 11w

The very instant that the government created a financial incentive for parents to not marry or live together, the rate of broken homes began to sharply climb among populations with higher poverty rates. Which again, includes all races, but disproportionately affected the black population.

1