ArcaMax

Instead of looking only at race for answers to complicated issues like black family life, we need to look at issues of economic class and a drying up of opportunities that in the past helped people with no more than a high school diploma to achieve upward mobility, also known as the “American Dream.”

In 1965, Moynihan and others were understandably alarmed that 24% of black infants and 3.1% of white infants were born to single moms. Unfortunately, by 1990, the rate rose to 64% for black infants and 18% for whites — and continued to climb.

But by 2012, libertarian sociologist Charles Murray’s study of white American families found that the out-of-wedlock birthrate for white Americans was climbing higher than the rate for blacks that alarmed Moynihan in the mid-1960s.

Why? I tend to favor the explanation offered by William Julius Wilson in his aptly titled “When Work Disappears” in 1996 and “The Truly Disadvantaged” in 1987. He attributes the increase in out-of-wedlock births to a decline in the marriageability of black men due to a shortage of jobs for less educated men.

Since I was entering college when Moynihan’s report came out, Wilson’s findings hit home with me. I feel blessed to have had two hardworking, churchgoing parents at home — plus affordable state university tuition and well-paying summer jobs at the local steel mill. We might be poor, Dad used to say, “but we’re rich in spirit.”

But the erosion of good-paying factory jobs and affordable education opportunities has killed the spirit in many families of all colors. That development hit home for me when I read the bestselling Trump-era memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance. He also grew up in Middletown, Ohio, but almost three decades behind me and, as his recounting of family dysfunction details, faced a lot more family challenges than I did.

I later told Vance that his book enlightened me by showing how white families had been left struggling as much as black families by unemployment, an opioid abuse explosion and other structural changes in my hometown’s economy.

Fortunately for Vance, his grandparents stepped in to help put him on the right path, just when he needed it.

On this Father’s Day, I still don’t know all the answers to the challenges of fatherhood, but I’m glad I had a great dad.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.