Latino and African-American family structures

Steve Sailer:

For example, in America's black ghettos, patriarchy collapsed during the 1960s when the newly generous welfare system came to replace husbands as the prime provider for poor black mothers. Illegitimacy rates skyrocketed. Until recently, African-American fertility rates remained much higher than among the more patriarchal white Americans.

Similarly, fertility rates have stayed quite high in black Africa, even though African patriarchalism generally lacks the features Longman identifies as crucial: stigmatization of illegitimacy and high paternal investment in children. Women do most of the work in Africa (80 percent by one estimate) and thus tend have less reason to be faithful to their husbands (as evidenced by the AIDS epidemic there).

While the stereotype of African societies as "matriarchal" is highly misleading—men possess almost all the political power—women often engage in the covert rebellion of saddling their nominal husbands with cuckoo's egg children. But, since the baby's mother will do most of the work to provide for the child, the cuckolded husband tends to be more complacent than in more patriarchal parts of the world.

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of UC Davis wrote of African family structures in Mother Nature:

"Many fathers are only sporadically in residence with the mothers of their children; and fathers, when they are on the scene, may be unpredictable regarding which children they invest in, and how much. A substantial number of women conceive at a young age, often prior to marriage or formation of any stable relationship… relatively few fathers provide a great deal of care."

The increase in welfare payments during the 1960s allowed poor African-Americans, after a century of progress toward white patriarchal norms, to rapidly revert back to African family structures, with a consequent reversion toward African levels of social malaise.

In both the American inner city and in Africa, the quantity of children has been abundant, but the quality of upbringing has been low. Men, lacking assurance that they are the fathers, have less incentive to invest in educating and disciplining children. So young males are more likely to grow up to be violent and irresponsible. And the weary cycle spins on.

While Latinos in American enjoy better paternal investment than African-Americans, their illegitimacy rate is still double that of non-Hispanic whites. Some are assimilating toward white norms, but others seem to be assimilating toward African-American family structures, creating a new Latino underclass.

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Here's the CIA World Factbook's