Director, Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing

Public discourse involving the black family often writes men completely out of the picture.

On every measure, black children benefit from being raised by a father and mother.

There will be neither strong families nor bright futures for black children in America without a revival of marriage and restoration of the two-parent home.

In 2022, the District of Columbia launched Strong Families, Strong Futures, a $1.5 million pilot program to provide financial assistance to new and expecting low-income mothers. The program drew over 1,500 applications in less than a month. A lottery was used to select the 132 women who would receive $10,800—no strings attached—over the course of a year, paid out either as a lump sum or in monthly $900 installments.

The Washington Post published a story in 2024 about the program that featured several women who provided details about how they used the extra income. While D.C. has grown more racially diverse in recent years, the demographics of the program reflect the “Chocolate city” moniker that defined the nation’s capital for decades. According to the CDC, 77 percent of black children in D.C. are born to unmarried parents, while 93 percent of white children are born to married parents. Given the connection between poverty and family structure, it is no surprise that every mother in the Post profile was an unmarried black woman. It is also no surprise that the word “father” was only used twice in the entire article.

Public discourse involving the black family often writes men completely out of the picture. In the world of left-leaning politicians, scholars, and social commentators, marriage is obsolete and fathers are optional in low-income black neighborhoods. The phrase “stay-at-home mom” typically implies that a man—most often a woman’s husband—is working to provide for his family so she can focus on raising their children. Its use in the Post’s story in reference to a mother of three who was already on several welfare programs was perfectly consistent with that framework, except for one key difference: The “man” providing for the material needs of all the mothers in the program was the government.

Critics of the welfare state that exploded in size during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty would see a direct cash transfer program like Strong Families, Strong Futures as a driver of D.C.’s racial disparities in family structure. For Christina Cross, however, government aid for single mothers in the form of food, shelter, and cash is the type of policy intervention that black families, in particular, need.

>>> Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years

Cross is a professor of sociology at Harvard University and the author of Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families. Her book is a data-rich analysis of race, family structure, and inequality. Cross argues that family structure does not explain the black-white racial disparities in education and economic security because those gaps still exist when comparing black and white children who were raised in a home with both parents. The author draws on three data sources to make her arguments, including two longitudinal studies that track how children were raised and how they fared academically and economically as they moved from adolescence to adulthood. She finds that black children had lower grades, college admission rates, and incomes as adults than their white peers. They were also suspended and expelled more frequently and more likely to live in poverty.