Well, I hate to speak the obvious but
IT'S A NUMBERS GAME! This is why so many Black families have no father in the home so this leads to poverty and very often .. these children fail in life.

Black women are the least married women in America.

What happen is - girls are raised by Black mothers alone because there simply are not enough Black men in the country. This has been a problem for at least the last couple of generations.
- The ratio of Black women to Black men is 2 to 1. (Why? who knows but it has to be biological, so in terms of finding a partner - Black women ... start off in the hole.)
- Then because Black people are so close to poverty or are living in poverty - within that group of Black men, a lot of them end up in gangs, crime, drugs - which leads to pre-mature DEATH ... but mainly prison takes them off the streets for good. (
Hey, 13.1 % of the population is Black but 40% of the prisons are Black!) A loooot of Black men are screwed up in the head so they land in prison.

Why? No strong father or male role model in the home to lead then in the right direction
.
- Then there are the Black men that are not in prison (yet) but they are involved in illegal activities, drugs, gangs etc .. wasting their lives and making babies that they will never support - so then another generation of Black kids grow up without a father

and they will repeat this all too familiar pattern.
- From what remains if the Black men - (the ones that are off drugs and not involved in illegal activties) and are actually EMPLOYEED - you have Black guys that are openly gay, or only date White women ... okay that's another thing.
-
So in the end you are left a very small pool of men from which a Black woman can choose a partner and raise 'a strong Black family'!

- And by the time those guys reach 30 or so they have figured out that they are scarce commodity so ... they just go from girl to girl - dropping babies and not committing to any of them - because they don't have to! The women are willing to have sex with them anyway so .. what would be their motivation to stick with the one woman forever?
OF COURSE there men like Barack Obama
that will marry and have JUST THE ONE family - but these men are scarce as hen's teeth.
So yes, at this moment 71% of Black America women are raising a child without a husband/partner/ father figure in the home. This is indeed destructive for the Black community because children DO need a mother and a father in the home.. for many, many reasons like stability. Of course, lot of Black kids manage okay because their mother sacrifices everything in order to fill BOTH roles. But who want to work that hard?
There simply are not enough Black men to go around so it's up to Black women to get real. Stop sleeping with Black men (avoiding pregnancy) or stay on the pill etc so you don't bring children into this world when in the end you will just have a HARD LIFE of scraping to feed them with no partner in the home .. so tha yes, they are at risk of failing life.
Black women also need to stop making everything so flipping political .. so that they CAN ONLY partner with Black men. Geesh Black men don't feel this way - they marry interracially at a rate of over 2 times the number of Black women marrying interracially. Duh! They get what they want - but then Black women are left on the curb still waiting on the mythical 'Good Black Man'.

The good black man exists but there are not enough of them to go around. That is the problem.
THIS IS A HUGE mistake ... because it can only lead to either never having a committed partner, 'sharing' a man

or waiting until the first wife leaves or dies so they can finally get married at the ripe old age of 45!
Crazy.
Black people need to stop waiting on something that is simply never gonna happen. Never. Meaning .. waiting on White people to give you BACK something (like sekf - esteem) that their ancestors took took from us. Nevvvvver gonna happen. Wasted effort. MOVE ON! You have to take it back for yourself.
So Black women need to taking control of the situation and source NON BLACK partners or else this situation will never be resolved.
(I can't speak on the Mexican families as their situation is altogether .. different.)

Edited by Becky - Dec 11 2012 at 5:15pm