The reason that’s nonsense is that it isn’t a problem for the majority of blacks. We’re talking about the minority, why that is a larger share among blacks than it is among other racial groups, and why it exploded sometime around the 1970s.
This woman is not poorly educated and have 15 kids out of wedlock with multiple men who aren’t involved because of anything the white man did.
First of all, this is ignoring all the lynchings, the "whites only" schools and drinking fountains, things like the Tulsa Massacre, the systematic exclusion of African Americans from even voting until the 1960s, etc...
But then, as you say, along came the 1970s: a turning point in the economic and social fabric of American cities—especially for Black communities. Up until that time, even if they had not managed to make it into solid middle class, many Black Americans were part of the working class, often employed in manufacturing and industrial sectors that provided stable, if modest, incomes.
But beginning in the early 1970s, those jobs began to vanish due to deindustrialization, automation, and globalization. Factories closed or moved overseas, and the blue-collar work that had once provided a pathway to upward mobility disappeared—especially in urban centers where many Black families had settled during the Great Migration.
At the same time, American cities saw a wave of disinvestment. As white families moved to the suburbs—often aided by subsidized housing and highway programs—urban neighborhoods were left with shrinking tax bases. Public schools, transit systems, hospitals, and housing authorities deteriorated from underfunding. Black neighborhoods were particularly hard hit because they had been excluded from the wealth-building opportunities of the New Deal and postwar era, like GI Bill benefits and FHA-backed home loans. So just as the economy was transforming in ways that demanded higher levels of education and social capital, many Black communities were still reeling from the immediate aftermath of legal segregation, redlining, and unequal schooling.
Then came the drug war and Ronald Reagan talking about "Cadillac-driving welfare queens". In the 1980s and 1990s, harsh sentencing laws—including mandatory minimums and three-strikes policies—led to a massive surge in incarceration, especially for nonviolent drug offenses. Black men were disproportionately targeted, leaving many communities with a generation of fathers, brothers, and sons behind bars. The criminal justice system didn’t just punish crime—it restructured families, destabilized neighborhoods, and made reentry into the workforce nearly impossible for those with a record.
What resulted from this perfect storm wasn’t just poverty—it was concentrated disadvantage. That means entire neighborhoods where multiple systems failed at once: underfunded schools, unaffordable housing, inadequate healthcare, overpolicing, and little access to decent jobs. In these environments, what might seem like “bad decisions” from the outside—dropping out of school, early parenthood, underground economies—are often adaptive responses to scarcity, stress, learned helplessness, and instability. They're not cultural pathologies. They're what people do when the system gives them no safe or sustainable alternatives.
This is what gets missed when people ignore all this and just talk about "bad personal decision": the issue isn’t that Black culture or personal behavior suddenly deteriorated in the 1970s, or even before that. It’s that the entire structural support collapsed just as Black Americans were finally gaining formal legal equality. For generations, they had been denied the chance to build wealth and stability—then, just as the doors of opportunity had begun to open, the economy shifted, public support was pulled back, and punitive systems stepped in.
When people argue that poverty or family breakdown is about culture, they’re not just wrong—they’re
ignoring history. The real pathology isn’t in communities. It’s in the systems that set them up to fail.
