Larry Elder: Black America Needs Fathers

POWERFUL VIDEO: A police officer and a protestor teach two young men that there is a better way than rioting.

Larry Elder suggests that Black America needs fathers and good role models. Broken homes lead to broken communities he claims.

A meme on social media refutes these sentiments with a “We’ll have daddy at home when you stop killing our daddies” slogan suggesting that the reasons black children are raised in solo homes is because a concerted nationwide campaign of black murders by police officers prevents it.

And while statistics definitely support the tragic assertion that black people are killed at a greater rate per capita than whites, it is thankfully, nowhere near the number of black children living in a single parent home.

Statistic: Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista

More than half (58%) of black children are living with an unmarried parent – 47% with a solo mom according to this research from Pew. Fortunately for society, there are many more black children living with mom than are slaughtered by police. But sadly, whether through institutional racism or not, the numbers of black youth in trouble with the authorities is higher than the number for whites.

According to The Sentencing Project juvenile facilities, including 1,800 residential treatment centers, detention centers, training schools, and juvenile jails and prisons held 48,043 youth as of October 2015. Forty-four percent of these youth were African American, despite the fact that African Americans comprise only 16 percent of all youth in the United States. African American youth are more likely to be in custody than white youth in every state but one, Hawaii.

Between 2001 and 2015, overall juvenile placements fell by 54 percent. However, white youth placements have declined faster than black youth placements, resulting in a worsening of already significant racial disparity.

Nationally, the youth rate of incarceration was 152 per 100,000. Black youth placement rate was 433 per 100,000, compared to a white youth placement rate of 86 per 100,000.

If having a dad at home could fix this problem of inequality we should all pray that it happens. America needs to end this.