Nothing that’s happening now has anything to do with the structure of anyone’s family. And if you really want to get to what disrupted black families-which I suspect is what you’re really about here, since you clearly believe that all of this is just about kids being raised in one-parent homes and white supremacy and police violence bear no responsibility- the two things that disrupted black families were “redlining”-the official policy of denying insurance and credit to businesses in black, brown and working-class white neighborhoods that was put in place in the late Thirties, for some twisted reason, a policy which destroyed the economies of black and brown neighborhoods, followed by the pointless rules attached to the social programs which were implemented later which banned social assistance to two-parent families. Those policies left people in economically destroyed neighborhoods with no alternative but to have one parent-usually the father- leave the home so the kids wouldn’t starve to death. “Just getting a job” was not an option in those neighborhoods, since redlining had killed the jobs and since you can’t travel the country looking for other work when you are already broke. And it’s not legitimate to simply expect people not to get into relationships and have children simply because they are living in poverty caused by an intentional government decision to choke black, brown, and working-class white neighborhoods to death.

Redlining officially ended in 1968, but many black and brown neighborhoods have been left as economic dead zones-the same government that caused the poverty in those neighborhoods with redlining has refused to take any serious measures to revive the economies of those neighborhoods, and the white economic power structure has colluded in keeping those neighborhoods poor because it believes, for some reason, that it is not in the power structure’s interest for prosperous black, brown and working-class white neighborhoods to exist.

It’s bullshit to keep making sanctimonious comments about “individual responsibility” when talking about situations where the political and economic leadership of this country have gone out of their way to make sure that, for many, no display of “individual responsibility” will be rewarded. You can’t expect people to be responsible when they have no hope and no reason to think anything will ever get better.