But you kept linking unwed parenthood to welfare, which just isn't correct.
except that the absent black father is largely a myth.
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There’s a very pervasive myth about black fathers: that they’re more often than not absent from their children’s lives. But if you look at the data, it turns out the truth is far more complicated than the ugly stereotype suggests.
New York Times columnist
Charles Blow previously took on this myth. Blow started with the basis for much of the idea:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that showed 71.5 percent of black, non-Hispanic children in 2013 were born to unmarried women, compared with 29.3 percent of white, non-Hispanic children.
But as Josh Levs pointed out in his new book
All In, 2.5 million of 4.2 million black fathers — or about 59.5 percent — live with their children. Levs’s numbers suggest that it’s not true, as the CDC figures suggests, that 71.5 percent of black dads are absent from their homes — but rather that many of them are simply unmarried.
And when black fathers do live with their children, they’re just as, if not more, likely to be involved in their kids’ everyday lives. Blow cited
CDC data that showed black fathers are more likely than their white and Hispanic counterparts to feed, eat with, bathe, diaper, dress, play with, and read to their children on a daily basis. While some of the differences in the data aren’t statistically significant, the figures indicate that black dads are at least as likely to remain involved in their children’s lives as those of other races.