When Reform Never Came: How Black Men Built a New Family Model

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So, today I want us to talk a little bit about how black men have decided to respond to a broken social contract, right? To a model that has not worked for them for some generations now. And in many respects, a lack of policy response, right? Because I've argued for years on this channel that most of the most poignant issues that black men have are really policy issues. The policy issues that have been, you know, kind of really absorbed into the black community and made part of the culture in many respects, and treated as if it is just the reality. But it doesn't have to be, and policies can change. But to the extent that they haven't, black men have responded very differently.

Now, this is important because right now, what I've heard a lot of, especially since the rise of BLM, is a lot of shaming of black men. Whether it's for not voting properly, not being active enough in the Democratic party, or, you know, just not hitting the streets with protest signs the way many black women have. And it's a difference in approach. People look at it as a failure on black men's part, but I don't believe that's what it is. I believe it's a difference in approach because if black men hit the streets with protest signs in large numbers, they become vulnerable to arrest in ways that women generally aren't. Every major protest that I've attended, when I've asked brothers who didn't go why they didn't, they talked about either having low-level warrants that could be exploited, and I myself actually had one at the time so I knew what they were talking about, or they talked about how many stories they had of black men getting arrested and having a difficult time getting out of jail, simply because the police could. So putting yourself up there, right, for law enforcement to toy with you just isn't a strategic move for black men. But we know black women don't go to prison in the same numbers. They don't go to jail in the same numbers. They're not arrested in the same numbers. So street protest works for them. It doesn't really work for us in the same way. Especially if you're supporting a family, you're barely holding on. The last thing you can afford to do is uproot all of that security, all those social expectations on you as a man to provide. You can uproot all of that by making the assumptions that many women activists make. And black men don't have the luxury to.

So what, what do black men do? They respond differently. Now, I have been involved in organizing ideas around what black men should protest for, which what they should, or I shouldn't say protest, what they should organize for. However, to the extent that those things haven't become a reality, those protest ideas, not protest ideas, excuse me, policy ideas that we've talked about in the black male political agenda, created alternatives, regardless, right? They've created alternatives that they're going to use regardless if we ever get the policies we want or not. And where we stand right now is black men are saying, "Look, we have a list of policy ideas. Unless you address them or something like them at core, unless you address our interests, we'll continue to use our own adaptations." And I'll tell you a little bit about those in a little bit.

But I've been sent this video by a number of people. Uh, and it's an interview with Delano Squires. I think I pronounced that properly. I'm not super familiar. I think I've seen him a couple of times. Um, but you know, we're going to delve into about about 10 or 11 minutes of it. Um, so let's check it out. Okay, that's weird. Hold on. Sound is not working at all. And there's no reason. Ah, okay. I think I found the issue. Let's back up a little bit. Let's try it again.

>> Marriage and birth rates. Delano Squires has researched the reasons behind those statistics. He is director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation. And he's also the author of the brand new book, The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable. Delano joins me now. Welcome, Delano.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> I want to dive into this very fast.

>> Wow.

>> So, let me start with with a few statistics, a few sobering statistics. So, today in America, about 70% of black children are born to unmarried parents. Um, and about half live with a single parent, particularly typically a single mom. Um, so what we have is a family structure where to be a black child who was born to and raised by your married biological parents through your 18th birthday is now the exception, not the norm. Um, this is this is the case as you go from state to city to city. And even where I am right here in Washington DC, uh, it's 77% of black children are born to unmarried parents. And what's interesting about that is particularly for a city that talks so much about racial equity, um, it's actually 93% of white children who are born to married parents. So that's a 70 percentage point gap. Um, and what I, one of the things that I talk about in the book is the fact that family structure um is one of the few areas and few social outcomes where progressives on the left have no interest in discussing, you know, racial disparities or racial inequities. So that that's part of what we see right now. And again, just because a child was born to parents doesn't mean that they don't have a father involved or any of those other things. But what it does mean is that there are millions of children starting life um within a family structure that does not provide the ideal environment for them to flourish.

>> Absolutely. And you argue that the black family instability is not simply an economic problem. Can you speak to that issue?

>> Yeah. So, so one of the things that I looked at is some of the data from um past decades and what you saw in 1960, the black poverty rate was about 55%. In that same year, about 80% of black children were born to married parents. So born within wedlock. You fast forward and what you see is almost a scissoring, a scissor effect where as poverty has gone down, the non-marital birth rate has gone up. So now poverty rate, black poverty rate is about 18% and as I said, close to 70% of black children are born to unmarried parents. So one of the things that I say in the book, I pose a, you know, a hypothetical question. I said, okay, who would be more likely to be married and have five children with his wife, um, a typical NBA player or NFL player today, or his great-great-grandfather who was a sharecropper um in the deep South in in the 1940s? And the answer

>> Yeah, that's a little strange. Uh, that's a bit of a strange comparison in a way. I mean, really, the agricultural lifestyle that we lived um prior to the Great Migration was very different, and you wouldn't necessarily have 12 kids once you transition to an urban environment post-World War II in the same kind of way you did then. And that wasn't necessarily rooted in the issues we're debating about now. That had a lot to do with economics. I mean, when you are sharecropping for a living, the more bodies you give, you can birth into the family, the more workers you have. And this is something you find around the world when it comes to agricultural cultures. But, you know, I'm not disagreeing with him wholly yet. I'm just saying that was a strange comparison. But let me continue.

>> But obviously is is the latter, which tells me that it's not purely a financial issue. Sure, economics are important. Um, I believe that particularly for a man to be ready for a family, he needs at the very least three things: One, stable source of legal income. Two, someplace to lay his head at night. And three, a stable mode of transportation. Um, but that economics is not the primary driver of why black family formation patterns look the way they do today.

>> And Delano, can you talk about the specific 1960s welfare policies um that did the most to incentivize single parent homes? I mean, that was the norm. I grew up as an African-American um woman under such a household.

>> Yeah. So, what you had in in the 1960s, particularly 1965, is President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, right? This is part of his war on poverty. And what you saw is welfare.

>> Now, I talked about some of these similar things in my book. And one of the things that I noticed is that many have labeled people like myself as conservatives simply because we make these kinds of arguments. And what I find interesting about that is they've successfully dismissed many of the arguments we make um as conservative and therefore unworthy of reflection outside of conservative spaces. But there are many of us who aren't, who don't label ourselves conservatives, but have agreements with a number of the arguments that you're kind of hearing here. Uh, even if for different reasons. But my point in bringing this up is I really don't think it's a conservative or or a liberal issue. I think there are many black men who have sought to move away from both and are really trying to redefine their politics outside of those two um polls, you know, and and construct their own. And I think Chris Rock put it best. He said, "On certain issues, I'm conservative. On certain issues, I'm liberal." You know what I mean? I mean, at the end of the day, but but here's the thing. Those are your labels. I don't particularly give a damn about what you consider what I'm saying, whether you consider it liberal or conservative. I'm making arguments in a way that I think would improve the quality of life for black men. I don't give a damn if it's considered conservative or liberal because I don't identify with either as an overarching marker for who I am. And I think you have more and more black men who are moving in this fashion away from these, you know, this kind of duality of one or the other and really looking at the question of what do we need? You know, and much like Ice Cube said, it really comes down to not only what do you need, once you can identify it, once you can solidify who's going to operate on your behalf with you and pushing for whatever agenda you've created, then the question becomes which people in power are willing to negotiate with me for my vote? That's where the question goes. So, you know, I just kind of wanted to to kind of push uh that that a little bit because I think it's a tired argument and I think it's one that's slowly becoming out of step in the last decade whether people outwardly acknowledge it or not. I think many black men are moving in a different direction.

>> Which was then AFDC for dependent children, Aid for Families with Dependent Children. What you saw is a program that previously was meant for um widows or or women whose husbands could not work for one reason or the other, transform into an open-ended cash transfer program that just existed in perpetuity.

>> I agree and I've made the argument that not only did this suggest a wealth transfer from the state to women, it's it was a wealth transfer largely for men, not only through the taxpayer system, but also through the family court when it came to alimony and child support from individual men and families. So in other words, it's not just the welfare dynamic, it's the state involvement in the family structure in and of itself. And what you saw from the 1950s onward um across race in many ways in in in the United States was a wealth transfer from many men to women. So the very notion of the independent woman comes about because there's a structural mechanism in place that allows her to live in a fashion where she doesn't have to depend on a man. And when she enters the workforce in the 1970s and literally doubles the American workforce to do so, she's still relying not only on men, often unnamed, but she's also relying on policies that ensure that government provide her a variety of safety nets. These things are happening. So the independent woman, I talk about this as almost like a Frankensteining of social networks because in order to replace that man, she's relied on everything from the state to even children becoming retirement plans to friends to boyfriends, you know, to corporations to nonprofits. She has a whole network. And I've talked about this before, even with men um who want to date her, right? Women say, "Well, you have to at least make what I'm making to date me." But the difference is he has to make that amount from his efforts. She can actually get that amount. Even if you're talking about welfare, between welfare and the help with her living situation and electricity and internet and, you know, she's able to get a lot of these resources that she doesn't have to work for. And in order for him to be considered worthy of her, he has to physically go make everything she gets on his own. And I think I've BGS and I calculated it a few years ago. So, it came to around $60,000 for many of the average women who were getting welfare and other resources um that he has to make on his own. And he has to work much harder to get it. And what we, I think we've had with that is some women who've completely dismissed men because they don't find it particularly interesting. You have what she has. You have to work much harder for it. You tend to be a little more conservative with how you spend it because you know what it takes to make it. And many have been kind of disqualified by women who didn't find them interesting enough. They were boring. Well, what did boring really mean? It meant that they had to go to work. It meant that they had to be conservative about their decisions because if they made a mistake in what they spent, there was no guaranteed check. They had to go to work and earn it back. You know, there were no, in other words, there were no safety nets for men. And I think this bifurcation in the black community has caused a huge disruption in how black men and women identify with each other because black men have no safety nets and they operate, you know, in a fashion where they know there's no guarantees about anything. Women on the other hand, whole different outlook, but let them continue.

>> You also saw the feminization of poverty and the racialization of poverty. Yes. Um, you have groups like the National Welfare Rights Organization that said, no, poverty is a woman's issue that disproportionately impacts black women. So you, you saw in some respects a recruitment onto the welfare roles of of black women, but with a very specific provision, which is that one, if you were married, you could not get access to this to this money, and even if you had a man in the house who was not your husband, you could not get access to this money. So it incentivized um household dynamics where you

>> He's absolutely right. And we also have to keep in mind that yes, the man in the house rule was dismantled formally, but there's also documentation to show that the practices that were used during the era of the man in the house rule are still applied to this day in many respects. They're still applied. It's one of the reasons that men don't have that same kind of access to these kinds of resources. So even though the formal policy, it doesn't mean the practice ended, and it still adversely affected men being able to get necessary resources when struggling and when in situations that require help. This is one of the reasons why it's much more common to see men on the street when you're talking about the homeless population than women. Women's homelessness presents itself as a woman sleeping on a girl's couch, even with her kids in tow. Men's homelessness is you're sleeping under a damn bridge and you're pushing a cart around. It's a very different dynamic. Or it could be a man with a job. You're talking about the working poor. He could have a job and be sleeping in his car. You know what I mean? Men's homelessness presents a little different. Women have facilities they can go to. Women and children. Men, much different. They're deprioritized.

>> You had an unmarried mom raising children on her own. That was the only way generally speaking that you could get access to welfare. Um, so what that, what that did in effect was displace men from their rightful, God-given role as providers for their home. And that set into motion a decades-long sort of pattern of family formation that moved men out of their primary vocations as husband and father and moved the government, both through elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, into that role as a substitute head of household.

>> And Delano, how do um modern and quote guaranteed income programs continue to exclude or diminish the role of fathers?

>> Yeah, this is something I'm starting to look at more. Um, in the book, particularly in chapter two, where I talk, I write about welfare, I start with a story about a program called Strong Family, Strong Futures, which is here in Washington DC. Uh, and I describe how the pilot program um gave $10,800 to new and expecting low-income moms. None of these moms were married. All of them were African-American. Mhm.

>> And the first person that the, when the Washington Post, when they did a story on it, the first person that they profiled was a woman they described as a 27-year-old stay-at-home mom, now with three kids. She had just had her third child. But then it said she was in a rent, she was in a subsidized apartment, two-bedroom apartment. She was on WIC, SNAP, and TANF, and now in this program. And then it hit me that the, when it said stay-at-home mom, the husband, quote unquote, that was being described um was actually the government. Now, she was one of the two, her story was one of the two instances in this Post article where the word father was used. One, it said the father of her three children went along when she took a $6,000 luxury trip to Florida. And the second is when it said that the fathers of one woman's children, um, that the fathers were not involved in their lives. And that was it.

>> So, and even in the announcement of the program itself, Strong Family, Strong Futures, it was all about providing funding to give moms, new moms, financial autonomy and independence. There was no mention of fathers whatsoever. And I've seen this in programs in Philadelphia, in Atlanta, and now. Um, one program, it's called the Bridge Project, which has different sites nationwide, talks about providing money to moms and their children, and it's all done under the guise of strengthening their families, but there's never any mention of the responsibility and role that men are to play as fathers to their children.

>> Wow.

>> And yeah, he's right about that. The, when we talk about the black community, the very idea of father has been really under attack for quite a while now. You know, uh, one of the more popular examples we give is, uh, when you had BLM and you used to go to their website and you see them talk about, you know, their basically an attack on the nuclear family. And when they would talk about what they considered the family to be, there were no men that were mentioned, especially father figures. It was all about non-traditional families with women and, you know, possibly LGBT and single mothers, and all of this was being raised up and celebrated. And you can see that culture not only in the protest culture of black of black America, but on the left in general, there's there's a kind of wide open acceptance of all kinds of new definitions of family. But one of the most consistent aspects of that idea is that you rarely hear father mentioned. Right now, much of what I've heard of Delano's work, he tends to lean into, uh, Christian narratives, and you have a lot of men that have kind of left the church partly for some of the reasons he's talking about. You know, in the last 30 years, you've seen a lot of men move from Christianity to other denominations, sometimes to Islam, sometimes to just being non-practicing, simply because the rules have shifted not only in society, but even in churches in terms of this whole question of gender, gender roles, gender relationships, whether it be under God or not, right? Feminism is actually reframing not only the church, but you know, how the word is even being determined or interpreted, and thus the practices of the church in and of itself. Many men have found that to be distasteful, right? And so they backed away from it, much like we could talk about in politics, right? The number of black men who are withdrawing from voting. I'm not saying it's all in response to this, but I find it to be an interesting correlation to see black men who are not necessarily going right-wing, but they're voting for the couch. They're abstaining. They're, they're, uh, you know, they're voting, what is it? Uh, lower on the ballot, but they're abstaining from voting for the presidential elections. Men are having all kinds of responses to their own dismissal from the black family as subsidized by the state. But what we've also been seeing happening in the last year and a half is the state withdrawing from this practice of subsidizing these ideas. The very money that's been behind this is gone. That's the thing. And it wasn't solely under Trump. The money was gone under Biden. But Trump enacted policies that began to, uh, diminish the resources that were usually extended to these very populations that he's talking about. And so the question becomes, what happens to the black family as all the safety nets that have been in place for more than a half century are taken down? What happens at that point as men are already walking out the door? And that's why this, this particular video is called "When Reform Never Came: How Black Men Built a New Family Model." Black men are adapting to these things. We're going to talk about how in a minute, but I just want to give him a chance to finish. But, you know, we're really looking at the ways black men are responding to these things.

>> Oh, I, I know because I've seen interviews you've done that you get a lot of pushback

>> um from progressive black leaders

>> in politics and media, and and they remain silent, uh, for the most part on the breakdown of the black family. Why is that?

>> I think quite simply, family formation is one of the few areas that they cannot blame on systemic racism, and their entire framework for activism is built on that.

>> The, the way I put it is this. They cast all of the problems facing black America as either the result of inequitable resource distribution or systemic racism. Which is why all of their solutions fall into one of two categories: bigger government or better white people. Now, when it comes to forming families, they don't, they don't have that option. They can't blame it on, you know, lack of resources or systemic racism. Um, and because addressing this issue would require them taking some sense of accountability and responsibility for repairing the damage that's been done over the last 60 years of bad policy and anti-family values. So I think they would rather ignore this issue because to many of them, talking about the decline in marriage and the breakdown of the black family feels too much like airing dirty laundry.

>> So they would rather ignore it um and and focus on on everything else. So part of the reason I wrote the book is to, to call these leaders, not call them out in a sense of combative, um, but but to say, look, you as leaders, you have a responsibility. And when the NAACP is willing to invest resources, to partner with Hollywood, quite frankly, B and C-list actors to quote unquote take responsibility for racism, but they won't partner with, uh, black actors or or musicians or entertainers or people of, you know, public note to take responsibility for our families, that's when I have a problem. So

>> I'm not sure who the B and C-list actors he's referring to are. Um, let me know in the comments section if you're a little more familiar with that. But I see what he's saying in one respect. So there's a dichotomy of responses to the black family issue, and he, you know, he's pointing out on the left, there's a call for bigger government and there's a call to address racism. On the right, uh, even amongst the black male right who are looking at this issue of the black family, it usually comes down to, uh, individual or family responsibility and accountability and so on and so forth. My issue, as one who is not beholden to either party, is that I can see a need to call all of those into question. It's not an either/or to me. I do think the state was responsible for what happened to the black family on a certain level, and they need to be, they need to be responsible or held responsible for participating in the repair of it or accepting the repercussions that come with it. Right? I do think there's an issue with, uh, white supremacy. I'm not going to discount that altogether. But at the same time, I do think there's a role that not only do, uh, black folk in particular, but the black family, need to play in their own healing. And, you know, for us, a lot of us in this circle of YouTube, black women have a very particular responsibility in terms of what they've done historically and what needs to be owned up to now. But nobody can call black women into, you know, any kind of accountability on the left, right? And the right is a little vague on, you know, what that personal accountability means. We're talking specifically about all of those things being in the equation, as well as holding black women accountable if there's going to be any healing. I mean, black men have been held accountable for decades. There's never been a point, I'm 51. There's never been a point in my lifetime where I haven't heard black men being held accountable in the black community and by the larger society. So, when we talk about black accountability, black men have always been held accountable. Guess who hasn't? Guess who hasn't been dragged out in public in the same kind of way and held responsible? Guess who had access to media that went all around the world for the last 30, 40 years and told everybody that black men were at fault and made films that depicted the most, the most horrible situations possible to put at black men's feet, but at the same time never positioned themselves for any kind of accountability for where the black family is. So, yeah, I don't have a problem with the, the kind of right-wing, you know, self-accountability argument, but I take, I come at it a little differently. Um, I think it needs to be something that's particularly targeted um at how black women have engaged this process and not been held accountable. I would doubt he's in disagreement with that, but of course, he approaches it from a slightly different vantage point. At the end of the day, my understanding is he's right-wing. As for me, I'm neither. Let him continue. It's high time that they be called to account and be called to explain why family structure is the one area of racial disparity that they will not touch.

>> Wow. Can you talk about, you know, when it comes to the collapse of marriage in the black community, about the widespread ripple effects in the Christian community and beyond?

>> Okay, I'm going to stop it here because um I'm not going to get into the whole, I mean, there's another 10 minutes to this, I think. Uh, what is it? Uh, yeah, it's about another 10 minutes and it's really a Christian argument. Um, which is obviously directed toward Christians, and since that's not the nature of the conversation I'm having in this show, it kind of doesn't behoove me to continue with that. Um, I will say I've observed, and my father was a Christian pastor. So I've observed, uh, the kind of, uh, situation in the black church as it relates to men, women, uh, family formation, coupling, dating, and mating. And a lot of it has been falling apart. It's one of the reasons I took to Kevin very early because he actually was one of the few people willing to talk about, uh, the kind of feminization of the Christian church. Not only down to pastors trying to appease large populations of women in the church, but even down to how the, how the word was actually interpreted along feminist lines, redefining the gender roles, uh, of the church. You know what I mean? And the response many men had, which was to walk away. You know, I remember the first show Kevin talked about feminism in the church. I called my father and asked him about it, and we had like a two-hour conversation about it because he was saying that had been going on for the longest. Um, and you saw the shifts of feminism from prosperity gospel all the way into, you know, the redefining of gender roles regardless of the text, and how many men responded by leaving, you know. So, I can appreciate that there's a lot to be discussed there, but as that's not what this show is about, I'm kind of ending it there.

But what I think is important about what we just heard is this idea of the vanishing black family, which is what this is called, "The Vanishing Black Family," a conversation with Delano Squires on CBN News, right? And this conversation about the vanishing black family is important to what I'm talking about because I'm looking at black men's responses to it. Now, in order to get to that, I wanted to also talk about, um, what some of the issues were that the family is dealing with. You know, some of it is across race, but even when it's a cross-race, it still has a different impact on black men. Um, there's a long-standing set of issues alongside, uh, you know, lower, uh, or higher poverty levels, lower wealth levels that has an impact on the black community. But let's look at some of these issues, right? The first one deals with paternity fraud. Check this out. I got this comment saying that in states where DNA testing became mandatory for child support, nearly half the men tested were not the father. I had to look into that. Here's what we actually know. Georgia passed a law in 2015 making DNA testing mandatory in all new child support cases where paternity had not been legally established. An acknowledgement of paternity is a legal establishment. Their own data showed approximately 20% of men ordered to pay child support were not the biological father. Nationally, paternity testing labs report that between 28 and 32% of men who take paternity tests are not the father. In 2025, that number climbed to nearly 40%. Right now, Missouri is pushing it even further. Representative Tonna Rush introduced House Bill 3197, which would require mandatory DNA paternity testing at the time of birth for every child born in Missouri. No assumption, no guessing, confirmed from day one. The bill also includes a fund to cover the cost so no family is priced out. Men have been ordered to pay child support for children that DNA later proved was not theirs, and courts have still refused to remove that obligation. Georgia got it right. Missouri is fighting for it now. This should be the standard in every single state. If you agree, comment below and tell me what state you're in because this fight is on a state-by-state basis. And we need mandatory DNA testing in every single state because no child should grow up without knowing who their father is. And no father should grow up not knowing whether or not a child is biologically his.

Now, this is one of those issues I've been talking about for the longest, and I said this before, DNA is redefining family wholeheartedly because you actually have, in some respects, generations of um of lies, basically, about who was related to who, right? So, what you have now is this kind of unraveling, and it is destroying certain families. However, this has usually worked um to the detriment of men. But now that men are starting to find out before they have to invest, before they're forced to invest and pay for children that aren't theirs in a court of law, they're now able to do so without having to go through that process. And now you have some states, as she was pointing out, that are actually helping in this process by forcing, uh, DNA testing at birth. Because you have women that are actually claiming, uh, that if you know, I actually have it on my Facebook page from a couple weeks ago. You had a woman saying, "If my husband gets a DNA test on our newborn child, I'm leaving. I'm divorcing him right on the spot." And you have a lot of women that are threatening men in that kind of way, right? Not every man is in a position to deal with that as much as we like to say they should be, right? But if you do it, if it's DNA testing by at birth and it's the law, it's required. This allows men to be able to find out the truth without having to go through the particular battles. I mean, hell, to be truthful, if I pushed that, you know, when my son was born, it would have been both sides of the family, hers and mine, that would have attacked me. And not everybody's in a situation where they can deal with that directly. I didn't even have the wherewithal at that time to consider those ideas. But I think it's a better idea to make sure that, you know, each man doesn't have to have a complete awareness about these issues in order to benefit from finding out the truth of his own child's paternity. Right? This has been something that women have enjoyed for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands. Men have always had to accept whatever she said and go with that. So ultimately, what I'm talking about here is unchecked paternity fraud. And this is one of the things that is a barrier to families, to the black family in particular, because our numbers tend to be, uh, higher in terms of that, at least as far as Jamaica and Nigeria are concerned in regard to that. But at the end of the day, it's something that, uh, I think, you know, black men need in many respects and should get. But this is one of the impediments that is helping to contribute to the vanishing of the black family because again, men are adapting to this being the norm. And until DNA testing is confirmed, you know, across the board, you have many men that are opting out entirely.

Let's check out the next option. This one deals with, um, anyway, well, I'll show it to you and explain it to you afterwards. Here we go.

>> I'll never forget this case. It was heartbreak. There was this like, I think he was 10. Yeah. 10-year-old little boy, and he used to say to his dad, "When we, when you drop me off after our visit, can we stop before we turn onto Mom's street and I'll give you a hug and I'll tell you I love you." Because then when we get to the house, I'm going to get out of the car and yell that I hate you and I never want to see you again, and I'm going to run up to Mom's because this kid at 10 had figured out that if he let Mom know he loved Dad, that Mom would be mad at him and she would be cold to him. And he also knew that his father loved him so much that he could do that and yell at him, and he would understand. Like. And so they had this routine for two years where they would pull up and get out of the car, and he'd hug him and he'd tell him he loved him, and then he'd get back in the car and he'd pull up to the house, and the kid would get out and slam the door and yell, "I hate you. I never want to see you again," and run back up to Mom's, and Mom would like shuffle them in. "My poor baby." Like, what do you think that does to a kid? Like, what do you think that does? What effect do you think that has on a kid? Like, how could you create conditions like that and claim you love that kid? But the problem is, we have a system that is ill-equipped to deal with that.

>> Yeah. Yeah. What you're looking at there in that segment is an example of what I call men's relationship emotional labor. And in this context, it was the son, the child of the woman who is performing emotional labor for her. He's playing a role in the family that he should not have to play. That's a role that is really designed for grown men, intimate, you know, men in her life, whether it's a boyfriend, husband, whatever it is. But it's a role that a child, a boy has to play with his mother because she's not emotionally regulating herself. And she will punish him if he doesn't do it. So he's had to create this entire ruse and take the responsibility of managing his own mother's emotions for her in order to make it, you know, endurable for him to live there. This is ridiculous. But this type of emotional labor, these types of breaks from traditional gender roles, and in this context, when I talk about gender roles, I'm actually including the roles of children in the family structure, gendered and family roles, right? He's supposed to be the son whose main responsibility is learning, growing, going to school, so on and so forth. That should be his main responsibility, and respecting both of his parents, but he has an additional responsibility of managing his mother's emotions so that she won't be cruel to him. This is a break from traditionality in a way we rarely talk about, if at all. I don't know if I've ever heard anybody talk about it as formally, but this kind of break from what I'm calling a family gender role, a traditional role for a little boy, is devastating and it's dysfunctional and it will have long-term repercussions over time because he should be shielded from this. And the father, it sounds like, would help to shield him from it, but it's primarily the mother who's not thinking about any of these things at all. The only thing she's thinking about is her own feelings. And this is a detrimental position to put a child in. But at the end of the day, this break from traditionality in this sense is another contributing factor to why many black men have been adapting in the way they have. Because if you're going to tell men they have no significant role as fathers, if you're going to break from traditionality in that respect, if you're going to bring government and other institutions in to replace his standing in the family, if you're going to tell, and we've seen this in popular mainstream culture, right? The diminishing value of the father in general. I mean, all we need really is strong mothers and maybe even a network of mothers, but fathers are not considered essential in casual conversation in mainstream culture. They are to be replaced and not to be thought about, right? And as long as this is the case, men have to fight an uphill battle to participate in families on equal standing, right? And this is something, I mean, especially when you have no serious decision-making power, when at the end of the day, if you decide on something for the child's benefit that goes against what the mother wants, or if she's just angry at you and decides to enact her vengeance by disagreeing with you in terms of whatever decision you make, even if it's a good decision on behalf of the children, she has the, usually she has the power of the court on her behalf. She has the power of custody on her behalf. This is why we advocate over here in the black male political agenda for a default 50-50 custody. But as long as women have a sway over who the child belongs to, who gets to see the child, whether or not the man can, the father can even be in the family, as long as that's the standard and it's not something that's immediately available to be changed and and and in policy, men are going to adapt in their own way. This is one of these things that we're starting to see happen.

Let's look at another example. Now, this one's going to hit you a little strange. This is WBBJ, um, right? And you can find this one online pretty easily. The title is "Mom Attempts to Run Over Students with Car After Her Daughter Was Accused of Being a Bully, Police Say." I ran across this a little while ago. This was dated May 15th, 2026. See the picture of the mother there. Name is Jasmine Dunmars. Faces charges for aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and vandalism. Right. Uh, this is a short one. This is Memphis, Tennessee. A mother in Tennessee is accused of attempting to run over high school students during a school fight. The Memphis Police Department said officers responded April 21st to an assault call at Melrose High School. According to an affidavit, a mother and her three daughters arrived on campus to attend a parent-teacher meeting for the school band. Now, notice you don't see anything about a father being called in. Right after the meeting, police said that the mother approached another parent, later identified as the suspect, Jasmine Dunmar, to have a conversation. The affidavit said that the mother confronted Dunmar and accused Dunmar's child of being a bully. The altercation turned physical when Dunmar's daughter began to fight another student. During the fight, police said Dunmar ran up to a student and began hitting them. She then entered her vehicle and accelerated, ramming into the other parent's passenger side door. After ramming the other parent's car, police said that Dunmar reversed and attempted to run over the fighting students. The students jumped out of the way, and Dunmar rammed the parent's car one more time before leaving the scene. She was taken into custody and booked into jail Friday. She faces charges of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and vandalism. Right? I remember parents like this even when I was a kid, although it's a little more frequent now than it was, you know, at least where I was. I didn't see this that often. Right? But part of why I bring this up is that, you know, black men's withdrawal from dealing with these kinds of, um, these kinds of people, these kinds of women. And slowly, I believe you're starting to see fewer black men of note who are willing to put up with this kind of behavior. You know, I would like to say at some point that black men will stop reproducing with women that act this kind of way, but we'll see about that. But in the, I will say at the same time, I am seeing a growing number of men who are starting to become more conscientious about who they form families with. Now, you notice in this scenario for either the other woman or her, Dunmar, did you see any men mentioned? Any family mentioned? Or, you know, husbands in that regard, right? Obviously, they've had dealings with men as they have children, but you didn't hear any fathers being brought into the equation to kind of smooth any of this out. And I think you have a growing population of men that are withdrawing from having to deal with this, having to negotiate with this kind of person over your own kids' well-being. Right? I'm finding more and more black men are tired of it, you know, and you got to deal with the whole, you know, culture in the black community of "who going to check me, boo?" Because that's the reality. Once you've reproduced with the wrong person, you are essentially dealing with "who going to check me?" Because who holds her accountable? Who does she have to be accountable to? You generally don't find very many that seem to have to be. So, another

reason that you can talk about the dismantling or the diminishing of the black family, uh, because you have men who are looking at this type of behavior in too many contexts. I've seen at least six or seven videos this week, you know, fighting in McDonald's, fighting on the street, bus stops. I mean, it's just, it's gotten to a point where it's a common thing. Nobody's surprised to be to see groups of women fighting on on video anymore. But also, as it relates to their children and having no men to call any of this into question on behalf of the children, but they have, they don't have to have men. And this goes back to some of the things that Delena was even talking about, the exclusion of men and the participation of the state in doing so. And as long as men can be easily excluded, these kinds of situations can go unabated.

Now, let's check another one. This one's, this one deals basically with marriage altogether. You know, here we go.

"Why do men keep getting married?"

I don't know. I mean, I honestly, like these days, I don't know what's in it for a man. Like there's no upside in my mind for a man to get married. It doesn't create faithfulness on the part of a woman. It doesn't create security in terms of finances for him. It doesn't create security in terms of his kids going forward if they actually go through a divorce. Like, what's the upside here? Somebody explain it to me.

Marriage is just about property. Sooner or later, you're going to divvy it up. You'll cut your losses. You'll be able to go back, get a job, rebuild, buy stuff. Having a child with the wrong person is a lifelong agony. I really want to caution men to be very, very careful in who they choose to have a child with because I see a lot of cases in dad's law school where people are having to deal with borderline personalities. It's agonizing for the mom. It's agonizing for the dad. And most of all, it's agonizing for the child.

All right, very short clip, but raises some important questions about marriage, especially after what we just got through talking about in the last article I brought to bear. But here's the thing. Uh, fundamentally, what we're talking about here is that black men have been looking at all these kinds of situations. The quality of marriage, the uh, the types of women available to them, the types of treatment they've gotten from women that they've had children with and married in the past. Uh, you know, the roles that their children, especially their sons, are forced to play to emotionally manage grown women. Um, DNA testing and paternity fraud, really paternity fraud. Uh, in the context of this notion of the vanishing black family, men have been seeing these kinds of issues for years and many more. These are not the only issues, but for a short video, I just brought up a few just so we could have something on the table to look at, right? But they started to adapt. Many of these men have started to adapt, you know, to this dynamic. And it's really in essence a response to what I consider an asymmetrical gender policy and strategic demographic of uh uh demographic underdevelopment. Meaning, um, there's been a long-standing attack as far as I'm concerned on black men. Uh, black men have been targeted, um, you know, as the boogeyman in society, and so we've always had an extra eye on us. There's always been a willingness to uh, trump charges up against black men. And of course, there are black men that participate, uh, in the the the illegality that, uh, you know, may bring them some kind of incarceration or whatnot. But as I've showed, especially with the Innocence Project, over 50% of those they've exonerated from prison have been black men falsely accused and falsely charged and given incredibly long sentences for crimes they didn't commit. This is the plot. This, I mean, excuse me, this is the plight of black male life.

So, when you talk about the family, what I consider the asymmetrical gender policies that we're talking about are the policies that benefit women, especially in regard to family court. And of course, issues of abuse, right? The way that tends to be used against men and black men most particularly, right? In many ways, we we were often considered the face of domestic violence, even when we were being abused in higher numbers than black women. Shout out to Tommy Curry and The Man Not. If you're not familiar with that, look up in that text when he talks about the 1980s and some sprinkling in the 70s where black men found themselves having experiencing higher rates of abuse than black women. But that's not the public conversation and the mainstream society doesn't acknowledge that at all because the going stereotype is black men are monsters. Right? So the policies that benefited women were seen as somehow just and natural, but they really created an asymmetrical context where men had to suffer more often than not when they had kids or tried to marry and have traditional families. And women were able to get resources in ways that men couldn't. And men finally began to grow tired of it in increasing numbers. And men kind of decided that if they can't have, you know, the policy changes that they need, you know, like I said, we're pushing for these things with the black male political agenda, but to the extent that they can't make those things happen at the snap of a finger, they've substituted u their own adaptations to address it.

Now, obviously, the first one is this whole question of Passport Bros. And I think what you see with uh MTR and his uh, you know, recent push to go to Thailand from Atlanta, if those of you aren't familiar with MTR is popular uh YouTuber, black male who has recently decided to move to Thailand. Not only, and and this is where I I agree with him. He's he's trying to break the stereotypes of passport bros just seeking out prostitutes. And he's talking about passport bro life really being a complete reframing of the black male experience in a context where he's not held as the villain, you know, preemptively. A whole red redefining of black male life, especially as it relates to the possibility of uh forming families, having relationships, whatever relationships they are. And mind you, I don't have a problem with men looking for sex if that's all they want. There should be nothing wrong with that. I don't give a damn about the shaming uh practices of other demographics. Men are perfectly free to look for whatever quality of life they want and whatever they value. I have no problem with that whatsoever. Yet and still, you have black men that have gone Passport Bro, that have gone international. And many are starting to support NTR and redefining the public image of Passport Bro. But I should also say Passport Bro was never something that was that was designed to be uh to uphold or or endure public scrutiny. Public scrutiny was irrelevant. Passport bro was about black men especially and at first redefining their lives and finding freedom elsewhere. Whatever that meant to them, whether it meant they were seeking out sex or whether or whether it meant they were looking to have children with wives that they just, you know, wouldn't bring back to the US, whatever that meant. But that's become one of the viable strategies. And I'm pointing out about five, you know. So you have, you know, the the the push to leave the boundaries of the United States and and establish new definitions of of of freedom and an improved quality of life elsewhere.

You have monkhood where I've seen young men as as young as 12 now recently who have just checked out from even dealing with girls and women. And this is before they really even started dealing with them. Some have watched, you know, and contrary to popular perception, it's not because they were watching uh the manosphere and they hated women. They were watching their parents. They were watching uh, you know, situations in society. They were looking at what was expected of men and what men got in return and they decided that it wasn't worth the effort. Right?

You got number three. You got non-marital long-term relationships. Right? Pair bonding but without marriage specifically so they didn't have to go through uh the family courts and deal with the likely judgments that uh would be brought to bear that they would have to endure, right? So you have that, you know, you have people who are looking for long-term relationships. You know, you have some who are looking, this is number four, short-term relationships, whether it's short-term or sexual, but they're very clear on the kinds of relationships they're looking for, and this is within the boundaries the US or outside of it. You have men who have defined what types of relationships they want. But I will tell you this, out of three and four, the non-marital long-term relationships or short-term/sexual relationships, I both of them are non-marital. And that's not an accident. That's not a coincidence. They're non-marital for a reason because black men have their own set of politics. They're just not politics that conform to either right-wing or left-wing notion, you know, sensibilities because on the on the left wing, they want you to talk about marriage. They want you to invest in women. Even even though you have many women that are, you know, saying they don't want to get married, they still want men to pursue in line with that and accept non-traditional family structures if marriage is not on the table. On the right, well, I should say the left is less concerned with marriage than the right, but to the extent that they are, they want men to accept non-traditional dynamics, non-traditional relationships that diminish the role of fathers and men. On the right, they are pretty much for the traditional marriage framework. But that doesn't work for many black men because we understand what's happening in courts. We understand what's happening in the family court. And it's not a situation that most men want to engage in. It's like putting your head in a chopping block, right? So whether you have to endure watching your child uh be, you know, you not being able to have access to your child, the woman you were with get custody of the child and then subject to ch the child to all kinds of non-traditional family structures that you don't approve of, which is something the left would more so advocate for, or the traditional nuclear family structure, which involves marriage, but doesn't account for what family courts do to you. You have black men and men across race that are starting with to withdraw from both the right and the left's ideologies around family formation.

And lastly, number five, you have the employment of SMV as a standard for approaching relationships of any sort, right? Sexual marketplace value. You have men learning about this concept, assortative mating. They're looking at, um, you know, what qualities they want to define because the I grew up in an era where men didn't have standards that we uh had thought about and listed out, especially the way women did. If any and if anything, if you tried to, women would shame you because men were not allowed to have standards, only women could, you know, so women developed this crass network or a crass list of standards, I should say, right? Where he had to make over six figures, even if nobody, if she's never met anybody who made six figures, she would still require it. Nobody in her family has ever made six figures, she'd still require it. She could have four kids with three different men and still require that you have six figures, right? That you had to be over six feet tall, that you had to own property and cars and you had to take her on trips around the world and, you know, all these crazy standards. Men never had any of those. But with uh the kind of, um, you know, pushing for some type of sexual marketplace value understanding, what men came to get is uh their value in the system. They started to understand, they started to look at, uh, you know, sexual dynamics between men and women in a more systemic way. And they started to understand, okay, I get it. Younger men without resources, they may get sex, but they're usually not high on the list in terms of being prioritized by women. Of course, handsome men get more attention than not, but still on a larger scale, on a macro scale, they they kind of understood it. They understood, you know, slightly older men in the 30s from 40s who were high earning, got more attention, right? Got more attention from the kinds of women they wanted. They understood that younger women were more sought after than older women. But they understood that younger men were less sought after than older men that had their [ __ ] together. They started to understand large-scale patterns of how men and women negotiate desire and they started to act accordingly. Now, this wasn't something that was available to young men when I was a kid. I was never introduced to these ideas. Even though we saw them early, we saw even as young as middle school, the middle school girls were dating the high school boys. High school girls were dating college boys. College women were dating men who were out there and had careers and owned homes and had expensive cars. You could sit next to her in class. You could be in a dorm right across from her. But much of the time, the women you wanted sought out the men they could get who had more than you did. And by the time you got something, you often became the man that dated a younger woman who would skate out on the men her age to get with you. But the point is, we understood that much, but we didn't see it systemically. And now that sexual marketplace value has become more common, more easily accessible. You can look it up on your phone and understand it. I'm meeting young men, 13 years old, who are starting to understand these large-scale macro patterns as it relates to what men and women want and what they seek after.

So that said, as men start to adapt and have adapted in the five ways that I pointed out, and please feel free to add any more in the comment section that you know of, men are starting to push away from the family as we understand it. And inadvertently, they are recreating black families in a whole new way, often in with an international uh tinge to it, looking to go outside of the the the social and cultural boundaries of the West and reframing what the black what the actual black family looks like. So it's not the vanishment the vanishing of the black family, but there is a redefinition that's happening that's far more internationally informed and it's still and it's growing. It's growing. So anyway, want to hear your thoughts about it. Let me know. And I look forward to hearing from you in the comment section. Peace.