What in the personal histories of these two women separates them so tragically and increasingly typically? We know there are several risk factors that correlate to poverty and limited opportunities for children. Lack of education, less than two parents actively engaged in raising them, and teen pregnancy are just a few. But what is the root cause, the thing that we find when we strip away all the demographic factors?Susan is correct to point to female choice, but the female choice she fails to mention is the significant one. Jessica Shairer chose to have sex with a black man. Chris Faulkner chose to have sex with a white man. Is this relevant to their divergent outcomes? Let's examine the statistics.
The white illegitimacy rate is 29 percent. A white woman who chooses a white man as her sexual partner and bears his child has a 71 percent chance of being married to him. The black illegitimacy rate is 72 percent. However, we can't simply assume that a white woman who chooses a black man as her sexual partner and allows him to impregnate her will have a 28 percent chance of being married to him because black men behave differently with white women than they do with black women.
Unfortunately, interracial births were previously so rare that the USA only began collecting data on them in 2003 and some states still do not break them out separately. However, because the CDC, which tracks birth statistics, utilizes a statistical technique called "bridging", which basically involves counting two half-black births as one black one, some social scientists have broken out the data utilizing "reverse bridging", which allows us to make the necessary calculations.
17 percent of births identified as black are actually interracial, which means that 16.7 percent of interracial black children are born to white mothers because the "reverse bridging proportion" of black children who are the product of a black father and a white mother is 98.2 percent; such children make up the vast majority of black-white interracial mixes. Since blacks represent 14.7 percent of all births, this means 2.45 percent of all US births are interracial ones born to white mothers and black fathers.
To this we compare the number of interracial marriages between white women and black men. 0.4 percent of all white marriages are to blacks, 64 percent of which involve black men married to white women. So, 0.258 percent of all white women are married to black men. If we compare the percentage of black/white interracial births to black/white interracial marriages, we see that the former (2.45%) outnumber the latter (0.26%) by a factor of 9.5 to 1. This means that the illegitimacy rate of interracial children born to white mothers and black fathers is 89.5 percent.
So, a white woman has a slightly better than 2 in 3 chance that the white father of her children will marry her. A black woman has a slightly worse than 1 in 3 chance that the black father of her children will marry her. But a white woman has barely a 1 in 10 chance that a black father of her children will marry her.
I leave it to the evo-psych fantasists to explain why this should be. I merely present the observable and statistical facts for your edification.
