Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families
By Christina Cross
Harvard University Press, 256 pages, $29.95
In 2022, the District of Columbia launched Strong Families, Strong Futures, a $1.5 million pilot program to provide financial assistance to new and expecting low-income mothers. The program drew over 1,500 applications in less than a month. A lottery was used to select the 132 women who would receive $10,800—no strings attached—over the course of a year, paid out either as a lump sum or in monthly $900 installments.
The Washington Post published a story in 2024 about the program that featured several women who provided details about how they used the extra income. While DC has grown more racially diverse in recent years, the demographics of the program reflect the “Chocolate city” moniker that defined the nation’s capital for decades. According to the CDC, 77 percent of black children in DC are born to unmarried parents, while 93 percent of white children are born to married parents. Given the connection between poverty and family structure, it is no surprise that every mother in the Post profile was an unmarried black woman. It is also no surprise that the word “father” was only used twice in the entire article.
Public discourse involving the black family often writes men completely out of the picture. In the world of left-leaning politicians, scholars, and social commentators, marriage is obsolete and fathers are optional in low-income black neighborhoods. The phrase “stay-at-home mom” typically implies that a man—most often a woman’s husband—is working to provide for his family so she can focus on raising their children. Its use in the Post’s story in reference to a mother of three who was already on several welfare programs was perfectly consistent with that framework, except for one key difference: The “man” providing for the material needs of all the mothers in the program was the government.
Critics of the welfare state that exploded in size during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty would see a direct cash transfer program like Strong Families, Strong Futures as a driver of DC’s racial disparities in family structure. For Christina Cross, however, government aid for single mothers in the form of food, shelter, and cash is the type of policy intervention that black families, in particular, need.
Cross is a professor of sociology at Harvard University and the author of Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families. Her book is a data-rich analysis of race, family structure, and inequality. Cross argues that family structure does not explain the black-white racial disparities in education and economic security because those gaps still exist when comparing black and white children who were raised in a home with both parents. The author draws on three data sources to make her arguments, including two longitudinal studies that track how children were raised and how they fared academically and economically as they moved from adolescence to adulthood. She finds that black children had lower grades, college admission rates, and incomes as adults than their white peers. They were also suspended and expelled more frequently and more likely to live in poverty.
Citing these facts, Cross calls debates over family structure “the great distracter.” Indeed, she suggests that focusing on racial inequality is a better use of political and social capital than promoting the two-parent ideal—the same argument she made in her 2019 New York Times essay “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.” As she put it in that essay: “What deserves policy attention is not black families’ deviation from the two-parent family model but rather structural barriers ... that produce and maintain racialized inequalities in family life.”
“To put it another way, black dads don’t matter.”
To address these structural barriers, Cross calls for more government spending on social welfare programs like TANF and WIC. For Cross, when it comes to black families, a payment from the state is more valuable than the presence of a father. Or to put it another way, black dads don’t matter.
According to the US Census Bureau, 89 percent of black children who live with only one parent are raised by their mother. Any mention of “single-parent” homes in academic research is in effect a discussion about mothers raising their children. So when progressives dismiss the benefits black children experience from growing up in a two-parent home, they are making a clear statement about the role black men play in the home.
Cross notes, correctly, that black two-parent families are all but invisible in academic literature as well as the narratives that shape public opinion. Her book, unfortunately, only exacerbates this problem. Because two-parent black families don’t produce the same outcomes as their white counterparts, she dismisses their significance. Cross’s discussion of particular cases mostly serves to make the point that racism is the main impediment to black progress. There is no discussion of the black husband and wife who work as a bus driver and teacher, respectively, and raise children who do well in school and go on to start their own families. She never profiles black families who turned side hustles into sustainable businesses that expose their children to the power of entrepreneurship while building wealth along the way. She doesn’t show us the black couples who have been married for over 50 years and have wisdom to offer on staying together through life’s challenges.
Cross begins Inherited Inequality by noting how her church-going parents and their peers regularly cited the breakdown of the family as a key driver of the social maladies facing her community in Milwaukee. She later cites public opinion poll data that found 60 percent of black respondents believed “differences in family upbringing” were a main driver of racial disparities in social and economic outcomes. But she discards this perspective, despite her calls for the voices of black families to be included in the “creation, implementation, and evaluation of any policy or program aimed at helping them.”
The oversight is not accidental, but a reflection of Cross’s ideological commitments. Cross has elsewhere written about how “heteropatriarchy” is one of the “the foundational pillars of white supremacy.” This means a heterosexual, male-headed black family is complicit with structural racism in a way that a black single mother dependent on the state is not.
“A heterosexual, male-headed black family is complicit with structural racism.”
Inherited Inequality was destined to reach the wrong conclusions family structure because its author set out to answer the wrong question. Whether black children benefit as much from being raised in a two-parent home as their white peers is irrelevant. What matters is whether data proves that one family structure is consistently linked to better outcomes than any other. On every measure, black children benefit from being raised by a father and mother. In fact, there was not a single outcome listed in the book that showed the opposite. Whether it’s high school GPA, childhood poverty, or future earnings as an adult, two parents beat one.
That is why everything should be done to promote what has been proven to help all children: two parent households. Cross highlights a 24 percentage point black-white disparity in high-school graduation rates, a 15 percentage point disparity in unemployment at age 25, and an eight percentage point disparity in children living below 200 percent of the poverty line. But she ignores the 42 percentage point gap in nonmarital births.
Cross points to the 1965 Moynihan report as “arguably the single most powerful force in shaping America’s thinking about the importance of the two-parent family for addressing racial equality.” Over 60 years after its release, the report written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant labor secretary under President Lyndon Johnson, remains the most consequential—and controversial—analysis of the black family in American history.
Moynihan warned “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling” and that “so long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.” At the time of his report, the black poverty rate was over 40 percent and the nonmarital birth rate was slightly below 25 percent. Despite living at a time when racism and discrimination were overt, more than 75 percent of black children were born to married parents. By 2023, the poverty rate decreased to 18 percent, but the non-marital birth rate increased to 69 percent.
These findings present a “poverty paradox” for scholars like Cross who believe family structure is mainly driven by economic factors. There is a connection between the two, but Inherited Inequality gets the relationship wrong, especially considering the gains blacks have made in education, economic power, and political representation since the Civil Rights era. Among American adults, 62 percent of Asians, 53 percent of whites, 47 percent of Hispanics, and 35 percent of blacks are married. It is no surprise then that Asians have the highest earnings ($121,700), followed by whites ($92,530), Hispanics ($70,950), and then blacks ($56,020). The median income for black married couples under 65 ($121,900), however, is higher than the overall household income for all groups.
This clear connection between family structure and financial security is encouraging, but unfortunately married couples only constitute 28 percent of all black households, compared to a national average of 47 percent. Anyone serious about addressing the link between family structure and racial disparities in social outcomes must start by acknowledging the steep decline in black marriage rates and increase in nonmarital births since the 1960s.
“Married couples only constitute 28 percent of all black households.”
A genuine attempt to build a better future for the black family requires a new blueprint, specifically one focused on reviving the institution of marriage. Such a movement will only be successful if family restoration is treated as a high priority by black leaders—pastors, politicians, public intellectuals, and cultural influencers. Black churches, HBCUs, and media outlets can all use their influence to encourage men and women to, as the nursery rhyme says, put marriage before the baby carriage.
Elected officials can also highlight the connection between family structure and social outcomes. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a campaign to reduce teen pregnancy in 2013 that gave young people the three-step plan— “finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children”—that would virtually guarantee them a life free from poverty. Programs like DC’s Strong Families, Strong Futures could be structured in ways that incentivize marriage.
Every child is the living embodiment of the relationship between exactly one man and one woman, and each child has a right to the affection, protection, and direction of those parents. Harnessing the power of our most important institutions to increase the number of black children raised by parents committed to one another in marriage would do far more for black families than a progressive policy agenda pushing for bigger government and better white people.
Cross notes that wealth is created and passed on over the course of generations. So are family norms. Young people in far too many black neighborhoods today have no reason to believe that marriage should come before children because no one in their lives—whether parents, pastors, politicians, or professors—has ever communicated that message. That must change because there will be neither strong families nor bright futures for black children in America without a revival of marriage and restoration of the two-parent home.