Trump and the black vote—fun with statistics
Several commenters have pointed out that Trump made a speech recently that appealed to black voters. Here’s how commenter Richard Saunders describes it, for example:
Trump makes the best speech of the campaign, and is the one of the first, if not the first, Republican to reach out to the black community in 50 years, a brilliant move both substantively and strategically…
I’ve already said, many times, how little I think that any of Trump’s speeches matter to anyone except those who already are predisposed to like him. One of the many many troubles with Trump (as I described at some length yesterday) is that there is an unusally huge (yuge?) gap perceived between his off-the-cuff words and his scripted words/persona, and the former tend to trump (sorry!) the latter because they appear to express his own thoughts rather than those of others. So my first reaction is the same as to any Trump speech.
But let’s put that aside and take the speech on its merits. Several people have indicated that it’s something no other Republican has done in 50 years or more (or very very few, anyway, as Richard Saunders concedes). But on what is that assertion based? Memory? Memory can play funny tricks on you; that’s why Google is our friend.
And just a very quick Googling reveals that both Mitt Romney and George Bush reached out in a similar way during campaigns, as did Rand Paul during the 2016 campaign (see this, this, and this). That’s as far back as I tried to search at first (to search all the Republican presidents and candidates of the last 50 years would take too long), but just now I decided to Google “Gerald Ford speaks to black community” and up came this:
In the months after he assumed the presidency, Ford actively presented his views on domestic policy, including civil rights and urban affairs, to African American organizations, including the National Baptist Convention, and at forums such as the White House Conference on Domestic and Economic Affairs. He used a 1975 speech at the NAACP national convention to talk about the adverse impact of the recession and inflation on low-income workers and the poor. He promised that his administration’s policy of fiscal restraint wouldn’t mean turning the country’s back on problems of employment, housing, education, transportation and health care…
Meanwhile, the president reached out to African American audiences to sell his policies. For example, his 1975 speech to the predominantly black National Newspaper Publishers Association addressed the economy, crime, taxes, unemployment and voting rights. “Blacks in our society have too often been mentally segregated by some thinkers and planners who acted as if blacks did not have the same expectations and problems as other Americans,” he said. “I promised at the very beginning of my administration to be president of all the people, and I am keeping that pledge. The administration will not slice off a small portion of the pie and say, ”˜This is enough for the 25 millions of Americans who are black.’”
There’s a good deal more at the link; the whole thing is an excerpt from a book entitled Presidents and Black America: A Documentary History (can’t find it at Amazon, though), which might correct the record on misconceptions about a lot of presidents.
I have grown tired of people who support Trump asserting he’s the only one who has done this, or that, or the other thing (tough talk on immigration being another) when in fact he’s not all that singular at all. The truth about the GOP and the black community in recent years is that the perception of “Democrats good, GOP bad” by the black community has become entrenched and is probably not amenable to a speech, period.
The MSM has long been engaged in promoting the idea that Republicans ignore black people. It’s said often enough by the left that I don’t think the right needs to repeat the falsehood. And yet, the right often accepts that characterization by the left without questioning or researching it.
During the primaries there was also lot of hype about how Trump was getting or about to be getting a significant amount of the black vote, as expressed in polls. I believe that was something that was not only pushed by Trump supporters for obvious reasons, but was pushed by the MSM to get more support in the primaries for Trump because they felt he’d actually be the weakest opponent for Hillary to face. But when I looked more closely at that claim about Trump’s support among blacks, it tended to evaporate (see this and this).
James Taranto has a recent article on the subject of Trump and the black vote in which he says:
Consider, though, that it would have been all but impossible to assemble a crowd of Trump supporters in a black neighborhood. Several recent polls have shown Trump’s African-American support, both nationally and in battleground states, as low as 1% or even zero.
On the other hand, Trump’s black support wasn’t always so low. This is from a May NewsMax report:
A May 2 Public Policy Polling release showed that in the swing state of Ohio, Donald Trump would garner 15 percent of the African-American vote vs. Hillary Clinton.
According to Van Jones, former aide to President Barack Obama and CNN contributor, that puts Trump in the White House.
“If only 70 percent don’t like Donald Trump, that means 30 percent are open to his argument; if he gets half of those, he’s president,” Jones said in a video posted on his Facebook page. “In order for the Democrats to win the White House, they . . . need 90 to 92 percent of the black vote.”
Of course that 90% to 92% threshold varies depending on turnout and on the candidates’ performances with nonblack voters. But if Trump’s black support has declined from a respectable (for a Republican) 15% a few months ago to 1% or less today, that suggests his detractors””Democrats, media people and even some Republicans””have been successful in their effort to portray him as racist. It makes sense for him to counter that perception, since most voters of whatever race would rather not cast ballots for a candidate they see as racist.
Some commentators have observed that given the margin of error, if a poll shows 1% support, the actual level of support could be negative. That’s impossible, of course: The margin of error does not supersede the absolute lower limit of zero. But the margin of error does work the other way: A poll showing zero or near-zero support could underestimate the actual level. And the margin of error of a small subsample””blacks are approximately one-eighth of the total U.S. population””is considerably higher than that of the entire sample.
It’s possible that the May poll showing 15% support among blacks in Ohio (a state whose African-American population share is close to that of the whole country) is a more reliable indicator than the recent zero or 1% polls. Perhaps social-acceptability bias has made black Trump supporters less willing to admit their true preference.
In any case, an optimistic Trump supporter would point out that the current polls are so low that they leave room for nothing other than improvement. Trump would be a fool not to take advantage of the opportunity.
In analyzing that poll from May, the first thing one has to realize is that in recent presidential elections, Republicans have gotten less than 15% of the vote but hardly zero. Romney (running against black candidate Barack Obama) got 6% of the black vote in 2012; McCain (against the same opponent) got 4% in 2008, while in 2004 George Bush (running against Kerry) got 11% and in 2000 he got 9% (running against Gore). Prior to that, Bob Dole got 12% and Perot 4% in 1996, and in 1992 George Bush got 10%.
Those are the figures for comparison. Remember, however, that the Public Policy poll from May was taken in Ohio rather than nationwide, but fortunately we are able to compare that 15% of black voters who were supposedly for Trump to the vote in Ohio for George W. Bush in 2004 against John Kerry—according to exit polls, it was 16%; pretty similar.
But there’s another problem with that 15% figure for Trump in Ohio back in May. If you actually look at the poll figures, you will see that it was a survey of 799 Ohio voters. 12% of those voters were black, which means (rounded up) that the poll queried 96 black voters. Therefore, Trump’s 15% of those black voters would have been 14 people. For comparison, Cruz got 11% of the black voters in the same poll, which would have been about 10.5 people. The difference seems rather meaningless because the n is just too small to matter. The margin of error for the entire group of 799 was +-3.2%, but for the subgroup of black voters it would be much larger.
I wouldn’t come to any conclusions about much of anything from poll results like that, except that the poll needs a larger n. At any rate, as Taranto points out, Trump no longer appears to be pulling anything like those numbers of black voters nationwide, if in fact he ever did in Ohio, and if in fact we trust that polls can measure this accurately. I somehow doubt that either finding—the 15% in May or the near-0% since then—are valid, and I would guess that the truth lies somewhere in-between, and will remain there no matter how many speeches Trump makes to the black community.
[NOTE: By the way, unlike many of his predecessors such as Romney—who gave his speech to the NAACP—Trump’s speech was given to a white audience. Make of that what you will.]
The answers to why black voters will not consider a Republican are likely to be unattractive. But keeping to the gentler parts, I offer this: When Trump was talking about illegal Mexicans and jobs, black people were interested. They also weren’t too much bothered by Trump’s declarations that some Muslims were dangerous.
Liberals went into high gear branding this as racist, even though from my ancient memory, Ricky Ricardo and Omar Sharif were considered white people back in the day. Exotic white people, sure, but not some other race. Almost nothing Trump said could be even stretched by a supine media to be anti-black, but the word “racist” stuck, and it was enough.
I don’t know how he or we could have combatted this. Plenty of people certainly pointed out the unfairness of it.
Romney’s speech to the NAACP had some interesting background elements.
The first and foremost bit, of course, was that Romney made the speech at all. Everyone knows that blacks are effectively part of Romney’s 47%, but he made the speech anyway.
The second is that the event at which he made the speech was a bipartisan affair. Both presidential candidates were invited to speak. Romney attended, and delivered his speech. IIRC, Obama sent a video of himself giving a speech.
The third item of interest is that, iirc, Romney’s speech got a standing ovation from the assembled members of the NAACP.
To the best of my knowledge, none of those items caused more than a very slight change in black voting trends when election day rolled around.
The single biggest part of the problem, imo, is that for too many people (and this doesn’t include only blacks), the ‘R’ next to the name of every Republican politician stands for ‘Racist’. It’s hard-wired into people to the extent that it’s not really even a conscious thing. They just know it as assuredly as they know that the sun rises every morning.
Black lives matter will get the Cindy Sheehan treatment starting Nov 3 should Hillary win the presidency. Their usefulness to keep the darkies on the plantation will have ended.
Given that the careers and fortunes of the members of the NAACP are intimately tied to the black political machines that have been running the urban centers into the ground, taking their poorer black brethren with them, for up to a century, I doubt that a speech to that group is the way to reach the average black voter.
The cities are Marxist hotbeds of graft, corruption, bribery and total incompetence. They control the bureaucracies, the election and school boards, the teachers’ unions, and kill attempts to start charter schools and school choice options.
The local media are all leftists and help frame the narrative that their dire situations are all due to white racism and the evil Republicans. The black populations have been so heavily subjected to propaganda for so many generations that I don’t believe the vast majority can be reached by any means in any venue with reason or logic because the input channels to them are impenetrable.
This, like the many other major catastrophes caused by leftist policies over decades, illegals, the debt, et al, will not end without bloodshed, exactly what the Marxists want, because they’re organized to take advantage of the crises they’ve created.
A Republican candidate probably shouldn’t try to go after “the blacks”. In our Electoral College system, you’re rewarded for taking states. So, go after Ohioans, let’s say. Target moderately-prosperous black neighborhoods, run ads on black media, send the candidate and/or surrogates to black events. Black populations tend to self-segregate, so make a point of targeting their concentrations.
That being said, I’d put in two caveats. First of all,
I suspect that there’s an Overton window that needs to shift before Republicans get decent levels of black support – or for that matter, get back to the double digits. Second, and this is pure conjecture, I suspect that in the middle and upper classes, there’s already been an increase in black support for Republicans that doesn’t show up on surveys. If you’ve been criticized for acting white all your life, it’s probably easier to vote for the GOP.
It’s a difficult national strategy because of the odd fact that the most-black states are the most Republican: that is, the southeast. Targeting Southern Blacks, rural or urban, won’t get you more than a few Congressional wins. No gains in the Senate or the Electoral College. In the northeast, the black population is much more urban. If you could crack that open, you might be able to put the Rust Belt into play. In the west, there really isn’t enough of a black population to turn an election.
And just so I’m not misread here, there are plenty of reasons for Republicans to make the appeal to black voters. It’s not just a numbers game. The message of opportunity, liberty, and traditional morality is worth delivering. But if we’re talking about national races, the big percentages and voter turnouts, the Republicans’ biggest value among black voters is in the urban northeast.
I do not like and do not use the term “African-American”. Do we use “European-American”? Or “German Protestant American”?
Only the pro-diversity crowd likes the A-A handle.
“Asian-American” is coming into use for the same reasons.
Romney’s terrible comment about the 47% doomed him. He wasn’t sincere in any attempt to reach out to black voters. Sorry. No comparison.
Trump’s speech tonight in Charlotte was epic. Never heard anything like it.
He and Oence are headed to Baton Rouge. Expect more positive polls next week. RCP average show Hillary lost 2 points in a week.
Your disdain for Trump seems to have blinded you to the fact that blacks are much worse off under the black President Obama. Maybe some are rethinking their affiliation. Certainly not the thugs in the street but there are black people who want middle class lives. A factor working against Republicans, of course, is the fact the most middle class blacks are government employes.
I guess we will find out in November.
I kind of remember HW Bush having some kind of conference with black “leaders” but the black leaders made him promise not to invite Thomas Sowell. HW displayed the kind of integrity which made him such a favorite of movement conservatives and agreed.
It’s available at Alibris.com, though. http://www.alibris.com/Presidents-and-Black-America-Stephen-A-Jones/book/17569276?matches=10
Polls should always be considered in light of the Bradley Effect.
That refers to Tom Bradley, once mayor of Los Angeles. Even when he won, it was by smaller margins than the polls had predicted.
The presumption was that those polled didn’t want to say they wouldn’t vote for him due to his policies because they’d be taken for racists. Bradley is black.
So they said they’d vote for him and didn’t.
Today, anybody thinking his poll response is going to be forever anonymous is smoking something.
Mike K Says:
“Your disdain for Trump seems to have blinded you to the fact that blacks are much worse off under the black President Obama.”
Mike, I guarantee you that all the regulars here are well aware of the fact that the black population, and most of the rest of us too, are much worse off now than before the coronation of our first half-white Marxist ever as POTUS.
This kind of information has been common knowledge all over the conservative blogosphere forever. Most actual conservatives have paid attention to the deterioration of our culture and sovereignty for decades, but our warnings to the rest of you went unheard because of your own apathy and/or were drowned out or omitted by the Marxist media. Too many of you Trumpers finally woke up only recently but were totally blind to the fact that conservatives were fighting Marxism and the GOPe all along.
You dumped us in with the RINOs and jumped off the cliff onto Donald because of your understandable rage against the machine – period. If you’d taken the time to learn who has been fighting for what, you would have known there were several good, solid conservatives with honor and integrity running, who can articulate their principles and the issues in complete sentences without insulting everyone. They all polled well against Clinton too, even Cruz, until Trump viciously character-assassinated him and his family.
Trump has no clue what is in the sound position papers on his own site because others wrote them. When asked about them, he contradicts them, and himself, every time.
Our disdain for Trump is based on his own life story as a liberal Democrat attention-whore who has no idea what he’s gotten himself, or us, into. On the other hand, your disdain for us has caused you to alienate us when we should be allies.
geokstr,
I worked for the welfare and health departments in the late sixties and early seventies in North Philadelphia, so I experienced the things you talk about. There were some more upper class blacks who treated the poor ones like dirt. There were many others (often with a military background like my first supervisor or teachers) who had real standards and wanted to help those on the bottom. And then there were some radicals who were fed by all the radical chic attention they got. Like our Community Organizer in Chief, they didn’t do a thing but try to get their names in the paper and intimidate everyone else.
But even today there are people within the black communities who are trying to change things. Paul Ryan has been working intensively with these people.
There are a couple of points I think should be brought up to reach out to these community leaders. One is that when the Black Panthers became the voice of blacks, they used the acting white thing to prevent decent blacks from defining for themselves what acting right means. This pulled the rug out from under parents, teachers, and ministers who really cared about how their young grew up.
A second thing is the rise of upper middle class white feminism which pushed the sexual revolution at the expense of teaching kids parenting and homemaking skills. Relationships became less important than orgasms.
A third thing is the higher ed credentials emphasis. Ed school idiots thought that programs like Head Start would turn all blacks into successful college grads. What these idiots don’t realize is that lots of young people need to learn certain skills at home and to feel satisfied at all the little things they gradually learn to make their lives better. A school cafeteria worker won’t teach a kid to love raw carrots, but a mother or grandmother who makes a carrot cake for their birthday or puts a bowl of peeled cantaloupe in the fridge for them to snack on will affect them. A teacher who gives them a C on a math test won’t help them, but a father that shows them how to use a ruler when he’s putting up a curtain rod or a mother who has them help her figure out how to halve or double a recipe may show the m the practical applications of learning math. None of these things fit into the acting white category. They fit into the things might parents taught me category, and they stick with you for your whole life and give you a chance to resist the “cool” people in school.
Too many kids today are sent into the bigger world with no foundation. One of the reasons I love To Kill a Mockingbird is that it is chock full of parenting examples. Atticus and Calpurnia show us many thing that can be done to teach kids.
expat,
Well said. On a side note, I’d happily vote for a politician who believes, lives, and has policies that promote the basic fact that what people need is moms, dads and jobs.
Moms, dads and jobs. So don’t put in place social programs that, for example, have perverse incentives toward being a single mom or that minimize the dad’s role as provider. And people need jobs, not payouts.
This is not easy, at all. But I think it’s the right focus. Moms, dads and jobs.
Richard: “Polls should always be considered in light of the Bradley Effect.”
Granted, but in your example the polls turned out to be correct, just skewed a bit.
My working theory is this: Candidates that don’t have a majority of their voters enthused and proud don’t win. In other words, “hold-your-nose” candidates are generally going to lose.
Trump needs to somehow move a LOT of people from NeverTrump or OKButHoldMyNoseTrump to enthusiasm. True, he has some very enthusiastic voters but the issue is that an enthusiastic vote and a hold-your-nose vote both count the same, but the hold-your-nose person has done very little to convince anyone else or make anyone else enthusiastic.
His ardent followers also need to quit ridiculing, threatening and down-talking those of us not yet dazzled by his Trumpness. Those tactics aren’t working and give me even more reason to vote 3rd party, write in or leave the presidential slot blank.
Mike K Says:
“I guess we will find out in November.”
Everything is so convoluted this cycle, I’m not sure we can draw any conclusions from November. At least not about intent.
Bill Says :
“His ardent followers also need to quit ridiculing, threatening and down-talking those of us not yet dazzled by his Trumpness. Those tactics aren’t working and give me even more reason to vote 3rd party, write in or leave the presidential slot blank.”
Everyone has seen this. It happens on every forum where Trumpkins concentrate, and it illustrates the fundamental mindset of his supporters: angry and self-righteous.
Trumpkins have SOME issues they are right about. The GOPe hasn’t listened to voters. But Trumpkins take these few issues to validate their emotional crusade, and then tune out everyone else who has a point too.
They are guilty of the very behavior they criticize in others, be they the GOPe or SJWs.
Trumpkins have SOME issues they are right about. The GOPe hasn’t listened to voters. But Trumpkins take these few issues to validate their emotional crusade, and then tune out everyone else who has a point too.
Now you know how Lincoln and the Republican abolitionists felt about negotiating with Southern slave lords. The Southern Baptists who propped up the slave lords, had their own racial and cultural supremacy views, which didn’t have room for things like peace or compromise.
The self destruction the Confederacy inflicted on itself, is of course blamed on Republicans, because the radical Republicans were the abolitionist party that came about as a reaction to slave lords putting bounties on abolitionist speakers from around 1830. Even after Reconstruction, which the Southern Baptists taught the descendants of the South as “Redestruction”, the Appalachians and the white Southern communities, were one of the poorest and least developed areas of America. That wasn’t the fault of the feds, the feds were pretty weak back then. That was the fault of the KKK and the obedience of poor white Southerners to the Southern Baptists and the Demoncrat party.
Obey demons, get rewards, doesn’t exactly work considering Faust.
One of the things that was always hard for me to understand about the South was their reputation for fierce warlike tribalism. The South I saw, was different. Mostly because this was the post Reagan South, in which Southerners finally openly threw off the shackles of the Democrat political poison, which helped ease off the pressure from various Churches to Obey the Authority of the Demoncrats over the authority of Jesus Christ. This was the “good” or modern South, one that revered Nathan Bedford Forrest and Lee was upstanding humans. Which they were, however their ancestors supported the Southern Baptist pro slavery faction, and propped up the slave lords of the Confederacy, which found Forrest and Lee to be convenient tools and then discarded them as trash when they became not useful.
This is why many of the Southern tribes in 1860, didn’t own slaves. They weren’t fighting for slavery, they were fighting to prop up their culture, their religion, and their political/feudal masters, the Demoncrat party and the Southern Baptist religion. When the leaders said start a war and die for them, the poor whites under the control of the slave lord plantation owners, obeyed. After all, that is the duty of serfs and peasants to die in wars started by aristocrats. That is the natural order of human hierarchies. Even Lee, who did not like slavery, fought on the side of the Confederacy, his home. That was how strong the loyalty to tribe were amongst the Scotts-Irish and other poor white migrants the slave lords ruled over.
It makes perfect sense to me that now the Demoncrats have abandoned White Nationalism in 2008+ America, that people would revert back to their Old Origins, the sparking pot that created the conditions for Civil War 1 in the US.
Moms, dads and jobs. So don’t put in place social programs that, for example, have perverse incentives toward being a single mom or that minimize the dad s role as provider. And people need jobs, not payouts.
This is not easy, at all. But I think it’s the right focus. Moms, dads and jobs.
Bill: That’s catchy! I like it.
The kids I know, by which I mean teens and twenties, who are doing well came from two-parent families. The others are not and some are in terrible shape. My heart goes out to them.
The erosion of the American family IMO is the single most damaging aspect of modern life.
“The erosion of the American family IMO is the single most damaging aspect of modern life.”
Yes, and until we start seriously working on this our problems will just get worse. The issues that come out of family breakup will take generations to solve. I wish more candidates would spend time talking about it, but our culture is not tolerant of talking about a key component of this – morality. It used to be common morality to not knock up/get knocked up out of wedlock but that is now a foreign concept. We’re reaping the whirlwind.
Yes, and until we start seriously working on this our problems will just get worse. The issues that come out of family breakup will take generations to solve. I wish more candidates would spend time talking about it, but our culture is not tolerant of talking about a key component of this — morality. It used to be common morality to not knock up/get knocked up out of wedlock but that is now a foreign concept. We’re reaping the whirlwind.
————————-
Unfortunately, the only recent candidates who might have been inclined to talk about it, and could have done so without being accused of being hypocrites, were Dubya and Romney. But Dubya was distracted by the War on Terror, and Romney didn’t get into office.
The Dems don’t care, and so they won’t talk about it (they push their social programs as a replacement for stable two-parent households). And McCain and Trump have both had marriages dissolve under less than optimal conditions that would open them up to charges of hypocrisy (Trump in particular) if they were to start pushing the point.
As the old joke went in 2008 – “The only candidate in the Republican Primary who’s only had one wife is the Mormon.”
expat–I love everything you wrote (9:07 am). To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my 2 favorite books, and both adult characters you mention (as well as Aunt Alexandra) present wisdom with words and example that is profound. I home-schooled my children (my daughter 4th-high school, a son 1st-7th, a son K-4th). When I went to the first parent-teacher conference for my youngest (5th grade), she told me “Mrs.W, I have a classroom full of children who should have been home with their mothers for the first 10 years.” In the ’70’s my mother was a vocal critic of what was happening to the black family by way of public policies. She had wisdom and foresight few in position of power possessed.
Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” was my emblem for the classic liberal: open-minded, fair, wise, generous and strong. Gregory Peck played him perfectly.
Tangent: Dill, the odd boy who was Scout’s friend, is based on Truman Capote, who was Harper Lee’s childhood friend.
Sharon W: Congratulations and thanks for raising fine children.
huxley–Thank you for your kind words. Gregory Peck was excellent and indeed, I think the casting for that film was superb.
What might be more interesting is the turnout of Hispanics…
http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/08/19/hidden-timebomb-trumps-polling/
junior:
I agree that standards of morality have changed greatly.
But I want to nitpick about one thing. People used to get “knocked up” prior to marriage quite often. But because out-of-wedlock births were considered shameful, the preferred solution was to get married—the proverbial “shotgun wedding.” They were not uncommon. Another solution (second in preference) was for the woman to be sent to a home to have the baby and give it up for adoption.
What has changed isn’t so much the knocking-up-out-of-wedlock part, as the societal attitude towards it and the preferred solutions to it.
See this.
And abortions certainly happened, too, and although not as common as now they were relatively common.
Mary Badham, who played Scout, remained lifelong friends with Gregory Peck. TKAM was also Robert Duvall’s big screen debut.
It broke my heart when TKAM’s prequel,”Go Set a Watchman,” was published a few years ago and it portrayed Atticus Finch as a racist.
Harper Lee was close to senile at the time and it struck me as an exploitation by her publisher and agent — a last trip to the well to make money off TKAM.
It’s a tough situation. Government really isn’t the best tool to provide moral leadership on something like the illegitimacy rate. What we need is societal pressure to reinstitute traditional moral norms, and in most respects society is pushing away from even the concept of norms. Tell me if there are any non-religious institutions that are promoting any norms other than “pc” ones. Search engine filters – that’s about it.
Nick–Quite the contrary. Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist eugenicist, Magaret Sanger. That organization is a sacred cow of the faux populist Democrat party. It is amazing how effective keeping the truth about the foundation of that organization has been. Such ignorance.
I read a short story sometime ago about a bright sensitive girl in the 1950s who gets pregnant, goes away to have her baby and gives it up for adoption, then returns to high school and finds herself shunned.
As a reader I sympathized with this poor unlucky girl and felt angry about her cruel treatment. But I realized that as mean and unfair as shunning was, it was one way for pressuring young people not to have kids out of wedlock, which is arguably a great wrong as well.
OTOH I also wondered to what extent such shunning really happened. I went to a Catholic school in the sixties and some girls got into trouble but not much happened beyond whispered gossip.
Milton Friedman’s maxim–“That which you want more of, reward” figures into this and many other “unintended consequences” of our social welfare policies of the last 60 years.
Bill, you might want to check various different churches and see if their family and children standards are higher or lower than average.
neo,
I suspect that more of the girls who got pregnant back then had been dating the guys for a while, so the shot-gun marriages weren’t between kids who had just hooked up for the night. I also suspect that the possibility of a shot-gun wedding made guys think a bit more about about the consequences of one-night stands. Also, there was probably more community support in those days to get the couple on the right track. If the couple lived up to their responsibilties, they were accepted.
Huxley – It would also happen that a 16-year-old girl would disappear for a few months then show up again with her newborn “sister”. Or a non-immediate family member (say, an aunt who lived in the next state) would raise the child.
Sharon – I’m not sure what you’re contrary-ing.
Nick-“Tell me if there are any non-religious institutions that are promoting any norms other than “pc” ones.”
I meant to indicate that the non-religious institutions are actually promoting things that violate even the “pc” ones. (Planned Parenthood seen as supporting woman but in fact was based on evil intentions.)
Ah, I understand. I lumped a lot of things into “pc” without spelling them out.
Nick: I used to get rides to school with a family whose daughter got pregnant. The baby was born and the grandmother raised her.
The new girl-child was named Caprice, a touch which did not go unnoticed by the literate adults in the community.
expat:
I agree that it was more commonly people who’d been dating for a while. But not always, by any means.
huxley:
I went to high school in the 60s and I don’t remember any such shunning of the girls who went “away.”
Ymarsakar: “Bill, you might want to check various different churches and see if their family and children standards are higher or lower than average.”
I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Honest question – can you rephrase or give me some context?
I went to high school in the 70’s and there was no shunning for the girls that went “away”, but they were few and far between, because there was a strong aversion to “loose” girls (called “sluts” when being discussed in the cliques). I grew up in Park Ridge, IL (all-white). When my brother went to college in Whitewater, WI and brought home a fellow student (black) and they attended a football game together at Maine South (yes–Hillary’s home town and alma mater), he was the only black person I ever saw at a school event. He was from Milwaukee and in conversation w/him, I was surprised to learn that lots of girls in high school, “went” away or had the baby. That really amazed me.
Sharon W:
Please see this.
Neo – that’s the way it was in my old neighborhood, too. One or two girls every couple of years would get pregnant and drop out of high school. The girl’s father would grab her by the arm, the boy’s father would grab him, by the ear, off they would march to our parish church, and they would be married. The boy would get a job, as a gas pump jockey, construction laborer, sweeper in a factory, or helper on a truck.
The problem is, those jobs don’t exist any more. Today, even those few menial/entry-level jobs left require a high school or higher diploma. So, even if we get these kids married, how are they going to support themselves?
WRT “To Kill a Mockingbird”. The same year the movie “Sergeant Rutledge” starring Woody Strode was released.
Same theme set in the Indian-fighting genre.
Fabulous review of the movie on Amazon. Can’t say enough about it.
Anyway, two releases on the exact, pretty much, theme.
Made a difference, I suspect.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Honest question — can you rephrase or give me some context?
You mentioned the family issue before. But families are a combination of high generation family trees. 10 grand kids, 2 grand father, sets. Not the modern 10 grandfathers, 2 grand kids set. Reverse pyramid.
So the barbarian or tribal cultures often have high birth rates, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they have a good family structure that promotes productive citizens.
So if you look at various church communities in the US, some have abnormally higher birth rates, as well as abnormally higher than average family stability. Without being migrants, Mexicans, or Muslims.
But there are also church communities that are not so. If you look into that, you should find the answer to why first world countries are destroying themselves on families, because this controls for the welfare issue. As most of them aren’t on welfare.
The problem is, those jobs don’t exist any more. Today, even those few menial/entry-level jobs left require a high school or higher diploma. So, even if we get these kids married, how are they going to support themselves?
What do you mean those jobs don’t exist? Harvesting the dual crops out West, construction jobs for Mexicans, exist.
If whites, nationalist or not, these days aren’t in that market, it’s probably because migrants cost less or family connections to various farms are needed before they hire.
In Japan, high school students would use their part time job to help with construction. That doesn’t mean they are lower than middle class, however. In the US, all those labor heavy, blue collar jobs haven’t so much disappeared, as gone into a black/grey market for Mexicans or migrant workers.
“Today, even those few menial/entry-level jobs left require a high school or higher diploma.” – Richard S
Well, that would put the lie to illegal aliens taking jobs.
But, you are correct that the parents would be enforcers of social norms. Nowadays, not so much.
Like an earlier discussion on education, if the parents are not pushing it with their kids (through their lives), nor expecting it, it often as not won’t happen.