The Vanishing Black Family: Delano Squires on Marriage, Moynihan, and the Crisis in Black America

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, the 16th of June, 2026 It was more than 60 years ago that Daniel Patrick Moynihan came out with his so-called report, The Negro Family, The Case For National Action. It was extremely controversial, both on the left and the right, amongst the white and black Americans.
Yet 60 years later, to some people, at least not much has changed. My guest today has a new family. I was going to say new family. No, he doesn't have a new family. He has a new book out, Delano Squires, The Vanishing Black Family. He's a black conservative, unusual in this country, works at Heritage.
And it's very explicit in seeing this book as volume 2 or part 2 in the Moynihan Report. Delano is joining us from the Heritage Studios in Washington, DC. Delano, two questions on this. Firstly, given that the Moynihan Report was written 60 years ago, is there really a need for a follow up? If you agree with everything it was said.

**Delano Squires** (1:45)
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. As it relates to your question, I wouldn't frame the book as a follow up to the Moynihan Report, even though I do talk about and cite the Moynihan Report extensively in my chapter on the rise of the welfare state. But to answer your question, yes, there's a need to reassess the current state of the Black family. Because in 1965, for instance, the non-marital birth rate among Black Americans was about 25 percent. Now, for context, nationally, it was about 7 percent. It was still higher, but 25 percent means 75 percent of Black children were born to marry parents.
Even with that, Moynihan believed that that was caused for national concern and caused to marshal resources, political, cultural, social resources to address the issue of Black family dissolution. Roll it forward 60 years and today, about 70 percent of Black children are born to unmarried parents. Now, again, the national rate has risen to 40 percent, but you still see a fairly significant and wide gap between family formation patterns in Black America versus the rest of the country. So yes, I would argue that there is a need to assess the state of the Black family today, and one of the big differences between my book and the Moynihan report, is that whereas Moynihan was speaking almost exclusively to liberals in and outside of government saying we need to do something with the Black family, I'm speaking primarily to Black leaders saying that we need to do something about the state of the families in our own communities, the people who say that they are interested in racial equity, and they're interested in closing racial disparities.
I argue in the book that this is the source of almost all the disparities, whether in the school house, the courthouse, or the jailhouse, like these things start in the home. So I'm writing to a slightly different audience, even though I'm touching on the same subject matter.

**Andrew Keen** (3:49)
The Third Rail, Delano, you know how controversial this stuff is. So as you know in one of your heritage pieces and in the book, today only 33 percent of Black adults are married compared to 48 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of Whites and 63 percent of Asians. This is of course where we're wandering onto the third rail of American politics. Why American culture? Why are so many more, let's take Asians, why are almost double?
Why are families of Asians almost doubly likely to be made up of mothers and fathers rather than single parents? How do we explain that without descending into some sort of rather vulgar racism?

**Delano Squires** (4:40)
Well, I think a big part of it has to do with cultural norms. And to your point, sometimes it's difficult for some people to disentangle culture from race. But when I'm talking about culture, I'm just on a basic level, the norms, the values, the practices that are seen as acceptable within a particular community. And regardless of what that community is, whether it's racial, ethnic, geographic, religious, there are both incentives for people to practice those norms. Part of that could be the particular life script that children are handed at a young age. This is what you do. You go to school, you get married, you start a career, or for some people, maybe you go to school, you get a job, you get settled in your job. And then when you're ready, then you find a spouse and then have children. Or for some people, like the marriage and children, the marriage part doesn't necessarily have to precede the children part. So I think a big part of it is that there are strong cultural norms within Asian American communities. And obviously that is a large category with, that covers everything from Indians in South Asia to Chinese or Korean families in East Asia. But you still see certain patterns of behavior as it relates to family formation. And I think in a broader American context, those patterns and those norms have been weakening ever since the 1960s. And I just think the black families has been the Canary and the coal mines since that time. Part of it because of the history, where American chattel slavery meant that black families in their formation were starting out on a weaker foundation because slavery and marriage are two fundamentally incompatible institutions.