Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 215 of Orlando Patterson’s 2000 essay “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration,” which is chapter 15 in Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. (2000) (footnotes deleted):

It may be true, as Katherine Newman recently observed, that men “who lack the wherewithal to be good fathers, often aren’t.” But the fact remains that in nearly all other ethnic groups in America, including Mexican Americans with higher levels of poverty than Afro-Americans, and in nearly all other known human societies, including India with its vast hordes of people in grinding urban poverty and unemployment, poverty does not lead to the large-scale paternal abandonment of children. In fact, the best available data show little correlation between job availability and the marriage rate.