RUSH: This will be a great opportunity to delve into the Walter Williams column that I referred to earlier. It’s got nothing to do with the NFL. I mean, that’s not why he wrote it. It comes from way back on September 20th, about a week ago, and the title of his column…

Where did this run? The link is so tiny, I can’t read it. It looks like the Daily Signal. “The Black Family Is Struggling, and It’s Not Because of Slavery.” Now, Walter Williams is a former guest host here. He’s brilliant guy, very conservative individual. Let me give you a couple pull quotes. By the way, none of this is new information. We’ve talked about it before over the years. None of this is new. We’ve known about the problems with single-parent families, single mothers. We’ve known about this. It’s independent of race.

We’ve known about this for decades, but it’s one of these things nobody will stand up and talk about because it’s racist, it’s bigoted, it’s intolerant. It doesn’t exhibit understanding of the new definition of “family” in America, you see? But we allow it to continue, and now we celebrate — we celebrate — single motherhood and young single mothers, and we praise them. They become dependent on the state, they become loyal Democrat voters, and we create these new ways of defining family and call it growth.

You know, we call it maturity and so forth. Couple pull quotes: “In 1960, just 22% of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70% of black children were raised in single-parent families.” So we’ve gone from 22% to 70% in 50 years. Here’s the question Walter Williams asks: “Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?”

Williams believes that the rise of single-parent families is directly attributable to the creation of the welfare state — the War on Poverty — that the government became the father. The government assumed the financial obligations of the father, meaning the father need not hang around. As I say, you’ve heard all this. But you don’t dare say it even today, unless you want to be accused of division, disunity, and inequality and racism and all the others. Another pull quote: “[T]wo-parent black families are rarely poor. Only 8% of black married-couple families live in poverty.

“Among black families in which both the husband and wife work full time, the poverty rate is under 5%. Poverty in black families headed by single women is 37%.” The Democrat Party has targeted single mothers as a primary voting bloc. The Democrat Party has identified single mothers as a rising population cohort and has devised policies to reach them. The Democrat Party benefits from this, and they are the only ones who do.

“That the problems of today’s black Americans are a result of a legacy of slavery, racial discrimination and poverty has achieved an axiomatic status, thought to be self-evident and beyond question. This is what academics and the civil rights establishment have taught. But as with so much of what’s claimed by leftists, there is little evidence to support it.” Little evidence. By the way, he’s exactly right. All of these problems with single parents, single mothers in the African-American population, they say, “That’s a legacy of slavery!”

And of course, people that don’t know any better accept it and believe it. They start feeling guilty about it, and then are easily swayed into believing that “white privilege” is the reason all this exists. And now these kids that believe that are in college, refusing to let people they disagree with speak. “The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure.” The bottom line of his piece, as time begins to evaporate here, is this, the end of the piece.

“Then there’s education. Many black 12th-graders deal with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade. They write and do math about as well as white seventh- and eighth-graders.” These are academic studies. This is not his opinion. This is research that has been performed and documented. “All of this means that an employer hiring or a college admitting the typical black high school graduate is in effect hiring or admitting an eighth-grader.”