Delano Squires used to sit in on morning calls with the assistant police chief while working in D.C.’s office of gun violence prevention. He told me it was always the same story: a young black man—sometimes the victim, sometimes the perpetrator—but always the focus. What struck him, looking back, was that when the city later rolled out its plan to address racial disparities, the indicators it tracked—incarceration, employment, education—never once included family structure. That absence is the spine of his new book, The Vanishing Black Family. His argument is direct: roughly 70 percent of black children are now born to unmarried parents, more than double the national average, and almost none of the institutions that talk loudest about racial equity—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights organizations, the black media outlets—will touch the subject. I pushed him on the obvious objection: that raising this at all risks stigmatizing single mothers, and he had an answer ready. Nobody worries that promoting college attendance shames parents who never finished high school, he said, because everyone assumes parents want more for their kids than they had themselves. He thinks the same logic applies to marriage. Where the conversation got genuinely interesting was his account of causation. He doesn’t let slavery off the hook entirely—he’s clear that it deformed the structure of black families for generations. But he rejects the idea that it fully explains what happened later, pointing to census data showing black marriage rates stayed remarkably high for a full century after emancipation, only collapsing in the 1960s. His culprits are more specific and, I think, harder to dismiss than the usual ones: the explosion of welfare spending, which effectively displaced fathers as providers, and the rise of second-wave feminism, which he argues convinced a generation of women that marriage was confinement rather than partnership. We spent real time on that second claim, since it’s the one likely to generate the most pushback. Squires isn’t arguing women shouldn’t have careers or independence. His point is narrower: that a movement built on convincing women to adopt the worst habits of men—casual detachment, indifference to consequence—was never going to end up pro-family, no matter how it framed itself. Whether or not you buy his full account of how we got here, his central claim is hard to argue with: This is the largest racial disparity in the country, and almost nobody with real institutional power is willing to say so out loud. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.