Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families

A groundbreaking study challenges basic tenets of US social welfare policy with proof that raising Black children in two-parent families does not close racial gaps in life outcomes.

Ever since Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report on “The Negro Family,” the disadvantages of the single-parent household have been at the center of debates about racial inequality in the United States. In particular, absent fathers and single-parent homes are seen as fundamental to the “tangle of pathology” that supposedly underlies Black disadvantage. Redressing inequality thus requires interventions that promote marriage and shore up the two-parent family.

Inherited Inequality is a decisive refutation of this narrative and a definitive account of the harm it has caused. Marshaling extensive longitudinal data of African American and white children from birth through young adulthood, sociologist Christina Cross demonstrates that the two-parent family is no equalizer. While growing up with two parents increases average household income and allows for more parental involvement, the resulting gains are racially skewed: Black children brought up in a two-parent home still fare much worse than their white counterparts, in school and on the job market. Thus, interventions aimed at correcting the supposed deficiencies of the Black family will not fix these inequities. To the contrary, Cross insists, focusing on family structure distracts us from the racist legacies and logics that persistently leave African Americans with fewer resources and opportunities, regardless of who raises them.

The first comprehensive empirical study of its kind, Inherited Inequality is a resounding repudiation of welfare policies that, to this day, favor marriage counseling over economic assistance. More than that, it is a provocative invitation to rethink the meaning of family in Black communities.