Whoopi Goldberg's Misplaced Anger

The women of “The View” are angry over this.

“I am starting to feel that there is some sort of racial thing … but damnit I am sick of this crap! Could you people get your act together? … Stop pointing the finger at single parents!”

The passage Goldberg cites:

“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

Was Goldberg also upset when Barack Obama noted the decline of the black two-parent household? —

“More than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children.”

– Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day address

— or just when she thinks a white woman said it? (Because Bachmann didn’t say it — in fact, it wasn’t even included in the original pledge she signed. Goldberg condescendingly remarked that Bachmann needs to read up on history, I reply that Goldberg should get her facts straight on this story before commenting on it.) Bachmann signed a pledge that she feels is indicative of her faith and doesn’t rewrite her principles to accommodate popularity. We’ve become the first industrialized nation to outlaw slavery, to elect a black president, but families in the black community are still suffering, a suffering often aided by the very individuals who claim to help. This is irony, not racism.

Politifact, the left’s favorite site to cite:

By using the term “we,” we will assume Obama is speaking to people roughly his age, 46. And by that measure, his claim is backed up by data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1960, the year before Obama was born, 22 percent of black children lived with single parents. In 1968, the number rose to 31.4 percent. By 2006, the 1960 percentage had more than doubled to 56 percent.

And the single parents are overwhelmingly women.

In 2006, 91.4 percent of single parents of black children were mothers. That figure hasn’t changed over the years. In 1960, it was a shade lower at 91 percent.

So is Obama racist for pointing out the increase of single-parent households in the black community? Is Politifact racist for publishing the statistics used to verify his quote? Is it racist to point out facts? Seriously, at what point do we stop with the sliding scale of racial offense? Noting this statistic isn’t a statement of superiority, it’s a statement of “let’s remedy this.” It’s apparently not racist to prejudge an individual and miss the actual meaning for the hysterical overreaction. That’s what I’m sick of, Ms. Goldberg.

That Goldberg cherry picks when she wants to get upset over a perceived racial insult is, itself, offensive. (No outrage when Democrats assumed that more black Americans were on welfare than white?) She has not a shred of anger towards the societal belief system that has led to this outcome, the way in which our culture repeatedly abuses fathers and downplays their importance to the family, the beltway policies that contribute to the degradation of the family unit that has been ongoing since the time of slavery when all children were more often than not in a two-parent home. We have more people in America on welfare than ever before and an administration that has enslaved our children to a multi-trillion-dollar debt. The now-omitted graph from the pledge wasn’t glorifying slavery, it stated the opposite and it correctly noted the toll that debt enslavement can have on families.

Also, as the product of a single parent household, I think Whoopi needs to stop universally speaking for all children of single parents. You know what? It sucked. Many of us are lucky to have turned out well in spite of it — and children from single parent households sure as hell don’t need enablers like Goldberg ranting and raving about how it’s okay when it isn’t. Grace follows redemption and certain situations are unavoidable, but I’m tired of Hollywood romanticizing it as a choice equal to that of a two-parent upbringing.