We're still working with the segment in the previously post. We pick up with this Meet the Press question. The answer: womens liberation, and the lack of good Black men.

MR. RUSSERT: What happened within the black community that we got to a point, since 1950, where 70 percent of the children are born with single parents? What happened?

DR. POUSSAINT: Well, I think all kinds of things. Some of it has to do with the fact that things changed for women with the women’s liberation movement. In the past, there was a stigma if you had—a big stigma if you had a child out of wedlock. That’s not true anymore for, for white women or black women. So a lot of the black women do not feel compelled to get married. And then the other issue is the availability of black men and whether they’re eligible to be married. You have so many black men incarcerated, so many black men unemployed, underemployed. In colleges now, black women outnumber black men two to one. And so the chances of hooking up in a marital relationship in the way our society works is more difficult. So I think that’s changed as well.

And then I think that a lot of supports for the family, changing values in the society and then the issue of black men being pulled out by going to jail. Let me just stress that. Right, right now, there are 2.2 million people in jail, and at last count about 910,000 were African-Americans. Now, the—at the time of Brown v. the Board of Education of 1954 there were 98,000 African-Americans in prison. So just from that period of time, there’s been a ninefold increase. And most of these prisoners, of course, are, are black men, 90 percent of them. And so they’re not available. They come out of jail, they can’t get jobs, they can’t get work. They can’t be fathers, they can’t build a family, they can’t make an income. And so the—all of these things that make...

This should be a call for unified action on the criminalization of Black people and Black males in particular. It is not...and as long as it's not, it will sound like assigning blame rather than seeking solutions. It is not possible to discuss reducing the criminality seen in the black communities without dealing with the school to prison pipleline. Any attempt to do so distorts issues to the point of damage.

Unfortunately, the problem is presented as a failure of parenting. And though the Doctors are sure their explanation would explain everything, I am equally sure it does not. The school to prison pipeline is real. The fact that white males with a prison record are hired before Black men with no record is real. These things must have impact, and making your plans without taking them into account leaves them intact...and as a result Black male involvement with the justice system can not be normalized.