This is a 2019 federal report, so it’s not using the latest Census data, nor does it show the impact of covid, which couldn’t be good, but it is still of interest. Here are total fertility rates for non-Hispanic white women by educational attainment:
So white women with Master’s degrees have 83% as many babies as white women with only high school degrees. White women with even higher degrees than MA’s have slightly higher fertility.
But here’s the TFR for black women, which has fallen a lot since the exuberance of 1991, perhaps the peak crack year. Keep in mind that there are larger percentages of black women at the low end of the educational attainment scale than there are white women:
So black women with Master’s degrees have only 44% as many babies as black women with only high school degrees, compared to 83% for white women.
This is one reason blacks as a group haven’t made much progress over the last 40 or so years: each generation a lot more blacks are born and raised toward the bottom of the social scale than toward the top because well-educated black women aren’t very fertile. Black women who have made it up the ladder tend to be quite cautious about having babies, which is sensible of them on an individual basis. But for blacks as a whole, this low fertility among educated black women imposes a sizable dyscultural / dysgenic effect on the African-American population.
So much of the progress one generation of blacks makes is lost on the next generation.
This is an important phenomena, but it simply doesn’t occur to most 21st Century Americans to think about anymore. It sounds like “eugenics” and “calipers” and other scientifically discredited horrors.
And here’s a graph showing Hispanic women, who tend to have the lowest levels of educational attainment. Hispanic fertility, especially among immigrants was particularly high from the late 1980s amnesty up through the Housing Bubble, then dropped sharply after 2008.
And all together:
So, these ignored reproductive patterns help explain why Systemic Racism sounds to many like the only plausible explanation for the lack of black progress over the generations: Nice white people think: For 50 years I’ve been reading all these articulate op-eds by amazing black women with advanced degrees about all the hair-touching microaggressions they must endure, but blacks as a whole never seem to catch a break. Clearly there must be some kind of giant, but unconscious conspiracy by whites, who have all the power, to keep the children of all these amazing black women down.
To think in terms of nature and nurture of who gets born, however, is so utterly alien to the the 21st Century mind that it never occurs to anybody that the amazing black women who complain in the media about hair-touching only have an average of one child each, while the not so amazing ones who don’t get featured in the media are having a lot more. So each generation, far more blacks are conceived and raised per capita by the non-amazing members of the black population than by amazing members.
In contrast, among whites, the dyscultural/dysgenic skew in who gets born is notably less severe.
