Our society has actively promoted two-parent families for decades, but today we’re in a particularly intense moment. We have books getting published like Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization and The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Social conservatives are talking about establishing a “Manhattan Project” for boosting birth rates and nuclear families, and some on the right are even musing about ending no-fault divorce.

Sociologist Christina Cross’s new book, Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist Between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families, seeks to challenge these stories and solutions. Cross studies the outcomes of kids who grow up in two-parent Black families — a group of people she argues tends to “escape our collective imagination” — despite all the intense focus on single-parent households.

Cross’s work bucks an idea that has fundamentally shaped government policy since the Moynihan Report in 1965 through welfare reform and contemporary marriage promotion initiatives: that if Black families just got married and stayed together, racial inequality would largely disappear. Her research reveals that Black kids raised by two parents still struggle far more than white kids from two-parent families, and do only about as well as white kids who only had one parent at home.

The numbers are stark. Black children in two-parent homes were two to four times more likely to get suspended or kicked out of school than white children with both parents. When it came time for college, there was a 25-point gap between how many Black versus white kids from two-parent families actually enrolled. By their mid-twenties, Black young adults from these families were three times more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts.

Despite representing half of all Black children in America, these two-parent Black families have been virtually ignored by researchers — just 2 out of 163 family structure studies published in leading journals between 2012 and 2022 examined their outcomes. Cross and senior correspondent Rachel Cohen Booth discussed the hidden costs of America’s marriage promotion spending, the research gaps that have allowed myths about Black families to persist, and why even two-parent Black households can’t escape structural racism. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

Your research strongly suggests that promoting these traditional two-parent families is not going to reduce racial inequality, but you do find some advantages for Black children raised in these kinds of households. Given that, do you think encouraging marriage is still a worthy policy goal or cultural aim, even if it doesn’t solve all the problems........

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