A hard conversation about family, faith, and responsibility is taking place between Delano Squires and Jason Whitlock, centered on Squires’ new book, “The Vanishing Black Family.” They argue that shifts in marriage, parenting, and cultural priorities are driving outcomes in education and crime, and they push faith and family as anchors that can reverse those trends. This piece rewrites their exchange in a direct, plainspoken voice, keeping the key quotes intact and the focus on personal responsibility and community renewal.
Delano Squires grew up watching peers slide into gangs and prison while he kept his distance, and that contrast shaped his thinking. “At a certain point in my teenage years, I said, ‘Well, it’s because of the families we were raised in. All our parents were married, … we were going to the same church, same values across households, a community of men who were raising us and keeping us in line. And I realized that family structure was the key,” Squires tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Jason Whitlock Harmony.” His childhood made him see family structure as the central variable that determined whether a young man stayed on track or fell off it.
That realization pushed him to put ideas down on paper, which is how his book was born. “So from there, just one of those things that I’ve always thought about, the importance of family, the importance of marriage, importance of my dad in my day-to-day life, his everyday presence. And at a certain point, I wanted to write about it,” he explains. The book argues that when fathers are present and marriage is treated as foundational, kids do better in school and communities are safer.
Squires lays the problem out bluntly: marriage decline correlates with a host of social problems, and cultural choices matter more than simple economics. “Men and women are continuing to have children, particularly in our community, where 70% of kids are born out of wedlock,” Squires tells Whitlock. He points to a paradox that undercuts purely economic explanations for family breakdown.
Over decades the non-marital birth rate has climbed even as poverty fell, which suggests cultural shifts are driving family patterns. “The other thing that we’ve seen over the course of the last 60 years is that as poverty has decreased in the black community, the non-marital birth rate has increased,” he continues, using NBA players as an example. Squires points to athletes earning millions while fathering multiple children out of wedlock as evidence that money alone does not restore marriage.
He does not deny economics play a role, but he insists they are not the root cause. “In a league that was 70-plus percent black, you had guys who were fathering four, five, six, seven kids out of wedlock, even though they were making millions of dollars a year,” he explains, noting that economics appear to have very little to do with children being born out of wedlock. The trend suggests a deeper cultural devaluation of marriage and stable parenting.
“I think economics is a part of it, but the real reason is because marriage is no longer seen as valuable, desirable, accessible, or indispensable for the purpose of forming a family. And the reason for that goes back much further than current economic trends,” he tells Whitlock. That view reframes public policy debates: incentives and transfers matter, but they do not replace norms about marriage and fatherhood.
Whitlock brings faith into the center of the conversation, arguing that spiritual life shapes whether families hold together. “If we had more God, we could have a successful marriage, and we could raise up better kids. That’s the missing ingredient,” Whitlock says. He links a turn away from religious foundations with a turn toward materialism as the chief hope for solving social problems.
He presses the point even harder, laying responsibility at the feet of cultural choices rather than distant institutions. “The cause of the vanishing black family is because we’re not looking for God to be our provider. We’re looking for money to be our provider. And so, whatever makes us the most money is going to fix the most problems,” he continues. “And to me it’s, you know, we’ve just lost focus on who our real provider is. It’s not man-made money. It’s God,” he adds.
The debate that Squires and Whitlock stage is straightforward in its implications: restore marriage, revive local churches and mentoring networks, and ask men to take responsibility at home. Those are conservative prescriptions that reject simple economic determinism and instead put cultural renewal and individual duty front and center. The bigger point is that stable families were once the engine of opportunity, and rebuilding those structures starts with choices people make now.
