Leave to Canada to highlight a report that the U.S. media seems to have missed.
The Toronto Star published this piece about the refutation of a report — “Called Out at Home” — which claims the reason there are so few African Americans in baseball these days is because of single-parent households. The upshot of the study, issued by the Austin Institute for The Study of Family and Culture:
70 per cent of African-American children are born to unmarried mothers, up from roughly five per cent in 1947, when big league baseball integrated. That rise coincides with slumping baseball enrollment among black youth, largely because kids with absent dads aren’t introduced to the sport….
I’m certainly no sociologist, that figure seems ridiculously high and, IMO, insulting, as is the opening line of the report’s executive statement, “It takes a father to make a professional baseball player.”
Thoughts?
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