During his speech at the Values Voters Summit, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney suggested that the biggest problem facing African American communities is “out-of-wedlock childbirth.”

Ann and I will use the bully pulpit to teach America’s children that before they have babies, they should get married. It’s time to make out-of-wedlock births out-of-fashion again!

Bill Cosby related that in some inner cities: ‘There are whole blocks with scarcely a married couple, whole blocks without responsible males to watch out for wayward boys, whole neighborhoods in which little boys and girls come of age without seeing up close a committed relationship and perhaps never having attended a wedding.’ This simply breaks my heart. And then there are the broad national implications of this tragedy. A nation built on the principles of the founding fathers cannot thrive when so many children are being raised without fathers in the home.

While “close to 70% of all new [African American] babies are born to unwed mothers–about three times the rate of illegitimate birth that prevails among whites and Asians” — preaching about family values does not address the structural racial inequalities that are undermining African American families. As author and social critic Paul Street points out:

The phenomena that are hopelessly muddled include an inequitably funded educational system that apparently just happens to provide poorer instruction for blacks than whites; an electoral system whose voting irregularities and domination by big money happens to disproportionately disenfranchise blacks; a criminal justice system that happens to especially stop, arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate African-Americans; a political economy whose tendency toward sharp inequality happens to especially impoverish and divide black communities; and residential markets and housing practices that happen to disproportionately restrict African-American children to the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods and communities, where kids’ chances of learning are significantly diminished by the threats of injury and violence. The list goes on.

Rev. Jesse Jackson made a similar argument in a rare appearance on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. Jackson argued that in African American communities “jobs out, investment out, guns and drugs in. We do not grow drugs, nor manufacture them. To unleash semiautomatic weapons as legal again to enforce the drug trade. Taxes up, service down. First-class — second-class schools.”

There’s a phenomenon here that lends itself to marginalizing a whole body of American people. We must take that on seriously, because in some sense, it costs more to lock up than to lift up.

While conservatives, and some liberals, are generally reluctant to discuss or address America’s deep racial inequalities, Mitt Romney’s misunderstanding of the problems plaguing African American communities may rest in his sheer reluctance to learn. Back in September, Mitt Romney was one of four top-tier GOP candidates who skipped a minority issues debate, citing a “scheduling conflict.” Unfortunately, rather than address what he calls one of the “biggest threats to the fabric of our society” with tailored solutions, Romney prefers to apply misguided ‘family values’ templates and leave the real problem unresolved.

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