Steve Sailer writes: I’ve often wondered if the reactionary strictness of Islamic family morals that irritates us sophisticated Westerners so much has something to do with Islam originating just north of the edge of the black world, with its high levels of familial chaos so evident on this graph. For example, Amman, Jordan has had its own black slum for a long time. The Arab slave trade introduced lots of blacks into Middle East (although the black population didn’t grow quickly like it did in the American South because Arab slaveowners tended to castrate the men and generally work slaves to death).
If you are from Sweden, the ideas of women working outside the house, divorce, non-marital childbearing, etc. doesn’t seem too threatening to Swedish culture’s stability and efficiency. You look around and ask, “What could possibly go wrong?”
On the other hand, in the Islamic countries of North Africa and the Middle East, if you ask what could possibly go wrong if we loosen up our family mores, you look to the south and and say, “Oh, yeah, a lot …”
On another note, the knowledge embedded in this graph of what family structures are like in Sub-Saharan Africa, and how they resemble African-American dysfunction, is simply unknown to probably 95% of working American pundits. The idea that, say, the structure of the family of the President of the United State while growing up was par for the course for Kenyan fathers is just unknown. James Q. Wilson brought up sub-Saharans’ casual attitudes toward childrearing in a 2003 book. But in standard American punditry, Africans didn’t have any culture whatsoever before 1619, so therefore all bad behavior by Africans in America is the fault of white people. Pay reparations now.
