Chicago pastor Corey Brooks argues that the American welfare state, rather than slavery, is the main force that broke the Black family. In an opinion piece, Brooks contends that government programs introduced in the 1960s weakened the two-parent household in Black communities and that the remedy lies in restoring family structure and opportunity on the ground.
Brooks builds his argument on the work of economists and scholars Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, both affiliated with the Hoover Institution. Steele's claim, as Brooks presents it, is that Black Americans were subjected to socialism-like government programs before any other group, and that this history shaped outcomes for families for decades. Brooks also says that after the 1960s, national policy moved from equal opportunity toward race-based remedies, a shift he argues created permanent dependency rather than lasting advancement. In his telling, the goal of equal treatment under the law gave way to programs that sorted citizens by race and, in his view, locked recipients into a cycle that outlasted the policies themselves.
The demographic figures at the center of his case come from the U.S. Census. In 1960, 22 percent of Black children lived in single-parent homes. Brooks says that share more than tripled in the decades that followed, and he attributes the increase largely to welfare programs from the 1960s onward. He argues that benefit structures paid more for absent fathers than for present ones, giving families an economic incentive to live apart. The point is central to his reasoning: if the system rewards separation, he contends, then the family breakdown it produced was a predictable result rather than an accident of social change.
Brooks links the consequences of that household pattern to the streets of his own city. He says roughly 80 percent of households on Chicago's South Side have one parent, and he connects the absence of fathers to gang recruitment and violence among young men. For Brooks, the problem is not only economic but developmental, since boys who grow up without a present father, he suggests, are more easily drawn toward gangs that offer structure, status and belonging.
Brooks speaks from direct experience of that work. He runs Project H.O.O.D., a community center on the South Side that offers job training, including trades, and mentoring for young men. His argument is that practical opportunity and male guidance are the tools that can rebuild families and reduce the pull of gangs. The center's model, as he describes it, pairs employable skills with relationships that give young men an adult presence they may otherwise lack.
The trend in household structure is documented by census data, but the causal explanation Brooks offers is contested. His claims about the effect of welfare on family formation rest on his reading of Sowell and Steele, and the broader debate over whether public benefits drive family breakdown, or respond to economic and social pressures that already existed, remains unresolved. The opinion piece presents Brooks's position on the policy question; the census numbers he cites are the more firmly established part of his case, while the explanation of why they moved as they did is the part that remains open to dispute.