This is a discussion of the numbers I used in the article “Sexual Race War in America 2000-2030,” which I put here separately for ease of reading. The main article can be found at: https://www.bronzeagepervert.yoga/p/sexual-race-war
I relied on queries to the CDC Wonder archive regarding birth certificates in America for the years 2024 and 2016. The measure I use is the percentage of total births to women of demographic X by men of the various races, in those years. The query site is here, https://wonder.cdc.gov/natality-expanded-current.html …various queries can be run.
I also relied on queries to the ACS census survey for years 2024 and 2014. Here I asked regarding women of demographic X with reported children 0-4 years old in their households, specifying for the race of these children, i.e., where it differed from the mother’s race. Their query site is here https://usa.ipums.org/usa/
I discussed most of the findings in the main article so I’m reserving this for some discussion of details, some anomalies, and some further striking numbers:
The “Unknown Race of Father” problem on the CDC Wonder Natality archives
Concurrent with the rise in unmarried motherhood over the last few decades has been upward shift of another natality phenomenon, the “unknown-race-father” category for the CDC. How one treats the “unknown-race” father classification is a matter of legitimate argument. You could assume this is a recording or administrative matter only and that the proportions of the unknown-race paternity are similar to the known. I actually think this is sometimes true and that “unknown” doesn’t mean the same thing in all places in the United States: it probably means one thing for, say, a college-educated married or unmarried nonhispanic white mother in Orange County, a non-college married white mother in Oregon with vaguely “hippie” or weird pretensions, versus unmarried 23 year old nonhispanic white mothers in Philadelphia, Memphis or Atlanta, or white Hispanic mothers in the Bronx or Massachusetts. The “unknown” rate of 18.8% in Orange County is almost surely not masking any substantial black paternity, but the upwards of 50%+ unknown rates in places like Nashville, Memphis, and Philadelphia almost surely are. But the latter is by far the most frequent case for the “unknown” category.
There are first of all circumstantial but very suggestive numerical reasons for suspecting that the “unknown” category is disproportionately, and maybe substantially, a signal of black paternity:
There’s also a 2008 study (Ma, Sai. “Paternal Race/Ethnicity and Birth Outcomes.” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 98, No. 12 (December 2008)) that shows the outcomes for “unknown-race father” are statistically considerably worse than for any other group, including for known-race being black, which would be the next-worst signal of outcome. Sociologically this tracks with black paternity. Ma himself I think tried to argue that the reasons this group of children had such bad outcomes were not race-dependent, and he may be right that this is a particularly “pathological” subset of births that cut across races, but for obvious reasons one would expect black fathers are overrepresented in this group.
In minute cases I’ve looked at, the “unmasking” of the unknown rate also numerically suggests black fatherhood at considerable rates. In cases like Henrico County, Virginia—incidentally one of the oldest settlements in the United States, or Indianapolis, Indiana, a reduction in the unknown percentage from 2016 to 2024 unmasked substantial increases in black paternity…I will mention these examples with numbers below.
Whether the “unknown-race-father” category is just slightly above the known percentage of black or much more so is for now impossible to tell, and again it probably varies by location and situation, but I think that given all this, a substantial attribution is defensible. It changes results quite a bit whether you think 30% or 50% or 70% of the unknown category is in truth black fathers, but I will present in what follows both the raw percentage, the percentage of known-race fathers, and the adjusted speculative “true” percentage under what I consider a conservative 30% portion of the unknown category assumed to be black. I actually think 50% of the “unknown” category being black, and even above that, in many regions of the United States is very defensible, both because of the already-mentioned sociological correlations and numerical suggestions, and because of a known differential in black-versus-white paternity attribution.
I think even if working-class white males have substantially adopted “black deadbeat father” wigger type behavior, the 30% composition of the “unknown” group being actually black is still conservative. But I remind the reader: the known race percentages in what will follow are still remarkable. Furthermore the findings of the ACS Census survey, which is a separate data set—with its own methodological shortcomings and noise—mostly support my ideas here.
Under a 30% reclassification of the rising “unknown-race-father” category as black in areas with large numbers of unmarried white births, the national percentage of black-fathered births for white mothers overall changes from 3% to about 5%. This seems low until you remember that even a 3% asymmetric outbreeding rate is at the very higher range of baseline female class hypergamy rates, and 5% takes it into the range of historical colonial-outbreeding patterns. Even without further alterations and with a baseline sub-replacement TFR, such a rate would have substantial demographic effects over a few generations.
I need to emphasize, however, that this would in any case be a national number which includes vast portions of America where there is minimal cross-racial contact. I’m presenting this national figure because it is important on its own. But as for the questions that I address in this essay, of what happens regarding natality numbers in situation of cross-racial contact in the 2020’s, for that you need to look at high-contact counties or at least counties with at least some minimal black male presence.
If you look at particular counties in America there are cases where the percentage of births to unmarried white mothers by black fathers is zero or close to—but these tend to be places with few or no black people at all, and with very small numbers of births to unmarried mothers overall. There are other counties where this percentage is “science fiction enormous”—Richland County, South Carolina (location of University of South Carolina, though almost surely not describing female students there) hits 28.0% black among known fathers over all age groups, and 37.7% at age 20-24. Baltimore city reaches 35.9% among known fathers, 42.3% at age 25-29. Norfolk city, VA is at 24.7% with zero unknowns at all. Prince George’s County in Maryland is at 40.0% among known, and at age 25-29 literally 100% of known fathers are black (with 67.6% Unknown). In Minneapolis, around 20% of known-race fathers to unmarried NH white mothers are black overall, but reaching about 35% of those of known race to age bracket 20-24. Again these are not “adjusted” rates regarding the “unknown” portion, but the percentage of known-race births: adjusted for the likely black share of “unknown race” paternity, these percentages are very likely close to 50% or I would guess above. That said, these are very-low-n locations: for example in the case of Minneapolis the numbers are striking enough but, similar to cases where there are 0% recorded black-father births, we’re talking about dozens of births only. In Richland, South Carolina the CDC records a somewhat higher number, but still only about 200-300 births to white unmarried mothers in both 2016 and 2022, and for Minneapolis for age brackets 20-24, there were only 119 births in 2024 to this demographic, of which only 76 were known-race; similarly in Charlotte, North Carolina where also in youth bracket of 20-24 NH white unmarried mothers you have a striking one-in-three of known-race births to black fathers, nevertheless that’s only about 34 out of 101 known-race births, with only 137 total births.
Top 30 Counties by female Unmarried White nonhispanic births
To get past this problem of noisy and possibly misleading low-n samples I decided to look at the top 30 and top 50 counties in the United States by total number of births to unmarried nonhispanic white mothers. I don’t want to just go through long lists of descriptions so I’ll present this chart below and describe the main findings.
I say this also in the main article but I repeat it here for just these two paragraphs:
For unmarried nonhispanic white mothers, I found the following. With a few very telling exceptions which I will address in a moment, in most of the top 30 (and in fact top 50) counties by total unmarried white nonhispanic births, about 10-15% of the known-race births to nonhispanic unmarried white mothers are by black fathers. There is notably a 9% floor on this share almost nationally. It doesn’t matter if it’s the northeast (Massachusetts is actually a very active contributor, including in formerly “endogamous” working class cities like Fall River), the sunbelt, Florida, San Antonio Texas, Cold Springs Colorado, the southeast, the upper midwest—Ohio and Indiana counties are again very consistent “contributors”—this floor holds regardless of region of the United States, and is present equally in almost all poorer and wealthier counties that include some minimal black male presence. There is furthermore a second “floor” at age bracket 20-24 where this percentage normally shoots up to 19-22%. Again these are the known numbers only, without taking into account the composition of the “unknown” race-of-father component. This holds in America among unmarried white mothers wherever a minimum threshold of 5-6% black male presence is reached: again county borders are hardly “real” but it’s the measure I had and it appears that any minimum of 5% of county male population as black will generate these numbers regardless of region or city.
Furthermore in most of these counties there are zero CDC-recorded other-race fathers to this demographic. In other words, it’s an entirely bimodal phenomenon, where the known race of the father is either white or black, but no other race. Adjusted for the likely disproportionate share of “unknown” fathers that are black, the percentage in question shoots up to a regular 20-30% of all births for all age groups in these higher-contact counties
I found the regularity of this pattern striking on its own: although the unknown share varies by county, in almost every county the known share of black paternity to unwed white mothers plus attributing around 30% of the unknown share also to black males, will add up to around 20-30% of births. If the black male share of “unknown” is higher, as I suspect it is, obviously the adjusted “true” share of births will go up too.
What happened in Indianapolis is typical for much of the United States during this period. In 2016 there were 2605 total births to unmarried nonhispanic white mothers in this county and by 2024 there was a 50% decline in total births to this demographic (married white women—and everybody else—also experienced a significant fertility drop since 2016, but not quite this steep). The percentage of known-race fathers that were black to unmarried white mothers in Indianapolis in 2026 was 14.9%. In 2024, this percentage had risen to 18.8% of known-race father births. But the unknown percentage declined by 8 points: from 32.5% in 2016 unknown to about 24% in 2024 unknown. (I don’t know if it’s legitimate to treat this as an instance of the “unmasking” of the real composition of the unknown category in parts of America, and I actually suspect this isn’t the whole story, but in this case unknown % fell by 8 points and the black-father known percentage rose by 4 points). In Indianapolis in 2016 the phenomenon seemed to be concentrated in single mothers over the ages of 25 or 29; only 12% of known-race father births in Indianapolis to the 20-24 age bracket were by black fathers. By 2024, this had doubled to more than 20%. The acceleration in this phenomenon since 2016 in almost all of America is almost entirely due to the younger age cohorts. This is true even in Fall River, Massachusetts, a white ethnic working-class city in a county with only about 5-6% black population and surrounding counties that rise to no more than 8-9% black. But by 2024, 15% of known-race father births to white unmarried mothers were to black males, and among the younger cohorts, in the 20-24 age bracket, although this was under 10% in 2016, as per the national pattern this percentage than doubled to over 20% by 2024.
There are certain other notable but genuinely freakish examples I could bring up. Henrico County in Virginia in the suburbs of Richmond is one of the oldest settled places in the United States. It’s now roughly 29.7% nonhispanic black, about 49.5% white, 9.4% Asian, and quite segregated. Among unmarried nonhispanic white mothers, the black-father share of known fathers went from 5.2% in 2016 to 19.5% in 2024—nearly quadrupled—while the unknown category actually fell from 17.7% to 12.9%. It appears in the data set as one of the most dramatic accelerations outside Richland County, SC. The raw absolute count of black-fathered births roughly tripled even as total births declined. This isn’t a tiny county, but it’s not a big-number county…we’re talking about 300 or so births total and black-fathered births in the dozens.
But the directionality here as well as in the ACS survey, which I address below, is what matters. Even in cases where there was a small number of births overall, which you could dismiss as anomaly or noise…the fact is that all these small-n counties trended in one direction only. So they add up, and using error confidence intervals, as I do below RE the ACS census reports, reveals a likely very high rate of black-fathered births for this demographic regardless of noise.
In places like Louisville, Kentucky, where the unknown percentage actually substantially rose since 2016, the increase in known black paternity among births to this demographic also increased, albeit not as dramatically. But in Louisville as of 2024 over 50% of births to unmarried white mothers are by “race father unknown”; with an 18-19% of known-race births to black fathers (22.6% at ages 20-24) it’s methodologically sound in this case to speculate on the true rate of black paternity to unwed-white-mother births being anywhere from 25% to 50% of their total births by 2024. This was not the case in 2016, let alone in the 1980’s when the number of unmarried-mother-births were dramatically higher. America’s unmarried “teen mom” birth rate fell very steeply since the 1990’s at the same time that an increasing and possibly very large share of present-day unmarried white nonhispanic births are by black males.
The ACS Census Survey Study
The American Community Survey is a survey run by the Census Bureau continuously every year. They send questionnaires to roughly 3.5 million randomly selected households across the US…and it’s mandatory by law to respond. The household fills out a form covering everyone living there their age, race, ethnicity, education, income, relationship to each other, marital status, and so on. The fact that it’s mostly mandatory is very good because it gets rid of the self-selection problems on surveys. But this survey is small sample size at the local level…so it’s decent for national numbers but local figures can be distorted.
For this data set I queried (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/) on the presence of children 0-4 attached to households with mothers of various demographics…you can specify for race of mother and race of child, education level and marital status, etc.; so the query can return, if you specify, the race of the children, which can then be compared against the mother’s. This is self-declared by the mother herself.
There were various confirmations as well as surprises when I compared the results against the CDC birth certificate numbers. Some of these discrepancies I still can’t explain in any way that satisfies me or the experts I asked (the LLM’s are also confused by the way, and can’t find a good explanation for some of the things in the data set). To begin with, of the children 0-4 that Asian women reported in their households, 17.4% were white or white-connected (white-mixed-race), which almost exactly matches the CDC birth records of 17% of share of births to Asian females in 2024 to white male fathers.
The full picture from the ACS for Asian mothers for 2024, of the children they self-reported ages 0-4 in their households, the racial shares are:
73.5% Asian (single race, same group as mother)
15.4% White-connected multiracial (white father)
8.1% Asian-Asian or Asian-PI multiracial (different Asian group father)
1.5% White single race
0.6% Black-connected
~1% everything else
Although again the numbers are somewhat small on the ACS when you get down to granular level groups or locations, I also found the following: the interbreeding rate was much higher among Japanese and Chinese than among “other” Asians that are grouped in by the ACS (“Other Asian/PI,” the big bucket with Indians, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, etc.); 36% of Japanese mothers and close to 30% of Chinese mothers on the ACS reported having some type of white child 0-4 in their households. I think you can run another racial classification which would disambiguate the “remaining other Asian” category, which would be interesting, but which I’m leaving for the future. On the CDC form you can do something sort of similar, and there I found extremely high interbreeding with white males from Filipino females (over 30% of their births nationally at to white male fathers), but quite low overall for Indian Asian females (3% nationally). The problem with granularity on the ACS is that although interesting, again, sample size gets too small anyway.
For unmarried white nonhispanic mothers on the ACS, of their children 0-4, 20.90% of children are nonwhite, with 17.82% coded as two or more races. Of that 17.82%, 10.15% are black-involved multiracial, 4.96% Hispanic nonblack multiracial, and 2.70% nonhispanic nonblack multiracial (white-Asian, white-AIAN, etc.). Adding black single-race (1.52%), the total black-connected figure is 11.67%. This is larger than the CDC calculation for some type of black paternity, which I expected given the big “unknown race of father” on the birth certificates for this group, but not as large as I expected. But keep in mind that this is for the national figure and for what could be at certain local and unstable-household situations in high-contact counties, an undercount due to low sample size. There are further problems in self-identification involved here: it appears that in places like Fall River, MA, Cape Verdean males, or their children, may often unwilling to self-identify as “black” even on a census form and so forth. To get past some of these problems I tried to look also at the local level, more on which below.
I checked the 2014 ACS to run it against the 2024 to see patterns of change in the racial composition of this group’s young children. The black-connected percentage went from 9.58% to 11.67%, only a 22% relative increase. But this number understates what’s happening because of the age gradient. In 2014 the trend was declining within cohorts: ages 3-4 at 10.0%, age 0 at 8.8%. In 2024 it flipped to accelerating: ages 3-4 at 11.6%, age 0 at 13.0%. In other words the most recent births are pulling away from the pooled average toward higher-than-average black-connected identity for share of children to women of this demographic.
To get around some of the problems I mentioned above regarding the distortions of the national rate, which includes many parts of America where there is minimal black population, I did a couple of things…first of all a county-level aggregation by Black population threshold.
When I pooled counties by their black population share, the rates climbed sharply: >5% black counties showed 16.9%, >10% showed 18.6%, >15% showed 20.2%, >20% showed 20.6%. The curve flattened fast as you can see. You only needed 5% black male presence to see rates well above national. For the age-0 cohort in >10% black counties there is a huge 21.0% of children in the households of this demographic of white unmarried mothers with some kind of black identity. But here as in the CDC measures, a minimal 5% black male presence is enough to generate these types of numbers.
I also ran confidence intervals at county level. Individual county estimates were noisy (n=15-44 typically) but the direction was unanimous. Every urban county with adequate sample pointed above the national average, with lower bounds of the 95% CIs consistently in the 10-17% range. Columbus Ohio was the most reliable at n=44: point estimate 27.3%, CI [16.3%, 41.8%]. No county contradicted the pattern.
The reason I had to try pooling counties with some minimal black percentage and/or run confidence intervals (I used 95% CI) is because at the county-level the numbers on the ACS for this measure are often science-fiction astronomical. If I were cynical the way “demographers” online today often are, I would mention these numbers. For example in many counties in Virginia and elsewhere, on the ACS, 50% or over of the children reported in the “households” of unmarried white mothers are often black, with numbers regularly running over 30%. For the “never married” as opposed to the divorced category the numbers are also enormous at the county level, with 50% in some places in the south and numbers often at 30-40% in the midwest and such. But these are tiny numbers, with samples in the teens or under a total of 50. I’m sure that once others find these they’ll sensationalistically hype them and it would lead to amplification on social media. But it’s highly misleading because of the low sample size. This is why I tried some corrections for it…pooling areas with a certain minimal black population percentage, or running 95% CI …but the thing is, although these are small samples, they unanimously trend in only one direction, and often by very large margins.
For married white nonhispanic mothers, the two+ races bucket for the children splits into roughly equal thirds: black, hispanic, nonhispanic nonblack. Black is the smallest component. The total Black-connected rate for married is 2.86% versus 11.67% unmarried…a 4× gap. And the married rate is flat to slightly declining in the youngest cohorts, showing no acceleration.
But the really odd part here is that even for married white mothers and married college white mothers, the ACS is showing about 9% of the children living in their households as multiracial of some type. This is very different from the CDC birth certificate dataset, which showed these groups as having minimal nonwhite paternity: only 2-3% of fathers declared on the birth certificates for 2024 for white college married mothers are nonwhite. These groups had about 97-98% white paternity on the CDC birth certificate data set, nationally. That’s by far the more complete count, but the national level for the ACS, although smaller and therefore more vulnerable to sample distortions…it’s still a pretty big national sample. So it’s a 3x discrepancy when you then look at the ACS data versus the CDC data. I don’t really know how to account for this, but I tried to think it through.
The slightly larger “third” of that ~10% share of “nonwhite” children is some type of hispanic classification. This is a special category on the ACS and other census forms that is often marked by hispanics to indicate “other” or mixed race status with hispanic or hispanic-white characteristics. As is known many hispanics in America identify as white. A possible explanation here is that the father is marked as white on the CDC birth certificate, but later, when the mother alone fills out the ACS census survey form, she will mark down their child as mixed-race or “other”-race due to the father’s hispanic status. The racial classification system of the CDC birth forms doesn’t allow that kind of granularity, or the mother or parents may not know what to mark down. They may also come to think of hispanic as a “race” by the time they fill out the ACS survey. These are two possible explanations then, neither entirely convincing: that the father is marked as white on the CDC form, but the child as another (mixed) race on the ACS form, or that the forms themselves differ, with the CDC form being an older and less specific version.
This, however, wouldn’t explain the black discrepancy between these two data sets: for college white nonhispanic mothers who are married, the rate of black paternity on the CDC form is tiny, barely above 1%; it’s about three times that on the ACS census form. I’ve found no good explanation for this. Adoption as an explanation wouldn’t cover it. What might explain part of it is that white nonhispanic mothers who give birth to a part-black baby at the time of birth are unmarried, and therefore show up in the unmarried column on the CDC form, will be married by the time the ACS is filled out, and so will show up in the married column on this survey. There are also associated darker and more cartoonish explanations that can be thought up for this discrepancy.
Unmarried white Puerto Rican mothers went from 8.69% to 21.32% black-connected children in 2014 versus 2024…a near-tripling in a decade. For age 0 in 2024, or the youngest children, it was 29.7% black-connected identity…although very low n again so. But this is entirely in keeping with the CDC numbers for white hispanics in the eastern part of the United States.
For all these groups black paternity isn’t in the context of marriage, which is why “interracial marriage rates” are not really relevant for studying this phenomenon—it’s the measure actually that most past studies have focused on, and it’s very misleading. Even “cohabitation” is not in play here: 5.16% of unmarried white women with a partner are cohabiting with a black-connected man, but 11.67% of their children are Black-connected. The 2.3× ratio implies a large share of conceptions happen outside cohabiting relationships. For married women the gap is much smaller at 1.4× …still odd though. But these pregnancies by black fathers aren’t really taking place within any stable relationships that can be measured. I assume it’s not just casual sex or one-night stands. I think possibly these women go through with their pregnancies because their black “boyfriend” says he’ll stay with them but leaves at the last moment or around then. This disappointment in and bad feelings for their truant black “boyfriend” may also lead to these women not accurately marking the race of the father (or at all acknowledging his existence) on the CDC birth certificate and so on. But this is speculation.
Throughout this post I looked at a very basic figure that really isn’t studied much at all: the share of births/children of a given female demographic group fathered by various races of males in a society that has multiple races present; and I studied this in situations of high contact so I could observe relevant effects. This is an important figure regardless of trends or causes. But it may well be that the big thing here isn’t just a surge in black-fathered births, but a drastic reduction in overall births…with a faster or steeper drop in white-fathered births. This is indeed what seems to be happening. For white unmarried women, white-fathered births collapsed 24% overall, and 37% for ages 18-24. Black-fathered births dropped only 8-9%. (This in itself is notable and requires explanation). But here’s the other thing I found. In 128 counties black-fathered births actually grew in absolute terms; of those 128, only 15 also saw white-fathered growth. The other 113 saw white paternity declining by hundreds while Black paternity rose by tens. White-fathered growth occurred in only 47 of 540 qualifying counties (8.7%) versus Black-fathered growth in 128 of 363 (35.3%).
I remind the reader what I mentioned also in the main article: the total teen mom births by white fathers—again, not all-ages unmarried, but teen mom births—in the late 1980’s-early 1990’s, when social conservatives raised a huge panic over this…the number of those births was comparable and very probably larger than the entire number produced by white married mothers with no college education in 2024. The all-around collapse in fertility in America is not really a function of marriage or “family formation” in the end. I believe what I said in my original fertility article, that it is a much more serious psychological-sociosexual shift and is compatible with America being a much more sexually “conservative” nation now overall.
In fine, the ACS and CDC converge from different angles. For unmarried white mothers, the ACS age gradient (youngest cohorts highest) is explained by the CDC showing white births collapsing while black births hold steady or grow in the same counties. The ACS confidence intervals showing every urban county pointing high are confirmed by the CDC showing exactly those counties experiencing the sharpest white-black divergence. These are two independent federal data sets generally converging. The anomalies in the ACS are something I can’t yet explain though.