AWOL Black FathersBy John Washington
21 Mar 2022
When my mother called me in from play one afternoon to meet the man seated in our living room, her introduction was redundant—I immediately knew who he was. And, right off, I did not like him. His absence had been a painful matter in my life. The house that we lived in explained some of it. It was unfit for human tenancy—a decaying hovel with a leaking roof, creaking structures, and a termite infestation. I was ashamed to let anyone other than my closest friends know where I lived.
I was 12 that year of 1956. This was the Jim Crow South where poverty was the default condition of the black masses. Black males were restricted to the lowly crafts of ditch digger, janitor, and farmer, unless they catered directly to the black community, in which case the jobs of preacher, teacher, and shop-owner were also open. Most worked the hardscrabble categories so there was poverty all around, and since my mother was the only breadwinner, our poverty was wretched.
But this is not a story of black victimhood. This is, instead, an essay about a flaw in black culture that is just as uncomfortable for me to speak about as it is for my black brothers and sisters to hear. But a problem must be acknowledged before it can be fixed. And the failure of black fathers is among the worst problems afflicting our community.
* * *
Does the criminal behavior of some young black males today owe something to a sense of lost masculinity? I feel sure that this is so. A friend who works as an Army recruiter told me that so many black males have criminal records, the military is no longer the instrument for building machismo that it was when I joined. So, in inner-city communities where viciousness defines manhood, darker paths have become the option.
In 1965, a controversial report entitled “The Negro Family: A Case of National Action” was published by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist working at the Labor Department. Moynihan concluded that a lot of the social problems affecting American blacks owed to the disintegration of the black family. “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society,” he wrote, “is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.” He went on:
* * *
I was stunned. A few months ago, I mentioned this to a black activist who was working on the problem of black violence in a nearby town. He had been trying to figure out why violence seemed to be endemic among their young black males and had reached a dead end. When I suggested that father-absence was not properly socializing black youth and asked him if he had read the Moynihan Report, he told me that the report was written by racist right-wingers determined to condemn blacks for their own misfortunes. I didn’t bring it up with him again. For now, the town’s solution is recreation centers.
It was not the first time I had heard the report dismissed in this way. It was basically the attitude of the black community upon the report’s publication. The backlash from the community was so militant and damning—reviling its author in the process—that the Johnson Administration dropped the issue and turned its attention to the Vietnam War. This reaction was not entirely surprising, given the demonization of blacks by many whites since first contact in the 1400s. Denigration used to justify outrageous and dehumanizing treatment produced a hypersensitivity among blacks that reflexively prevents us from accepting criticism from outsiders. Criticism from insiders has become something like heresy.
* * *
My childhood was filled with influential male role models who tackled life with guts and grit even though they were bent double by their humble labors and by the indignities of Jim Crow. These were my maternal grandfather, uncles, older cousins, and the responsible black fathers in the neighborhood, who took care of my early development as a young man until I got to the Army. I was part of a large clan that formed a protective ring around my mother and me. I was passed around my maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles, and older cousins who looked after me while my mother worked as a maid.
When I map these early experiences onto the experience of the black community today, I am angered that such a support system no longer exists. Where are my people? I would not have survived some of today’s inner-city neighborhoods plagued by high rates of father absence and no fill-in dads. Without family, homo sapiens would be a failed species.
* * *
Astonishingly, the subject of father-absence remains taboo among many black activists, even though the rate of father-absence among blacks is horrifying. For these activists, any attempt to discuss black cultural failures is a kind of victim-blaming and a distraction from what really ails the black community—the persistence of white supremacy.
The FBI’s crime database contains more chilling and embarrassing facts—data so inglorious that it took me a long time to accept them. I love my people and what I was reading left me angered and distressed. But I was not looking at opinion, I was looking at indisputable statistics, and they began to alter the way I thought about myself and my people. They finally cleared my psyche of victimology.
* * *
Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/03/21/awol-black-fathers/
