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Being a modern Black man in America

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In the White House currently living and functioning brilliantly, is the most important role model of a Black husband and father, present and accountable—President Barack Obama. We can’t all be like him, but the precedent has clearly been set.

“African American fathers are as different from one another as they are from other groups. They come in all shades, shapes, and types, yet the stereotyped Black father is seen—by those who are not of color—as a visitor to his family, underemployed, marginal to his family, inattentive to his children, rather violent, and plainly not in the family picture. In reality, African American fathers are as dedicated to their children and families as are men of other racial groups; some are models of perfection, and some really are deadbeats.”—H. Pipes McAdoo.

Long before their forced association with Caucasians and White social norms, African men and women had thousands of years of experience being parents, guardians, mentors and providers. African men were reared within cultural rules and expectations, that generally aimed at the survival of the family and kinship relations. African men found respect, identity, purpose and a sense of place within their societies by complying with both the social rules and behavioral expectations of their societies, and the many ways one could achieve success and fulfillment within those societies.

Slavery and the slave trade—whether European-driven or Arab-driven—changed all of that, forcing millions of African men and women to adjust to new forms of parenting and rearing their children. That African people in various parts of the world have survived and are still surviving, is a testament to their skills in adapting to new, sometimes strange, demands on their parenting abilities.

In the USA, ante-bellum slavery and its progeny, created various race-based caricatures of African descendent women and men to aid slavery’s existence and profit margins. Thus Black women became either dominating nannies who reared everybody’s children but their own, cooking, cleaning and otherwise taking control of all things household-related except being the real woman of the house, or willing prostitutes to prurient White desires. Black men became irresponsible semen-givers for increasing an owner’s stock of slaves, and a tireless beast of burden for slave labor. Masters did not generally prize or reward the parenting skills of Black men or women beyond teaching the Black young their inferior place within society.

However, beyond the notice of overseers and masters, Black families found ways of growing and surviving in spite of the hostile environments imposed on them. Black men and women married and tried to keep families together for as long as they could and in any ways they were able to do.

They continue that today, in spite of social stereotypes which say otherwise. Although many noted scholars, researchers and authors have repeatedly claimed the death and/or fatal dysfunction of the Black family, and the discernible predominance of both the Black matriarchy and the always-absent Black father, the facts say otherwise.

In spite of the tremendous odds against them, millions of Black men still find respect, employment and a sense of fulfillment in their roles as Black fathers in this country. Although read one way, the current statistics say that most urban Black families are single-mother headed without any viable male role models. Looked at another way, those same statistics show that 45.7 percent of Black households are headed by married couples and 43.6 percent of Black Americans have never been married.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 24.7 million children (33 percent) live absent their biological father, including 55.1 percent of all Black children, 31.1 percent of all Hispanic children, and 20.7 percent of all White children. Absent fathers is a country-wide epidemic, not merely a problem for the Black community.

Even though more than half of Black households may be headed by women, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that whether or not they live under the same roof, African American fathers overall remain much more involved with their children than their White and Latino counterparts, discernibly spending more time feeding, dressing, playing with and reading to their children.

Part of looking again at this dysfunctional idea of the absent Black man is to interrogate the standard model for family life in the USA, i.e., the nuclear two-parent, one-worker, two-to-three kids “Leave-it-to-Beaver” vision. That has been one option for Black American families, but never, given our circumstances, the only model. What has a much longer and much more practical vintage in the Black American experience has been and still is the Black extended family, with often multigenerational family members present to help raise children and provide a bulwark against catastrophe.

The Black extended family model has best been defined by psychologists Robert Joseph Taylor, Linda M. Chatters  thusly, “Extended family households are those in which, in addition to the household head, spouse/partner, and minor children, there are other individuals (related by blood/marriage or unrelated) who reside in the household. These individuals could be adult children and adult and minor grandchildren of the household head and spouse, as well as other relatives (siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles) and unrelated persons.” The extended family also may involve distant relatives and households in other cities, states and regions (like down South, as Maya Angelou described it). Within that model the mentoring, strong male in the family who answers the questions—“What does it mean to be a man?” “How should men appropriately treat their female partners?” “How does one become a responsible husband and father?” “How does one become a decent man and father in this world?”—need not be the father figure in the household, but can easily be the uncle, step-father, cousin, grandfather, etc. It is collaborative child-rearing and it still works well, as it did in Africa.

The challenges of Black fatherhood have not diminished in our society, but neither have the resilient waves of more and more Black men willing to shoulder the load.

In June 2015, in spite of mass incarceration, gang violence, police murders, the “new Jim Crow,” and other hiccups, Black fatherhood is still alive and well in America. Children are being reared, and the population is yet surviving.

There are also numerous programs available to assist Black fatherhood and parenting, including President Obama’s Black Male Initiative, “The Black Fatherhood Project,” a film by Jordan Thierry, and the Baltimore Responsible Fatherhood Project, among others. A great, classic film about the trials of being a respected and respectable Black man, husband and father, is Ivan Dixon’s and Abby Lincoln’s “Nothing But A Man,” which is available online.

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