"We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.""Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes," Mr. Obama said, to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it."
The speech was striking for its setting, and in how Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, directly addressed one of the most sensitive topics in the African-American community: whether absent fathers bore responsibility for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans.
Now I know, as a white, middle-class woman, some might say I don't have any right to say anything about this.
More after the jump
However, I've been practicing law for about 22 years now, and a large part of my practice is in the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court representing fathers who have been sued for child support, mothers seeking child support, children whose paternity must be determined and child support established, children being placed in foster care, parents (usually single females) being accused of abuse and neglect for everything from leaving their children unattended while they go off to work to bringing some guy into the household who treats the children badly. I'm tired. I'm tired of listening to grown men tell me they shouldn't be responsible for paying for a child they brought into the world because "it was a one night stand" and "I told her I'd pay for an abortion," or "she ain't gonna spend that money on them kids, anyhow," to "I'll only pay if she gives me visitation," to "I thought she was using birth control - ain't my fault she got pregnant on purpose," to "it's not my kid."
I'm tired of representing young women - sometimes barely past childhood themselves - who are before the court on abuse and neglect petitions because they don't make enough money to pay for day care or they never made it past their party phase and they dump the kids on their own mothers.
I'm tired of representing delinquent kids whose fathers haven't been seen for years or are in jail or will not acknowledge them, whose mothers are not around either due to work obligations or illness or disinterest, whose grandmothers or sometimes even great-grandmothers are unable to keep up with them due to age and infirmity and sometimes having responsibility for several grandchildren from more than one child who refuses to grow up and take responsibility for the lives they've brought into the world.
I'm tired of hearing little kids for whom I'm the guardian tell me they have never met their father or daddy never comes to their school, never calls, never visits except on Christmas and Easter. I'm tired of hearing little kids tell me of a father whose presence in their lives is sporadic at best, but who demands respect and obedience during the brief periods he floats back into their lives.
What's interesting to me is when I meet the great-grandparents and the grandparents, many times they're still together. They're the people who got married in the 50s and 60s and early 70s. It's a fact that the black family was more together in the 1950s than it is today.
I'm tired of the "Pampers Pappy" phenomenon. Pampers pappies show up every few weeks with a box of Pampers and formula for their offspring and wait to be congratulated for their enormous contributions. When the mother complains there's a lot of "baby mama drama" which sometimes ends up in the courts. Bitterness, recrimination, domestic assaults - they're all there. Any brief perusal of the internet will yield dozens of recent studies which tell us that over 70 percent of African American children are growing up in single-parent households and the children in these single-caretaker households suffer from far higher rates of poverty, delinquency, substance abuse, and early pregnancy than children from intact nuclear families.
Back in 1964 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then an Assistant Secretary of Labor, sounded the alarm on the drift in the black family. He was denounced as a racist, even though the empirical evidence he produced supported his position. He argued against the new welfare rules for which mothers were eligible only if they didn't have a man in the household. These rules still exist today, and have spawned an entire sub-culture of people who cheat on Section 8 eligibility requirements. Lots of women live with their boyfriend of the moment, but they'll lie about it if confronted, and if the presence of a man in Section 8 family housing is suspected he has to leave in order for the mother to keep the housing. There is little in this system which promotes stability or rewards parents for staying together. The thing is, an old white guy like Moynihan was never going to be credited with having told the truth. No, it takes someone from within the community who can say "we have a problem and we need to do something about it." Bill Cosby's been doing it for years, but he's not considered credible by some due to his own actions in producing a child out of wedlock and the blunt dismissiveness of his statements. He's a rich man far removed from the realities of the inner city.
So I'm glad that the man denounced as the "most liberal person in the Senate" came out and said what needed to be said. He understands what a lot of classic liberals refuse to understand, which is that the dysfunction of the African American family cannot be laid purely at the door of racism, that jobs creation and education alone will not cure this problem, and that there needs to be an attitude change on the part of the people making the babies. Children NEED stability. They need to know their fathers. I've met so many young black men who think being a man means you smoke, drink, drug, and have sex all you want and when someone looks at you funny you have to hurt him; otherwise you're a punk. The vast majority of the young black males I've represented have little to no contact with their fathers; many do not even know who their fathers are, and have no concept of what it means to be a responsible man.
I hope this bodes well for the future and that the sight of this dedicated father who is on the inside track to be the next President of the United States will make the young fathers and mothers sit up and take notice and be inspired to take responsibility for their children.
What would African Americans think if Affirmative Action were eliminated? Maybe it's too soon or maybe it could be done in steps. I'm just really curious. I don't have the answers.
Senator Webb is right to talk about the deleterious effect of labeling virtually everybody except the white male a disadvantaged minority somehow in need of a leg up, whereas the white male, no matter what his background or education or economic status, is supposed to be left to himself. The result is anger, a very deep, abiding anger on the part of the people who feel they've been left behind and everyone else is getting special treatment. Webb is also right to point out that AA originally started as an attempt to rectify the centuries of disadvantage endured by African Americans in this country, but now it's been extended to everyone else. Of course there's been racism and sexism in our society, but you can't legislate it all away, and demanding equal opportunity is not the same as requiring extra weight be given to racial or gender factors in order to artificially even the playing field.
When AA came in I started to hear the comments from the lower class white folks in the neighborhood in which I grew up, and my relatives from the depressed former coal mining area around Carbondale, PA (aka "the Bitters", as Wonkette calls them), complain that all the jobs were going to black people (later the Hispanics, the Asians, and whomever else), that no one cared about them, etc. I can't count the number of times I heard during the 70s and 80s, from family members and neighbors who worked in the federal government, that so-and-so, who happened to be black, was a lousy worker but couldn't be fired because he/she was black. Grossly unfair to the target of the gossip, who was never there to defend herself/himself, and not accurate, since poorly performing workers of any race can be disciplined or terminated, but it was a matter of Perception. If people perceive that other people are getting special treatment there is anger, resentment, and an assumption that the person receiving the special treatment really isn't competent at all and got the job because of race or gender and not on merit.
The other problem is this: How can we continue to assume that just by virtue of skin color or ethnic membership a person is inherently handicapped and must be given preferential treatment? How can we assume that the son of an African American middle class couple who went through school in a high-performing school district like Fairfax County and had all the advantages of living in this area is somehow more disadvantaged than a white son of a semi-literate single mother Wal-Mart clerk from deepest Appalachia?
We must stop focusing on race or gender as the basis for assistance and start focusing instead on other factors. Poor whites have no more advantages than poor blacks, poor Hispanics, or poor anything else. I listened to Obama's speech yesterday in Michigan. He talked about the need for education for ALL Americans, and of making college possible for ALL Americans who want to have college educations. I think he is the key to moving on from the initial assumptions of AA to a much fairer system which recognizes economic disparity. Moreover, he's plainly telling those who would be victims that you cannot have control your life if you are a victim. It's tempting to be a victim, because that way you are not responsible for your failures, but the downside is that it's a trap which makes your welfare and the welfare of your family and those dependent upon you dependent upon the "kindness of strangers." There develops a sense of entitlement BECAUSE one perceives oneself a victim, with no corresponding sense of self-respect and self-reliance. When we teach our children to beg and to expect handouts we're teaching them that they do not have to demand more from themselves, that they do not have to do what it takes to achieve a higher level of accomplishment or self-sufficiency.