Black Children Fatherless? Why The Surprise?

“In neighborhoods where men are missing in action, youth violence is more likely, a recent University of Michigan study has concluded.” So begins an article from a Chicago based black advocacy organization whose name I do not wish to publicize.

In my opinion, this is an unremarkable study. And I reference it as same because anyone with an intellectual capacity above that of plant life knows this. It is a waste of time and resources to regurgitate the obvious.

What the author of the study should be focusing on are the causal factors for same. The author said, “When you take men out of the community you have this scarcity of men who could be positive role models and provide economic stability.” This would be more easily accepted by those of us who actually explore such things if it were not specious in intent.

Let me explain. The author of the article writes: “The professor pointed to several factors that may account for the male shortage in Flint and similar communities: Across the United States, men have been more likely to lose their jobs and were more likely to seek unemployment away from their communities. They also experienced higher mortality rates than women due to violence and disease; and higher incarceration rates have also siphoned men away from their neighborhoods. … In light of these findings, Kruger suggested that intervention programs that strengthen relationships between fathers and children could mitigate youth violence. He also said that officials need to rethink policies that over-criminalize and over-incarcerate men for low-level infractions.”

For those who missed it, what the author is doing is shifting blame. The idea that the men in question have lost their jobs and moved away to other domiciles for work-related purposes is as gratuitous as saying a morbidly obese person is slightly overweight. The problem isn’t about men abandoning their children; it is about sin and immorality.

It is about a population group that has been encouraged to embrace commonality and eschew modernity. It is about a population group that has been shown tolerance for animalistic behavior among which are abortion, violence, and sexual promiscuity.

Black women comprise 13 percent of the childbearing population (ages 15-44), and yet they have 36 percent of all abortions. With that murderous disregard for the life of unborn children why would we expect black fathers on the broad scale to feel a sense of accountability to their born children? The majority of images permeated in low income neighborhoods with large black populaces are antithetical to modernity and personal responsibility.

It is disgusting to hear black athletes during the college bowl season memorializing their mothers for working two and three jobs to raise them. How about we start memorializing those women who are responsible enough not to have children before they are married? How about we place the emphasis on men and women not behaving as sexually driven animals unable to control their primal urges?

The truth be told (and empirical evidence supports same), most black men (and women) aren’t interested in having children; they’re interested in having sex. Period, end of story. If they were looking to be parents, they would approach the responsibility for same differently.

Disagree if you feel you must, but the supportive evidence proves me right. And, please, enough of the oft-used excuse that it’s because of slavery and the fact that the male slaves were sold away from their families.

The idea that it is because of high incarceration rates and low educational attainment is not an excuse either. But both are supportive facts pursuant to the points that I am making.

There is a final point I would be remiss in not making in this truncated treatise opposing what the author of the article for the Chicago-based black advocacy group wrote and it is that ultimately the findings referenced will lead to blaming whites and making demands for money to combat the lack of responsible black fathers, and the chilling effect said is having in urban areas.

But it doesn’t take money to behave morally. It doesn’t take money for men to stop seeing women as instruments to be used for several minutes of pleasure whenever the urge dictates. It doesn’t take money for a woman to realize the likelihood of the male she is making herself available to probably has no intention of staying with her any longer than it takes for him to zip up.

I’m saying what the majority of others are either afraid to say, are too politically correct to say, or are deinsentivized from saying. The truth isn’t complicated. We have churches in urban communities where the pastor is preaching black nationalism and not “You must be born again” and “Thus saith the Lord, thus saith the bible.”

It isn’t discussed much publicly anymore, but I recall vividly, even into the 1990s, women in low-income housing developments were in jeopardy of being evicted if the father of their child/children was found to be living with them. There are countless stories of men having to sneak in and out to avoid the woman being penalized.

An absence of proper male role models is having catastrophic effects amongst blacks, but we need to be specific pursuant to the facts that are responsible for their absence.