Instead when the president began by suggesting that we need to “do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood,” I started shaking my head. Rather than empathizing with those Black families that have been destroyed by violence, he blamed the prevalence of non-nuclear Black families for contributing to it! Recycling this tired narrative about broken families and absentee Black fathers does nothing to address the steady flow of guns into our communities, nor the pathologies that lead young people to fire them.
Yes, I think we can all agree with Obama that “for a lot of young boys and young men, in particular, they don’t see an example of fathers or grandfathers, uncles, who are in a position to support families and be held up and respected.” But as David Leonard has shown, just because nearly 70% of children are born to unmarried parents, this does not mean that 70% of Black children don’t have active fathers.
Moreover, Newtown, Aurora, Wisconsin, and Arizona were not framed as the result of White familial pathology. Are young White males shooting up public spaces indiscriminately because White fathers are absent? Is White mass violence evidence of a failure of White parenting? No one would dare to suggest such a thing, nor would they attempt to build a set of public policy solutions around such thinking.