The generation that learned that it was okay for men to father children and abandon them is passing that lesson on their children:
When 19-year-old Donn? McDaniel became pregnant last year, Tim Wagoner didn’t consider marrying her.
“Nah, man, it wasn’t really discussed. We’re just friends.”
They’d dated a year. The pregnancy wasn’t planned.
Now their son, Zyhir, is 4 months old. Zyhir stays here, stays there.
It’s 11 a.m., a cold fall morning. A darkened rowhouse in Northwest Washington, just off Georgia Avenue. “Cold Case Files,” the television cop show, is the only electric illumination in the room. Cries come from the crib by the couch.
“You fussin’, shorty? You don’t want to be in there?”
A tattooed hand reaches down, pulls little Zyhir up to his lap. “The bottle? This it?”
Wagoner is 27, handsome, neat moustache and goatee, the oldest of five kids. Lean, muscular, not too tall. Maria, his mom’s name, is tattooed on his hand. He lives with her and his sisters, making $7.50 an hour working at a teen recreation center in Brookland two days a week. He’s studying for his GED.
Wagoner is with his child part of the time, and part of the time he’s not. He and McDaniel share child-raising duties but there’s no formal agreement, and Wagoner pays no child support.
In many ways, this is a new norm. Single black mothers almost outnumber black two-parent families, and absentee black fathers have become a staple of conversations, sermons and stand-up comics. Some 48 percent of all black children live without their fathers in the home, nearly double the rate of any other ethnic group in the United States. On his block, Tim Wagoner knows more guys his age who have been shot than who are married with kids.
It wasn’t always this way, of course:
In the 1890 Census, one generation after slavery, 80 percent of black households were mom, dad and kids. It stayed that way through the 1950s, when the census counted 77 percent of black families as united, compared to 85 percent of white families.
But, now things are far different:
Today, federal statistics show that 69 percent of all black children are born to single mothers, more than twice the national average and almost triple the rate of whites. In Potomac Gardens, a public housing complex on Capitol Hill where virtually all residents are black, the president of the residents’ association says that of the 208 families, 180 are headed by single moms. Some dads help out a lot, others not at all.
Somewhere I hear Bill Cosby saying “I told you so.”
I expect this kind of post from Jerry Furham but not you.
Vivian,
I can honestly say I don’t know what you mean.
Do you honestly think it’s a good thing for any segment of our country that yet another generation of children is being raised fatherless ? Every indication is that this is the worst of all possible worlds and I don’t see anything wrong with pointing it out, as the Post did this morning.
It is what you included in your post. You left out the parts of the article that gave a hint as to why there is a problem with fathers in the black community, focusing instead only on the negative aspects.
Until the public at large understands the cause, they are unable to address the effect. Call it blame the victims, if you will.
You mean like the welfare rules that discourage men from living with women on welfare because it results in a cut in benefits ?
And the job situation is a problem but I think it’s stretching things quite a bit to say that bad economic opportunities are the cause of out-of-wedlock births.
I don’t discount the external pressures and causes, but, ultimitely, people (not external forces) make choices to do or not do certain things. They may have reasons that they make those choices, but that doesn’t mean they choices aren’t theirs. At some point, isn’t everyone required to face up to the consequences of those choices ?
As I said, the article touched on the problem, but didn’t go into detail. The black family was intact until welfare came into being. The first men left their families because they were doing what was best for them, providing income the men themselves could not earn. Think of the time frame we are talking about: the mid 1960s, with Jim Crow in full force. Between the Emancipation Proclamation and that time frame, black families were mostly intact. Johnson’s Great Society had the unintended consequence (some say it was intentional – I choose not to believe that) of breaking up these families. And so began a cycle of men being raised without fathers.
How does a man make a choice to stay with their family when leaving meant that the family could eat? That is not a choice, at least not in my mind. The government exacerbated the problem by paying more for each child.
The collapse of the black community – with better off blacks moving into better neighborhoods thereby removing the role models from the community, the warehousing of poor blacks in housing projects – just continued feeding the beast.
From my perspective, it is pretty easy to see how we got here. What’s not so easy is trying to figure out how to fix the problem. And Cosby’s little BS speech rings more than a bit hollow.
Vivian,
The key quote I take from your reply is this one:
“The black family was intact until welfare came into being.”
This is precisely the point that I think needs to be made. Thanks to an ill-conceived and badly implemented government-run program, incentives were created that, in essence, made men — black or white, but predominantly black — not only irrelevant, but a burden in that their presence actually reduced family income. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster I don’t know what is.
If you want to blame the welfare system for this disaster, I’m right there with you.
Vivian,
A postscript…..
Notwithstanding the impact of the welfare system and the responsibility that the people who implemented it have for the current condition of families in America’s inner cities, I still believe in the idea that people have both the power and the opportunity to choose their own destiny.
Just because everyone around you is falling into oblivion, that doesn’t mean you have to follow them.
It really isn’t a matter of following. It is a matter of not knowing any other path.
Let me give you an example. Norfolk went back to neighborhood schools a number of years ago at the elementary level, with the result being segregated schools, not just racially, but socioeconomically. After a year, they did a story about the performance of the kids. One story had a teacher trying to get the kids to do math. “If you started with one cherry and added two cherries, how many cherries did you end up with?” or something to that effect. The kids raised their hands and asked, “What’s a cherry?”
If you have no other point of reference, there is no power and opportunity because, in your world, those things do not exist.
The issue of fatherless black children is far more complex than it looks – or that Bill Cosby made it out to be.