One of the most pervasive stereotypes about black Americans is that of the absent black father.
The absent black father myth is the idea
– the stereotypical and incorrect notion – that African-American fathers have
very little contact with their children, if any contact at all.
And in black America, the reality of being fatherless is perhaps most painful.
73% of all black babies are born out of wedlock.
Experts say there's a crisis when it comes to black fathers in this country.
The news media loves asking where all the black fathers are – and that whole idea has been linked to everything
from poverty and crime to even police violence against black communities.
Why are these police shootings occurring? Well, it's because there is an absent
black father, or it’s because black families are on welfare.
But this idea that black fathers aren’t present in their kids’ lives is actually false.
To be a parent is to have children that you love and try and support, and black fathers
experience that the same way anyone else would. Why would you even think there was a difference?
Hey guys, I’m Sana, and this Sunday on AJ+
we’re going to talk about the myth of the absent black father here in the United States,
where it comes from and how that stereotype tells a much bigger story
about the black family and black communities in this country.
Just because the trope of the absent black father is so pervasive, doesn’t
doesn’t mean it’s true. Now, yes, according to a Centers for Disease Control report,
in 2013 72% of non-Hispanic black women who gave birth were unmarried.
But being an unmarried mother doesn’t automatically mean that the father isn’t involved.
And in fact, that’s exactly what that CDC report found.
When compared to white or Hispanic fathers, black fathers were actually more likely to be involved
in their children’s lives in almost every way. They were even more likely to
have bathed, diapered or dressed their kids, eaten a meal with them, played with them,
helped them with homework and taken them to and from activities. And a lot of that
held true even when black fathers didn’t live with their children.
But if we go solely off of what we see in the news media…
Where's your dad?
Don’t really know.
Tell me about that.
He’s just not around.
… you wouldn’t really see black fathers in that way.
Communications Professor Travis Dixon studies the prevalence of stereotypes in mass media
and the impact of these stereotypes on audiences. He wrote this report,
“A Dangerous Distortion of Our Families,” and in it he found that almost all news and
opinion media implicitly or explicitly encourages pretty egregious assumptions about black fathers.
Black fathers were shown spending time with their kids only
half as often as white fathers – contrary to, well, the actual facts.
We found that black mothers, white mothers, white fathers interacted with their kids about
26% of the time in these videos and photos that occurred in the news media.
Half as often, we found that happening for black fathers. Only about 14% of the
time were black fathers actually interacting with their kids on camera in photos.
Dixon also found that news commentary singled out black fathers 60%
of the time, compared to white fathers only 20% of the time.
What has it been like since your dad's been in jail? Can a father's love break through prison walls?
That media distortion is substantial. We know for a fact that African-American
fathers are just as likely to participate in the lives of their children than fathers of other races.
And this isn’t, by the way, a politically partisan issue.
Both conservative news outlets like Fox News and more centrist
ones like CNN were top distorters. Specifically Hannity, The Kelly File and CNN Tonight.
Did both of you have fathers present in your lives, growing up?
So where does this toxic idea about black fathers even come from?
Well, one theory takes it back to a 1965 report titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
The report became one of the most contentious political documents in 20th century America.
Democrat and Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan put the report together
to make the argument for how the Lyndon B. Johnson administration had to do more for racial equality
than simply pass the Voting Rights Act. Moynihan argued that to really fight
racial inequality, the government had to understand the state of black communities
and why they were the way they were. But Moynihan ended up focusing on one thing: the black family.
According to him, the fundamental reason for growing economic inequality between white and black
Americans was a “crumbling family structure” in black communities. And at the foundation of the
so-called “crumbling black family structure” was the absent black father.
Moynihan looked at nonmarital birth rates and rates of fathers living
separately from their children, and made a whole bunch of assumptions about
parents’ relationship statuses and parental involvement. The report didn’t
take into account factors like the legacy of slavery, generational wealth or even economic migration,
in which men left their homes so that they could provide for their families.
We spoke to Carvell Wallace, a writer and a podcaster,
about the way black families have been discussed in the mainstream.
Reading some of the literature of that time, I was like shocked at how overtly racist liberal literature was,
in terms of trying to diagnose the ills of the black community and trying to explain
why these uprisings were happening.
And everyone was blaming it on the fathers and drugs and families and welfare
and mothers and everything. It was a lot more convenient for the story
to be told that black people weren't holding up their end of the bargain,
rather than acknowledging that America wasn't holding up its end of the bargain.
The Moynihan report ultimately created three camps: the liberal camp, which saw
the report as a foundation for policy change; the conservative camp, which saw
the report as a justification for the argument that black communities were
responsible for their own issues; and then the left-wing camp that saw the
report as blaming the victim, ignoring structural racism and reinforcing racism.
So what happens when people are exposed to these stereotypes about black families?
Aside from the reinforcement of the idea that black communities have no one to blame but themselves,
there’s the everyday, real-life impact these stereotypes have through policies
and support for those policies. First, there’s an almost total, willful
ignorance about the impact of slavery and modern-day incarceration on black American families.
Foundationally, slavery ripped apart black families, and mass incarceration
has put 1 in 12 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 in prison
– versus 1 in 60 for non-black groups. Then there’s how these
characterizations of black American families have an impact on policies that affect all Americans.
Take poverty for instance. During the Great Depression era,
the face of poverty was a white man who was down on his luck, or a white family
fallen victim to circumstances outside their control. And the country felt
a duty to end poverty, namely with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Then, decades later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began to shed light on the
reality of poor black American families living in cities, and the reporters who
followed him began to report on these issues.
We are tired of living in run-down, dilapidated, rat-infested shacks and slums.
And as a result of that, over time, all of the imagery began to focus on these
black families, and it began to actually have a pernicious impact. It began to
have us think of poverty and black families as tied to this issue of black
laziness. And that's where we largely find ourselves today.
According to Pew, more than half of Republicans believe that a lack of effort is to blame
for poverty, instead of circumstances beyond one’s control. As the conversation on
poverty and race shifted, so did the support for welfare.
People began to think that we needed to curb welfare benefits, increase work requirements,
because the real problem is that black people are on welfare and they just want to be lazy.
When we think about policy, what's good for families,
we tend to think about them in these racialized terms, and when we do that, we tend to have a distorted view of what needs to happen.
we tend to have a distorted view of what needs to happen.
So what’s the solution? Well, here’s what Dixon and Wallace had to say.
The main way that the media perpetuates stereotypes and racist tropes is accidentally.
I think the people who are in the decision-making rooms and the content-making rooms are
carrying these biases with them, without knowing they're carrying these biases with them,
because there's no one around to challenge them.
So I think that, ultimately, greater diversity at all levels of decision-making in the media
and content-making process is probably our best chance at dealing with this.
As an African-American father myself, as a father of twin sons, I take pride in
that role and I know many many other black fathers who take pride in being
involved with their kids, regardless of the marital situation with the mother.
So I really would like the media to show some of those stories as well.
Ultimately, I'm raising my kids to be a part of the solution, rather than a part of the
problem. You know, that's really all I can do.
So we focused on the way the news
media talks about black families and black fathers, but there’s no shortage of
the same representation in entertainment. Take, for example, one of our favorite
scenes of all time from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. You know exactly which one
I’m talking about. So let us know in the comments below what you guys think, where
else you’ve encountered this trope – and tune in next week when we come at you
with another great video.