My Father and I
I’m so affected by racists throwing Black marriage statistics at me in my early life that today I notice nearly every Black father I see walking down the street with his child. I’ve even contemplated making a website called “Return of the Black Father,” where people can submit anonymous pictures of Black men fathering. Seeing Black men caring for their children strikes my subconscious as odd because it defies the logic I’ve been conditioned to understand. I still have yet to have a kid because I’ve always subconsciously feared being what America taught me I was; a deadbeat father.
Racists often throw around marriage statistics to bolster their assertion that Black men are of lesser male virtue than White men. They say “stop making excuses” and close their ears to any attempts to explain the reasoning behind these statistics. In truth, they are collectively posturing details to form their preferred outlook of White male virtuousness; they fight off any attempts to factor other intellectual content into 
their logic. Their approach to Black male paternity is much like them failing to consider Europe’s oppressive effects on Africa as White men shaped future world culture to benefit them, then calling the African countries they murderously pillaged, enslaved, and continue to survive off of, “backwards,” or, “shithole countries,” as President Trump put it. Racists often fault us for not inventing the airplane or computer during the Jim Crow era; they fail to recognize the ingenuity-blighting effects the conditions White men subjected us to caused. They also fail to credit Black labor with underpinning their innovations. Normally, humans dedicate their primary labor to survival and sustenance. They apportion surplus labor to innovation and advancement. With Black labor sustaining White survival in America, White men had much more time and energy to dedicate to innovation and advancement than humans ethically participating in life would have. I call their failure to consider this fact, “Euro-Narcissism.” Euro-Narcissism is why White men’s outlook survives on a bedrock of perceived Black male failure. It aids racists in failing to recognize how American conditions and intentional, deliberate efforts by the US government merely reduced Black male paternal participation, enabling statistics to paint a picture of an unvirtuous Black male. Marriage statistics engender the outlook that White men are naturally better fathers than Black men. However, this attitude differs from reality and I am a prime example. Despite growing up in a single Mother household statistically, I had two Fathers, neither of which factored into America’s marriage statistics or the overall regard for Black fatherhood that prevails today.
Daddy
My biological Father was the ultimate Father and my Stepfather was the ultimate Stepfather. I only have pictures of their past to remind me of my Mother and Father’s romantic bond, however, there wasn’t a school shopping trip my Father didn’t fund, healthcare he didn’t provide or a Christmas where he didn’t put gifts under the tree. In fact, I remember my Father pulling his big rig truck up to
the street behind my Mother’s house and taking my Sister, who wasn’t his biological daughter, and I to get Christmas gifts for the rest of the family, IN THE TRUCK. Yes! He was such a good father that he drove us from store to store in a big rig, tractor-trailer truck, during the holiday season rush, to spend his money for us to give gifts to the people we cared about, including my Mother, whom he wasn’t getting along with at the time. Before I was born, my Father made my older Sister from my Mother’s previous relationship, his daughter. And while his first Daughter, my oldest Sister, who has since passed away, was from my Father’s childhood girlfriend, she was welcome in my Mother’s home long after my Mother and Father had broken up. She was family to my Mom and her Mother loved me, although we didn’t spend enough time together to become close. My Father loved my second oldest sister before I was born and remained her father until he died. He remained her father after she reconnected with her biological father. She had two fathers too! In fact, she had three fathers, when you consider my Stepfather. My Father took my Sister school shopping and she often spent Christmas at the home he made with my 
Stepmother, who, too, took us both in wholeheartedly. When my Stepmother had my second youngest sister, she was everyone’s little sister and my biological Mother loved her too. My oldest sister’s Mother loved her too, as did my Stepfather. Everyone loves my youngest Sister, my Mother and Stepfather’s child. In a nutshell, everyone in our tribe wholeheartedly loves one another regardless of family ties. My older sister, and my two youngest sisters, despite having two mothers and three fathers between them, and two having no blood relation at all, have taken trips together. The term “half-sister” and “half-brother” had no meaning to us, although my Mother tells me I tried using the term once as a child. Clearly whatever parenting she did, worked because I certainly haven’t used it since. The children in our tribe with no blood ties considered each other family and even today, we only call each other “Sister” and “Brother.” Sometimes my Mother and Father would fight and the step-parents somehow knew how to support their spouses without creating family rivalries. Family gatherings were always cordial and when my parents had to unite, like when a teacher was being unfair to me in Highschool, they did, eventually getting him fired. The nucleus of this whole tribal bond is my Mother and Father, who statistics indicate were estranged.
My Stepfather
By the time I can remember, my Mother had a boyfriend named James, a musician, who planted the seed to me becoming a musician and drummer; no other adults in our tribe play instruments. My Sisters and I still know him today. Sometime after James came Michael, my eventual Stepfather. I don’t even think he and my Mother ever legally married. Welfare regulations denied married women benefits, reducing them by the amount of money the Husband was making. The government also thoroughly scrutinized husbands’ finances, which made the application process harder and discouraged men’s willingness to participate. This was yet another reason not to legally marry. I think my Stepfather may have been dealing drugs when he and my Mother got together but that eventually stopped and their hard, honest work eventually got us off of welfare and out of the hood, even if only temporarily. My Stepfather, Stepmother, Sisters and whole family are all in my life wholeheartedly today. I can call them with the whackiest ideas and they’ll entertain them. I see my Stepfather maybe twice a year but if I showed up unannounced on his doorstep right now and needed a place to stay, he and his new wife would allow me without question. My Stepfather accepted my collect calls from jail and used three-way calling to help me contact people while locked up. This was over a decade after he and my Mother broke up. He’s also the person who taught me how to drive a manual transmission car. Another note: My Stepfather had a two-door, manual transmission 3 series BMW when he met my Mother and I thought it was the coolest thing. I have only driven two door, manual transmission 3 series BMWs my whole adult life. My Father bought me my first one, which means the combination of my two Fathers created a major part of my persona. Me driving BMWs over the years has caused many of my friends, co-workers and even my landlord to buy a BMW. This one little BMW trend started with my Stepfather and has radiated through me to impact countless people for decades. He’s a huge piece of who I am and I thank my Mother for bringing him into my life.
Confusing, Right?
While all the details of my tribe may be confusing, we certainly weren’t confused about love, family, support and loyalty. The men set aside typical rivalry and maintained the tribe my Mother 
assembled. My point is this; while my Mother was a single mom statistically, I had two fathers, both of which provided for me financially, protected me, and contributed to my character. Both were friends and admired each other. My Stepfather still speaks highly of my Father’s character today. Marriage statistics don’t reflect this. Many of my friends didn’t have fathers in the home but many did and those fathers likely didn’t bother going to the Courthouse to make sure the government knew they were part of that household. There was love in all these homes and anytime I brought a fatherless friend home, my Father treated them like his own. My Stepfather did the same.
The truth about Black fathers is far from the racist narrative, which makes Black men out to be short-sighted, lazy and out simply for the thrill of sex. Black men are the world’s original human fathers. We fathered so well that, in partnership with our counterpart, the Black woman, we brought into existence every single other component of humanity, including White people. However, the Black man’s social situation says more about the Western social model than Black men’s virtues. I estimate the Black diminished paternal period’s height to be from the early-to-mid 1980s to the mid-to-late 1990s, or the crack era. Friends I sold drugs with in the mid 1990s who became fathers in the late 1990s, have given their children legitimate upbringings using drug money. They bought them cars for their sweet 16th birthday parties and put them through college so they wouldn’t take the same path their father did. This shows that the generation immediately after President Reagan’s War on Drugs, in the midst of that drug economy, resumed proper fatherhood under the most trying of social circumstances. During slavery, fathers would risk their lives, sneaking off of the plantation and walking for hours in the night, forsaking the little sleep they were allowed, to visit their families on other plantations. During the Jim Crow era America financially depressed Black people and yet the men never left the family. Many, including Black nationalists and White supremacists note that the Black family was more complete before integration and the Civil Rights movement. So, it’s safe to say Black fathers back then were around somewhat on par with White fathers. But the percentage of Black fathers certainly did decrease post-Civil rights, which means something in addition to economic oppression drove the Black man from the home. I call it, “Systemic Social Degradation.”
Systemic Social Degradation
The Jim Crow era proved that economics couldn’t break the Black family up. However, one slavery era theory did prove effective in disrupting the Black familial bond, the “Willie Lynch Theory.” It’s 
not certain that Willie Lynch ever existed or that his great meeting with American plantation owners ever occurred, however the goals and techniques to disrupt and break up the Black family were common knowledge to plantation owners and widely implemented by slaveholders. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are America’s post-slavery, post-Jim Crow, Willie Lynch trio. Their policies along with America’s economic failure struck decisive blows to the Black family and drove many Black men away from the home. Although a lot more Black men were in the house than statistics indicate, these American Presidents enacted policies that, for many Black families, achieved Willie Lynch’s goal. Three American factors managed to achieve what slave owners worked tirelessly to do during slavery. A. America’s economic failure. B. American persecution Black men. And, C. Reasons A and B marginalizing Black men.
1. America’s Economic Failure: Western economics has been a failure since its inception. A landscape so resource-poor as Europe could never produce good faith people because the conditions are so scarce. The economic and social systems that come from Europe are just as bad-faith. Every social system Europe ever invented, whether it be Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Communism or others, was just another rendition of how a minority population can exploit the majority and appropriate the fruits of the majority’s labor without violent consequence. Without delving too far into economics or sociology, scarcity causes humans to hoard out of insecurity and demarcate boundaries of interests. This is why America is a land of walled off houses protecting people who have hoarded wealth, or have become, “rich.” European history is mainly the story of human groups hoarding wealth and redrawing borders. Within those “Countries,” a word deriving from the word “count,” what one does with hoarded wealth, occurred internal strife where the powerful hoarded resources, thereby creating further scarcity within each state. This scarcity engendered social and political systems designed to cope with the dysfunction scarcity causes. Each and every one of Europe’s social and political systems is a rendition of institutionalized laziness. Central Banking, a system where the laboring masses allow a government mediator to collect and convert the absolute value of real toil into its own severely debased and variable-valued currency product, has been a failure every time it has been attempted because it collects the masses’ labor fruits and leaves them with a dearth of the same. In 1944 America, having profited immensely from WWII, had so much of the World’s gold that the economic majority of nations chose to peg their currencies to the gold-backed dollar. That lasted all of 27 years then in 1971 America scammed the other nations when President Nixon eliminated the dollar’s gold backing; dollars were no longer backed by gold and we simply got to use economic confusion to make the dollar’s value what we wanted. America, the Leader of the Free World, committed a bad faith action.
The recession President Nixon’s scam caused obliterated the Black family because it sent lower-class White men to the bottom, using social advantage to compete for the economic scraps Black families were surviving on. America, supposedly a platform for individual prosperity, failed in its duty to be just that. Men physically capable of building homes couldn’t attain one because the nearly insurmountable obstacle called the “American economic system” stood directly in the way. The same year it eliminated the Dollar’s gold standard, rather than fix its mounting economic problems, America distracted Americans by turning them inward against Black men by starting a “War on Drugs.” In 1994 President Nixon’s aid, John Erlichman admitted the “War on Drugs” was actually a war on Black people and Hippies. This war on “Niggers and Nigger Lovers worked and not only left Black men’s families looking at them as socially degraded failures, it made it consequential to have them around; felonies meant police can raid your home at will, putting your children and wife at 
gunpoint based on vague and often untrue suspicions. As I write this, Ohio deputies are suing Afroman, a popular rap artist, for selling merchandise with pictures from security footage taken as they bogusly raided his home looking for drugs. They didn’t find anything but definitely damaged Afroman’s potential domestic relations; any woman considering being with him has to consider the safety factor. Anyway, providing fathers with a prior drug conviction could be instantly jailed and lose their jobs due to the absence caused by bogus arrests. Government stretched the definition of “trafficking” to characterize drug users as druglords and facilitators. People caught with two bags of weed or a cheap scale in their home were treated as kingpins and sentenced heavily in Nixon’s drug war. In John Erlichman’s words they, “criminalized them heavily” and reduced Black men to second-class citizenship by making them felons. In the mid 1980s, President Reagan took Nixon’s war on Black people to astronomical heights by turning a blind eye to a supplemental cocaine economy from Central and South America imported directly into economically depressed Black neighborhoods. He then gave police incentives to persecute Black men by allowing them to rob them of their drug profits under the color of law. Many of these police officers were drug dealing, drug addicts, doing the exact same thing Black people were doing. However, they were gainfully employed, which makes the criminality they practiced under the color of law, in contrast to Black people’s drug dealing, pure greed.
2. American Persecution of Black Men
Although American institutions have characterized Black men as prone to criminality since before we were even citizens of this country (read more about that here), the shift in regard from us being pesky nuisance criminals to being violent threats coincided with the Civil Rights victories in the 1960s. It should be noted that Harry Anslinger, America’s first Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner, referenced “White women seeking sexual relations with negroes” in his push to criminalize marijuana and not Black men raping White women. Being racial propaganda, Harry Anslinger had the opportunity to characterize us as rapists but the White male mindset at the time was that of authority and confidence. However, the Civil Rights legislative victories struck a blow to that confidence and signaled that White men’s intellectual barrier to Black progress had broken down. This shocked them so they began to lay the groundwork for their go-to method of control, barbarity. Suddenly America began using media to characterize us more as violent threats to be
forcefully controlled. Policing became more overtly forceful, White vigilante groups, America’s first street gangs, grew and Black men faced yet another marginalizing force against their ability to move around freely and earn at their true potential. Candidate George Bush even used Black criminality to win a presidential election. Company owners now had, in addition to the racism inherent to America, to consider Black men’s violent potential and could now cite safety issues when denying Black men gainful employment in a severely depressed job market. Into the 1980s, media blatantly emphasized Black crime while diminishing White crime. America saw the Black man as a criminal and violent threat, an effect that continues today.
3. A and B marginalizing Black men
Government demonstrating such a strong interest in Black men’s oppression maintained a Black aversion towards government institutions. It meant Black men in loving, committed relationships were less likely to run to the local courthouse to make it official; Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’s welfare policies made legal marriage even less likely because they required a man not be in the home. With Black men being economically depressed, given a drug economy then jailed and made 2nd class citizens for participating in that economy, beaten and killed at random, having their image tarnished in media, it’s no wonder Black people had more broken households than the rest of America. Unable to provide and since the government’s fix required they not be in the home, many Black men gave up. These factors contribute to the statistic White men use to posture themselves as better Fathers. Lower social status and a system that made Black men citizens with lesser constitutional protections made many Black men liabilities to their homes. Rather than being providers and protectors of Black women and children, America socially degraded Black men, making them unprotected, easily assailable liabilities. The fact any homes had Black fathers says a lot about Black people.
As I write this, Alex Murdaugh, a wealthy, prominent and accomplished White father is on trial for murdering his Wife and Son. His family had everything this country had to offer. Sadly, Western society can only interfere with humanity’s natural cohesion and impose social advantages for White men. Life, what humans are naturally entitled to, belongs to humanity and nothing Western culture creates can engender genuine love, good faith and wholehearted sentiment. The Murdaugh Family appears to have lacked these natural achievements. In fact, Western society is a hinderance to these human phenomena. I spend a lot of time in Europe. European cultures generally play down wealth and the citizens mistakenly consider economic safety, “happiness.” It’s not. Citizens in European countries outspokenly seek economic safety but economic gain over others is certainly their true aim. The overwhelming majority who visit Africa come back befuddled at how Africans can “be so happy with so little.” Africans, marginalized from Western society, don’t have the distractions of Western society prohibiting them from worldly happiness. Good air, food, people who wholeheartedly care about your existence, sex, children, music, dance and comfort are all humans need for true worldly happiness. This is likely why my family had so much genuine love. Although in poverty, we were impoverished in the richest country in the world. We were also marginalized and least likely to cleave from the only luxuries we had, the human values listed above, in favor of Western values. The combination of Western pseudo-comfort and marginalization created an environment ripe for optimal family love under Western conditions. This also explains why many poor families that come into money fall apart. I contrast my upbringing with many of the family struggles I see on the news, like the Murdaughs. Working in wealthy circles means I closely know many well-to-do and upper-class people. I’ve also dated in those circles. The amount of good faith love in these homes in minuscule compared to what I and all the kids in my family had growing up. I see dysfunction, including molestation, parent-child/child-parent hatred that I thought only happened with families like Menendez’s. I see sibling rivalry that only laws stop from becoming deadly.
True Wealth
If love was wealth my family would easily be the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. While I have never felt financially safe, I know I have love from all directions and throughout my whole tribe. I, even in my adulthood, have many older male figures to help me in life. Marriage statistics are telling society the exact opposite. Now that America has new issues other than the Black man, like Arabs, White men’s homosexual tendencies, White women’s unwillingness to procreate with them, and the diminishing White male image, Black men are experiencing less pressures and Black male parental participation appears to be increasing. Our conditions right now are far from ideal yet the streets have been surging with Black men pushing strollers, teaching lessons, having picnics and simply fathering with their families for over a decade now. I’m not sure if they’re feeling comfortable enough to go to the courthouse and legally attach themselves to the women they’re having kids with, but they are more visibly there than the 1990s and 2000s and certainly more there for their kids than the old statistics indicate.
Social Degradation, a White male-prioritized economic desert, a President that launched a war against Black people called a “war on drugs,” another President that hid his failure by allowing a drug economy into Black neighborhood then intensified the “war on drugs,” another President who designed Welfare policies to drive a wedge between men and their families, then intensified the “War on Drugs” by increasing jail sentences for the dysfunction caused by previous presidents’ policies. When you combine this multitude of factors with the Black men socially incapacitated by drug use it’s clear that America intentionally attempted to root the Black father out of the home. Rather than fix the issue, White men, the powerholders in Western society, publish statistic without much context to exploit the agony Western society intentionally caused us. It then uses those statistics to bolster the White lower class males’ sense of self. Although a different form, it’s simply White men feeding off of Black existence, just as they did during slavery. I’ve been at the receiving end of their efforts, very effectively giving me the impression that I was genetically a bad father. This messaging was so effective that it overrode my reality, the two great examples I had before me, my Father and Stepfather. Hopefully this blog post will shed some light and give context to the commonly known myth of absent Black fatherhood.