Wanted: Fathers
Bob Herbert in today’s Times discusses the new book by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint, Come On, People: On the Path From Victims to Victors.
Here is part of the column:
The most important step toward ending the tragic cycles of violence
and poverty among African-Americans also happens to be the heaviest
lift — reconnecting black fathers to their children.
In an
interview yesterday, Dr. Poussaint said: “You go into whole
neighborhoods and there are no fathers there. What you find is apathy
in a lot of the males who don’t even know that they are supposed to be
a father.”
The book covers a great deal that has been talked
about incessantly — the importance of family and education and hard
work and mentoring and civic participation. But hand in hand with its
practical advice and the undercurrent of deep love for one’s community
is a stress on the absolute importance of maintaining one’s personal
dignity and self-respect.
It’s a tough book. Victimhood is cast as the enemy. Defeat, failure and hopelessness are not to be tolerated.
I gather that both Cosby and Poussaint were on “Meet the Press” Sunday. I missed it. Did any catch it?
Robert: Thanks for the heads up on this. I suspect that I will read this within two weeks. It is a subject that comes up repeatedly in my ethics classes at Morgan State University (one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the chartered urban university for Maryland). The first book I purchased after I was hired by Morgan was one where Poussaint is a co-author entitled “Lay My Burden Down.” The topic is suicide and depression among African-Americans.
This semester, my ethics students are reading (among other books) American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare, by Jason DeParle (of the New York Times). It is a great book, and we regularly commented on the absence or the difficulties of fathers in the lives of these families.
I suspect that I will agree with much that is written in the book, but I will also constantly wonder what public policy changes could make the turn around more likely. If the biggest personal hurdle is getting fathers back into families, then I think that the rest of us need to take on the single biggest political hurdle to help make this possible: the decriminalization of drugs. Until we break down the economic forces and incentives, coupled with the devastation that comes in the form of addiction, prison, unemployment, and obviously crime, that are deeply tied to the drug trade, I really do not see a dramatic turn around on the horizon.
Every single American needs to be in solidarity with these young (and older) men, even if many of us think they have made some bad decisions in life. If we stand on the sidelines, or worse, stand in judgment, many lives will continue to be destroyed.
We usually watch Meet the Press on Sunday mornings after mass. Cosby and Poussaint were eloquent and frank. I don’t think that what they said was news, exactly, but some things need to be heard more than once. It was also goo to hear a whole hour devoted to an important topic.
For many years, Bill Cosby underscored the the importance of family in his warm and funny TV series, Scenes with the son, portrayed so well by Malcolm Jamal Warner, touched on the theme here., The interplay crossed racial lines but was obviously mean tto reach black families.
Sincce then he has continued on the stump for this message, sometimes with real resentment in some quarters of the black community.
The issue has been around for some time. Many moons ago, I was in on the ground floor of the Harlem Interfaith Counselling Service (HICS) which grew for a poorly furnished one room office to a large establishment )taking up a whole floor when I left New York in the 90′s).
When one says there are whole communities without fathers, one might want to add the qualifier ‘”poor” – with all the attendant problems of drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, poor schools and employment problems found there.
The interplay of family helping community stability and community stability supporting family is complex and not easily solved in large swaths of movement.
An interesting question is the role of the Church in all this – in Harlem years ago, the ecumenical allieance was at work in promting family in all of the areas I noted above.
I especially wonder, in the current situation, how much the Church is invested in the inner cities where these fatherless problems perdure and what role they play.
(I’fd also like, apropos of this, to note Mark Sargent’s review of “The Future of Marriage” in the current Commonweal. While that book argues in the context of the gay union debate and stresses the importance of children to maintaining community stability, I thought it worthwhile to discuss in a thread of its own the (to me complex and difficult) issue of the relationship of family and community stability factors and, beyond that, what the Church should do in relation to them.)
At the Meet the Press website you can download a webcast of the Cosby/Poussaint discussion or get a transcript of it. Well worth a look, listen, or read.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/