What Obama Doesn’t Know About His Presidency

He’s shattered the myth of the absentee black father. If only he knew what a myth it is.

For eight years, America’s leader has given the country an unprecedented opportunity to end the pernicious, racist myth that most black fathers don’t stick around to raise their children.

Statistically, this is false. As I explain in my book All In, by far most black dads live with their children — and are, on average, the most involved of all. Most black children are not fatherless.

But as President Obama leaves office, that false belief remains alive and well. Even Obama himself doesn’t seem to have a clear picture. In remarks over the years, he’s made the scope of black fatherlessness sound worse than it is.

“If you’re African American, there’s about a one in two chance you grow up without a father in your house ,” Obama said in 2014. “…We know that boys who grow up without a father are more likely to be poor, more likely to under-perform in school.”

He left the impression that half of black kids “grow up without a father,” as he did. Here are the real figures:

• About 2.5 million black men live with their children, and 1.7 million don’t, according to the CDC. I quote the lead CDC researcher explaining that this marks “the debunking of the black-fathers-being-absent myth.”
• Virtually all dads who live with their children, across all races, care for them in every major way (clothing, bathing, feeding, helping with homework, talking with them about their day) at least several days a week. On average, black men who live with their kids do this the most.
• Although a minority of black fathers don’t live with their kids, these dads have more children on average. So this much is technically accurate: slightly more than half of black children don’t share their official residence with their fathers. But this does not make them fatherless. Many of these children still have their dads in their lives, just like kids of all races whose parents don’t live together. Some spend half the week, or every other week, living with their dads.

Fatherlessness is statistically bigger in the black community than in other communities. It’s exacerbated by the incarceration crisis, in which black men are more likely to be arrested, incarcerated, and have longer sentences than white men accused of the same offenses. For All In, I spent time interviewing fathers in jail. Black fatherlessness is also part of a long, historic cycle that needs to be broken.

For more on this, see what the New York Times, Vox, and other media have written in response to All In; watch interviews on NewsOne or Your Black World, or check out my Provost’s Lecture at Stony Brook University’s Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities (skip ahead 45 minutes in).

None of this excuses dads of any race who leave their families. A chapter in my book is devoted entirely to a black father who had six kids (by three women) and didn’t raise any of them. He takes responsibility and explains how he has spent years making up for it. He has now built relationships with all of his children, including two boys in the NFL.

But it’s critical for everyone to know that absentee black dads are the exception, not the rule. It’s time to stop scapegoating fatherlessness for problems facing the black community.

And men who consider shirking their families must know this: that is not the common, normal, acceptable thing to do. For great examples of black men raising their children, look all around you. They’re everywhere — even if no longer in the White House.