If disproportionately killing and imprisoning African-Americans is racist, then disproportionately killing and imprisoning males is sexist. But the real sexism is caring only about the systemic racism and turning a blind eye to the other half: the sexism.
Caring about black boys and men quickly reveals there’s no community that has been harder hit by dad-deprivation than the African-American community. It wasn’t always this way. Between 1880 and 1960, a majority of African-American families consisted of married fathers and mothers. But in the early sixties, nuclear families dramatically decreased. Inner city poverty and crime dramatically increased.
Single moms have done an extraordinary job raising children even as they often raise money—and millions of their children have turned out well. But this rise of father absence often leaves single moms overwhelmed, dads depressed with neither purpose nor love, children more likely to be damaged in over 50 developmental areas, and pockets of fatherlessness that become pockets of crime.
As we’ve gone from the Era of Father Knows Best to Father Knows Less, Father’s Day is a perfect time to rediscover the value of dad. Fathers do not know less, they know differently. For example, dad-style parenting is more likely to feature bonding by roughhousing, and stopping the roughhousing when rough gets too rough. And as dads engage the children in games, if his children don’t try hard enough or smart enough, he’ll teach them to be winners by letting them lose. The results are counterintuitive: Dad-enriched children demonstrate greater empathy, social skills, and postponed gratification.
Why this gap between dad-deprived boys and girls? For starters, a dad-deprived girl at least has a mom as a same-sex role model. Dad-deprivation creates in many boys a “dad void”—a boy not knowing who he is as a man, frequently having less of the discipline he needs to fulfill his dreams.
The result? A multi-faceted boy crisis that resides primarily where dads do not reside. Today, boys are 66 percent more likely than girls to be living at home between ages 25 and 31. They are falling behind girls in almost every academic subject—especially in reading and writing, the biggest predictors of success. Forty-three percent more boys than girls are dropping out of high school, and even before COVID-19, more than 20 percent of these boys were unemployed in their early 20s—six times the national pre-COVID average.
Today, our country is threatened less by the destruction of the nation from the outside than by the destruction of the family from the inside. Dad-deprived boys hurt. And it is these boys who hurt who hurt us. Hungry for role models, these boys are sitting ducks for terrorist recruiters and gangs who promise them a ready-made “family.” And when they become drug dealers, mass shooters, ISIS recruits, or fill our prisons, our government spends about a trillion dollars per year to clean up the results of their trauma. That destruction of the family from the inside becomes a threat to the nation from the outside.
Involving a boy’s dad is not always possible. If we are to expect these boys to avoid destructive role models and the school-to-prison pipeline, we must create scholarships to inspire great male teachers, mentors, and coaches.
In every generation’s war, when boys feel needed and called upon to serve, they give of their lives. If we are to be genuine in our caring about black lives, we will be as outspoken at telling boys of every race that we will view them as heroes not only when they protect us by killing and being killed in wars away from home, but also when they become great fathers by loving and being loved in the peace they help to create at home.
