The East Community Guide - Gainesville, FL August 2017 the east take2 | Page 4

Black Dads Are Doing Best of All
Charles M. Blow
One of the most persistent statistical bludgeons of people who want to blame black
people for any injustice or inequity they encounter is this: According to data from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), in 2013 in nearly 72 percent of
births to non-Hispanic black women, the mothers were unmarried. It has always
seemed to me that embedded in the “If only black men would marry the women they
have babies with…” rhetoric was a more insidious suggestion: that there is something
fundamental, and intrinsic about black men that is flawed, that black fathers are
pathologically prone to desertion of their offspring and therefore largely responsible for
black community “dysfunction.” There is an astounding amount of mythology loaded into
this stereotype, one that echoes a history of efforts to rob black masculinity of honor
and fidelity. Josh Levs points this out in his new book, “All In,” in a chapter titled “How
Black Dads Are Doing Best of All (But There’s Still a Crisis).” One fact that Levs quickly
establishes is that most black fathers in America live with their children: “There are
about 2.5 million black fathers living with their children and about 1.7 million living apart
from them.” “So then,” you may ask, “how is it that 72 percent of black children are born
to single mothers? How can both be true?” Good question. Here are two things to
consider: First, there are a growing number of people who live together but don’t marry.
Those mothers are still single, even though the child’s father may be in the home. And,
as The Washington Post reported last year: “The share of unmarried couples who opted
to have ‘shotgun cohabitations’ — moving in together after a pregnancy — surpassed
‘shotgun marriages’ for the first time during the last decade, according to a forthcoming
paper from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.” Furthermore, a 2013 C.D.C. report found that black and
Hispanic women are far more likely to experience a pregnancy during the first year of
cohabitation than white and Asian women. Second, some of these men have children
by more than one woman, but they can only live in one home at a time. This
phenomenon means that a father can live with some but not all of his children. Levs
calls these men “serial impregnators,” but I think something more than promiscuity and
irresponsibility are at play here. As Forbes reported on Ferguson, Mo.: “An important
but unreported indicator of Ferguson’s dilemma is that half of young African-American
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