There’s a 16-second, hastily shot video that’s been circulating on social media over the past year showing a few dozen Black men happily pushing strollers along a sidewalk in Oakland. It’s been viewed more than 700,000 times.
The footage is from February 2020’s Black Dads of the Bay Meetup near Lake Merritt. San Jose native Louis Ceaser created the event with the initial hope that a couple of Black fathers like him might be interested.
Ceaser said 150 showed up.
The video went viral because Black dads in America, simply by existing in public spaces with their kids, are contradicting the problematic myth of the “absent Black father.” The myth is so pervasive that it has obscured a new generation of progressive Black fatherhood.
“There were dudes who saw us out there and asked what we were doing. When they heard what it was — just a bunch of Black fathers connecting with each other — they would just join us,” recalled Ceaser, who became a father for the first time in 2019. His wife, Vivien, is pregnant with their second child.
“It was emotional for me, for a lot of us.”
Black men have long been excluded from America’s portrait of the care economy, despite evidence that they play a central role in it. In a 2013 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 70% of Black dads living with children under age 5 bathed, clothed and changed the diapers of their kids, compared with 60% of white fathers. And 35% of Black fathers read to their children on a regular basis, a little more than the 30% of white fathers who did the same.
“The work (Black fathers) do on a regular basis is looked at as an anomaly,” said Prentice Powell, who spoke in a whisper as his newborn daughter, Shai, napped beside him. “I didn’t have a blueprint for how to be a father. But so many of us Black men are functioning off this innate gift, this natural ability to be great at it. The country just doesn’t acknowledge us.”
Shawn Ginwright, a professor of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University and a father of two children in their 20s, says the country’s Black father narrative is mostly devoid of such “intimate beauty and love.”
“My son has seen me cry. I have seen him cry. These are intentional spaces where I engage with my children,” Ginwright told me. “I’m trying to expand their notion of what it means to be a Black man, to be a Black father.”
The absent Black father stereotype is a product of systemic racism — fueled by economic disinvestment, mass incarceration, media portrayals, and antiquated views of marriage and living arrangements.
The number of imprisoned Black men in America exploded from the 1970s to the 1990s as a result of the war on drugs. Pew Research Center data show Black people still account for more than 30% of prison populations. Decades of over-policing took a toll on Black families in America and removed countless Black fathers from the lives of their kids. According to a 2015 report by national nonprofit Child Trends, 1 in 9 Black children in the U.S. has had a parent in prison.
According to 2019 CDC data, the nonmarital birth rate among Black women was 70%, compared with 28% for white women. A 2017 census report showed that 53% of Black kids live with one parent. People have ignored the broader systemic inequities that put Black families under greater pressure and used a surface-level view of the data to perpetuate the absent Black father myth. In doing so, America has disregarded Black men’s ability to successfully co-parent outside of marriage or a shared physical address.
Daytime talk shows in the 1990s such as “Maury” stoked the flames through paternity test segments often featuring Black guests. Bill Cosby, before he was accused by 60 women of rape and convicted of felony sexual assault in 2018, spent years publicly excoriating Black fathers. As recently as 2015, during the Baltimore protests against police violence, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky blamed some of the unrest on “the lack of fathers” in Black communities.
While working on this column, I called my two older brothers, Kyle and Blair. Both are in their 30s. Each has two children. Neither had time to talk.
Kyle was clothes shopping with his daughter, which is something my mom did with my grandfather when she was a child. Blair was taking his son out for a “dad lunch,” which is something my dad did with me growing up.
“If you think about it, we’re taking the things older generations did right and we’re building from that,” Blair said. “Our focus is just more on the emotional connection. It’s different than the past, but in a good way.”
Each day, Black men in this country are reframing the conversation around Black fathers. It’d be a nice Father’s Day gift if America started to listen.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Justin Phillips appears Sundays. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
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It's time to let go of the 'absent Black father' myth - San Francisco Chronicle
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