Father’s Day always reminds me of the late, great futurist Alvin Toffler’s description of parenthood: “The single greatest preserve of the amateur.”
Indeed, like countless other parents, I was stunned when I first held our child in my arms and wondered like the first-time congressional winner in Robert Redford’s “The Candidate,” What do I do now?”
Let’s be honest. Dad’s Day often seems to struggle for respect with Mom’s Day, which happens just a month before. In fact, in 1911, I recently learned that the great Chicago social reformer Jane Addams suggested that the city set aside a day to honor fathers only to be turned down. Maybe the city fathers had the opinion my own father expressed about gift neckties.
“No more neckties,” he declared after too many years of that particular gift.
That’s OK, I also have learned. Part of being a man, my father used to show me by annual example, is to shrug off the notion that anyone should make a big deal out of what to buy you for Father’s Day.
Once again, Father’s Day arrives at a time when Black families like ours are a major focus of speeches and sermons. It’s an election year, much like the one in which I heard my most memorable Father’s Day speech. I’m talking about then-Sen. Barack Obama’s landmark 2008 address at the Apostolic Church of God on the South Side of Chicago.
The address gained lots of attention, even in a hot presidential race. Obama was on his way to being elected the nation’s first Black president and — as detailed in his best-selling memoir, “Dreams from My Father” — he was raised mostly by his white American mother after his parents divorced. Growing up, he only saw his father once, when he was 10.
That wrenching absence in his life story figured prominently and appropriately in his Father’s Day speech in which he declared fathers to be “critical” to the family and that the underpinnings of life in the Black community are worse off than they otherwise might be because many Black children are growing up as he did, in homes without a father.
“Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important,” he said. “And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation. … But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. … You and I know how true this is in the African American community. We know that more than half of all Black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. … And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”
Although the reaction to his speech was generally favorable, especially in conservative political circles, his candor about Black family troubles triggered familiar and angry accusations among numerous Black folks about washing the community’s dirty laundry in public.
Most famously, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s furious reaction, caught in a hot-microphone moment at Fox News studio, included a graphic, physical threat to the senator’s anatomy, for which the civil rights leader later apologized. With a bit less fury, best-selling Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates also criticized Obama’s point of view.
“From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails Black people,” he wrote in The Atlantic, citing a litany of headline-making racial abuses. “But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder.”
”Some Black people always will be twice as good,” Coates concluded. “But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.”
Indeed. Yet, we who care about Black America’s challenges, especially among those struggling with low income and few other resources, need to start somewhere, and the most glaringly obvious place to begin is within our own families and neighborhoods.
Yes, we do have strengths in our families, churches and grassroots organizations, among other resources, and we need to use them.
Still, liberal or conservative, it all begins at home. Happy Father’s Day, Dads. Make sure to pretend to like the neckties.
