A Father's Day column

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 Mixed feelings on Father's Day
Jun 18, 2006
by Dutch Martin ( bio | archive | contact )

Email to a friend Print this page Text size: A A As the product of a single-parent home, I have always had mixed feelings when Father's Day comes around every June.  How could I comment on the importance of fathers if my own formative years were shaped by my own father's absence? Although much has been written about the negative effects of fatherlessness on black children I would like to share my feelings on how important fathers are and how misguided welfare policies have undermined the black family—including my own.
 
Historically, black families were intact and strong. Even during an era when racism was worse, blacks still worked hard, kept their families together and sought to educate themselves and their children. In other words, we not only survived in the face of the obstacles in our way, we excelled.

What happened?

LBJ's 1964 "War on Poverty" program happened.  Economic and social progress in the black community was utterly ruined with the expansion of the welfare state.  A bureaucracy was formed that basically subsidized irresponsibility and social dysfunction, paying unmarried black women to have children out-of-wedlock while giving weak-willed black men an excuse to be lazy, irresponsible losers siring as many illegitimate kids with as many women as they pleased. (Any why not?  The government would take care of their progeny.)  Having had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, the black family began a rapid moral disintegration under a program that went from an emergency rescue to a way of life.   No wonder so many blacks just sat on their hands and did nothing after the civil rights movement.  

For three generations—until welfare reform was adopted in 1996—young black girls were raised and culturally conditioned to be "baby mamas" instead of loving and nurturing wives and mothers, and prefer "baby daddies" over responsible, loving and supportive husbands and fathers.  In the black community, the mere idea of marriage as a sacred institution for the proper rearing of children soon became a joke.

Many black men saw no reason whatsoever to be committed husbands and fathers. And why should they? Welfare rendered their role in the family unnecessary.  In her book The Burden of Bad Ideas Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald recounts how when she asked a woman receiving welfare benefits what she would do without them, the woman replied, "I'd get me a husband."
 
I grew up on welfare, the youngest of six children with an absentee father.  My family life was dysfunctional to say the least, and not having my father in my life left a void in my soul that at times has been emotionally crippling.  Who would teach me how to drive a car, tie a necktie, balance a checkbook, and relate well to the opposite sex?  Most importantly, who would teach me how to be a man? I don't care what modern feminists say, a woman cannot instill in a male child the tools he needs to be a man.  I had to learn many of life's lessons of manhood the hard way—pretty much on my own.
 
Remembering the spiritual and moral decay that living in a fatherless home on welfare festered in my family and all the families in our neighborhood makes me both angry and sad.  What makes me angrier is that today's black "leaders" don't have the guts to admit that the welfare state—which for many of them was their political meal ticket—failed black America horribly.  Thomas Sowell, in an August 17, 2004 article entitled "A Painful Anniversary," puts it this way:

The War on Poverty represented the crowning triumph of the liberal vision of society—and of government programs as the solutions to social problems.  The disastrous consequences that followed have made the word "liberal" so much of a political liability that today even candidates with long left-wing track records have evaded or denied that designation.
Don't let anyone kid you, folks.  Fatherlessness hurts like hell!  You never get over it; you just deal with it.  I've been dealing with it for 32 years.


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