By Stacey Patton

“We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one.”

–President Barack Obama

I grew up without my father. I know his name: Steve. And I’ve seen three photographs of him standing proudly next to three of his grown sons that he had with two other women. When I was born he was married to another woman living across town with their twin boys. My older sister was four. When his wife discovered he had been cheating on her with my mother (who didn’t know he was married with kids), she divorced him. Steve packed up, became a rolling stone, went south, married again, and had another son. His current wife knew about his twin boys but nothing of the two daughters he left behind in the early eighties.

I was 27 the first time I had a phone conversation with Steve. Today, he lives somewhere in Franklin County, Virginia, has a slow countrified drawl, and only remembers that I liked red grapes as a toddler. Getting Steve to talk about himself, his feelings or about the past was like pulling teeth. When I finally asked where he’d been for nearly three decades, he was full of excuses, blaming my mother and other women in the family for why he couldn’t man up and take care of his responsibilities.

President Barack Obama with Joshua DuBois, the Pentecostal pastor who served as Director of Religious Affairs for Obama's presidential campaign, and is now heading up the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which includes the "Fatherhood Initiative." Photo by Pete Souza

I don’t feel that my father’s absence left any kind of psychic wound in my heart nor do I believe that I missed out on anything from not having a relationship with him. I’ve had so many women and a few men of both races, in my life that filled the void. Far too often it is assumed that kids who grow up without fathers react negatively or experience they same kind of psychological hurt. While there are studies that show how deep those wounds go, not every child responds to their circumstances in the same way.

I’ve never had a strong paternal longing. Sadly, I’ve spent much of my adult years wondering whether black fathers are even necessary. And I’ve listened to black women being demonized for asserting the roles of mother and father and for telling their daughters to be prepared to raise children on their own because a black man might not stick around.

So it with mixed emotions that I respond to President Barack Obama’s new “Fatherhood Initiative” which is being coordinated by the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The initiative, which launched this past June and is headed by a young Pentecostal minister named Joshua DuBois (pronounced Du-Bwah), is designed to promote fatherhood and personal responsibility through nationwide town hall meetings.

“This is not about public policy,” DuBois told NPR in a recent interview.

“It’s about the message of galvanizing communities around responsible fatherhood. [Obama] grew up without a dad in his own home, but he also saw the impact of father absence when he was working in Chicago. So he started this national conversation about responsible fatherhood.”

I dissent.

The conversation started in the early 1990s. The fatherhood responsibility movement, as it was then called, emerged with the self-proclaimed goal of protecting the interests of families and children. Through fatherhood conferences, men’s workshops, and Promise Keepers’ mass meetings, pro-marriage advocates consisting predominantly of white men fervently defended the importance of marriage and argued that the role of fathers had become marginalized within the family structure. At the same time, black male advocates clamored for economic and social programs as a means to protect the interests of children.

In 1995, former President Bill Clinton stated that “the biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children’s homes, because it contributes to so many other social problems.” Two years later, a congressional task force was created to promote fatherhood and governors’ and mayors’ conferences followed nationwide. Later, George W. Bush’s administration instituted a package for “responsible fatherhood” with a $315 million price tag.

If we are going to address fatherhood issues in town hall meetings, instead of focusing on trying to improve the moral behavior of a mass of people, these gatherings need to discuss ways to address the rising unemployment rates — especially those of African-Americans, whose nearly 15 percent unemployment is the highest of any group. A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that in 18 states and the District of Columbia, black unemployment ranged from a low of 8.1% in Maryland to a high of 22.8% in Michigan.

This is the crisis that most needs our attention. The Obama administration ought to devote extra resources to address these disparities, not to sponsor fundamentalist revivals and circuits. I bet that the people who will actually show up will be mainly women and men who are already doing what they can to be responsible.

And let’s not forget that joblessness and crime go hand in hand. Our racist criminal justice system has millions of black men ensnared, separating them from their children. When released from prison, they are denied the resources and opportunities that will allow these men to become breadwinners.

In what was tagged as his “seminal speech on race” given in Philadelphia in March of 2008, President Obama said that the African-American community must take full responsibility for their owns lives “by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

Three months later, in his Father’s Day speech at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, he said, “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 … as fathers and parents, we’ve got to spend more time with them and help them with their homework, and replace the video game or the remote control with a book once in awhile.”

Weeks after that, in his mid-July address to the 2008 NAACP Convention in Cincinnati, he continued that “Because I believe that in the end, it doesn’t matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose, or how many government programs we launch, none of it will make any difference, a least not enough of a difference, if we don’t also at the same time seize more responsibility in our own lives.”

I hope that our first black president, whose own papa was a rolling stone, is not following in the footsteps of his predecessors by using moralism as a blind for the more systemic economic and racist strictures challenging many black and poor men’s ability to be responsible. These kind of “personal responsibility sermons” only serve as an opiate of the political class that absolves them of devising any real structural prescriptions.

Unlike the example of my own deadbeat dad, being an absentee father isn’t always a matter of making bad decisions or choosing to abandon one’s offspring. There are many examples of men who want to parent but their attempts are often thwarted by family courts and the children’s mothers. A Rutgers-Texas study found that a significant number of men who fall behind on child support payments struggle with irregular, low-way employment and can only focus on finding the next job, meal or next night’s shelter.

Though the issue of absent fathers is a particularly critical one in black families, where nearly two-thirds of children live in single parent homes, this initiative should not be- black focused as it almost always seems to be in mainstream media and political commentary. DuBois says the focus will not just be black families.

“This is about kids who are growing up without responsible role models in their families and that is for all American families regardless of their background,” he said.

The fact that President Obama has been very forthright in addressing this issue in African-American communities is commendable. But this enormous social problem stretches beyond black, impoverished areas of the country. Black people don’t hold a monopoly on child neglect. Will this national conversation address affluent white males who also opt out of family responsibilities? And what of the rising divorce rates among whites, which are often initiated by women? To what degree will rising out-of-wedlock births among white women be addressed?

I am not arguing that fathers are not indispensable and central to children, families and the larger society. But this kind of faith-based initiative has no place in government. It is a clear violation of the separation between church and state and it has come at the worst possible time. Right now our country is falling apart at the seams and sermons on personal responsibility will not end two wars, joblessness, rising poverty, and the homelessness spreading across demographic and racial lines.

This is not the time to preach to people. Men with children need encouragement, not sermons. They need tangible methods of moving from where they are to a place where they can truly make the contributions that will benefit their children and the larger community.

Stacey Patton is a Senior Writer and Editor for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and The Defenders Online.