From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. . .are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved.
The Moynihan Report -The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965)

Dr. Umar Johnson write this piece on the blog A Voice For Men. He has been a big advocate for men and boys for quite some time. I have followed him in a few documentaries and on YouTube.

In this piece, he knocks it out the park! He summarizes everything I’ve been saying on my blog and is very clear in his message.

He is a no-nonsense-get-to-the-point type of man. I dig that. He also is unwilling to back down from controversy because he is as convinced as I am that we need to get our communities rebalanced.

This idea of “I don’t need a man” is dangerous and harmful to everyone that lives among other human beings.

Some mothers might not think they need a man, but their children sure need their father.

Dr. Johnson breaks down why there are so many single mother families and how we got to where we are in our society. I have posted on numerous occasions as to the dangers of choosing single motherhood, raising kids on your own and how it affects society in general.

We call men who supposedly abandon their children deadbeats, but don’t examine WHY they are no longer in the home?

Dr. Johnson states:

You’ve heard the rumors, for they are everywhere, and although unproven, they still resonate as “facts” throughout much of American society. The untruth that Black men don’t want to care for their children has become a staple in American folklore. Even sadder is the fact that these rumors are not only postulated by the numerically dominant white majority of this country, but are actually created, maintained and reinforced by the Black community itself.

Even President Obama, who rarely makes mention of the unique and unparalleled conditions facing Black men in this country, couldn’t help but join in on the carnage of the Black man’s image by telling Black church audiences during his first bid for the white house that “Black men need to take care of their children.” Obviously, trying to woo Black female voters, the Senator turned President is also guilty of reinforcing the image of the Black man as a “dead beat dad.”

The question put forth to you today is whether or not this unsubstantiated rumor is true? The answer is a resounding “No!” Not only do Black men love their children, and want to be with their children, many go to great lengths trying to secure their “state guaranteed right” to participate in the lives of their offspring, only to be met with constant betrayal at the hands of the all-too-racially & gender-biased family court systems that make up these United States.

Dr. Johnson goes on to break down the reasons where this mentality comes from:

Behind closed therapy doors, I have had scores of Black mothers, benefiting from years of hindsight and maturation, admit, although all too late, that “yes, I kept my children from their father and I was wrong.” Although any admission of honesty must be granted its blessing, unfortunately, the years of damage created by this cycle of ignorance and emotional neglect cannot go unmentioned. So many Black children are literally being destroyed by their custodial parents, and way before the mis-education machine, and psychiatric exploitation cartel, has a chance to get their hands on them.

What are some of the unjustifiable reasons mothers keep their children away from their fathers?

1) Out of Sight/Out of Mind: The pain of relationship rejection causes many Black women to prevent the man access to his children in order not to repeatedly have to face the very person who rejected them.

2) Jealousy For What They Never Had: Yes, I have had mothers admit that not having a loving father in their lives can create a subconscious envy for their daughters leading them to disrupt the father-daughter relationship that they never had themselves.

3) A Woman’s Scorn: Revenge is often at the center of disrupted paternal emotional bonds. So many Black women lack the mature understanding that they and their children are not one and the same person anymore. Many women continue, for years after birth, to hold a pathological belief they what’s good for them is automatically best for their children; In other words, “If I don’t need him in my life, then he/she doesn’t need him in their lives.”

4) Child Support: Obviously if a man can find a job he should provide for his children. However, with so many Black men being undereducated and incriminated with felonies, it is quite difficult for many of them to find work. What children need most is the loving affection of their fathers. Although it costs to raise children, it doesn’t help to keep a father from his child for financial concerns alone. Unfortunately, in many municipalities the court systems have effectively separated custody issues from support matters which now gives mothers the right to collect the father’s finances and at the same time continue to keep his children at bay.

5) Keeping the New Man Around: Although I find younger mothers much more guilty of this than older ones, it is also growing in prevalence amongst older mothers as well. So many Black women suffer from the emotional dependency of always having to have a man around to validate their womanhood (a condition often created by their own fatherlessness) that some will go to great lengths to guarantee “the new guy” a place in the sun by keeping the biological father on the outskirts and then trying to force the paramour upon the child as the replacement dad.

Getting revenge against their ex-lovers, at the children’s expense, is a frequent theme in many family therapy sessions that often leads to broken relationships later in life after adult children learn that their mothers were the true reasons behind the absence of their fathers from their lives. Many mothers are able to effectively disguise their oppressive tactics against Black men under a false mask of innocence, projecting victimization by the father when in fact they are the victimizers; playing the helpless victim in public who is raising children without the benefit of the father, but is a merciless oppressor in private, deliberately keeping the father from his children.

Read the entire piece HERE