In a press release posted yesterday on Yahoo Finance for Baby Center, LLC., we (dads) are getting a truck load of praise and it isn’t even Father’s Day.  It has been discovered that American dads are really getting into this whole parenting thing.  According to the article it appears to be lots of dads of all races, not just the Mike Brady’s of the world.  And apparently we got skills to brag about too. 

But after reading an article like this I always have to wonder how many black dads were really surveyed.  Was it 10?  Perhaps 100.  I’d like to think that we are well represented in the sample of 2000 people because then the study shows that we have hope.  We get this dire picture painted of absent black fathers, deadbeat black fathers, imprisioned black fathers, unemployed blackfathers, and so on, and you eventually start to think that it’s a hopeless cause.  I know it’s not, but many other people prefer to write us off, and make us the butt of tasteless jokes.  I’ve even heard that we don’t exist, or are invisible.  Would Ralph Ellison write about black dads if he were alive today?

I long for the day when fathers as a group and us black fathers in particular no longer need studies to determine if we are doing our thing as parents.  I’m personally quite tired of studies, and research, and theories on the our status in the world. 

Nevertheless, the problem is that as long as there is a need for such statistics, there will be people out there conducting surveys and compiling data and writing depressing reports to explain their findings.   

 

 

Â