Update (3:19 p.m.): How I got on the e-mail list is a mystery, but I just received a “media advisory” from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, about the “African American Healthy Marriage Conference,” scheduled June 19-21, at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Did I mention how much I loathe the term “African American”? Anyway, the theme is “Healthy People, Healthy Families: Connecting Marriage Research to Practice.” From the e-mail:
“The African American Healthy Marriage Initiative is an outreach effort to promote and strengthen the institution of healthy marriage in the black community. ACF has partnered with national, civic, faith-based and community organizations to offer marriage education services to Americans who may not have such opportunities in their neighborhoods.
“Sessions during the conference include good news about African American fathers; the three anchor institutions of family, education and faith; and military couples with children and the impact of separation on their relationships. Speakers scheduled to appear include Ronald Mincy, Ph.D., of Columbia University , School of Social Work ; Robert Franklin, Ph.D., presidential distinguished professor of social ethics at Emory University ; Wilson Goode, Sr., director of Amachi and former mayor of Philadelphia ; and Jerry Regier, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, ASPE, HHS.”
The conference will be useful to someone, I’m sure. It’s sad things have gotten so bad in the “black community” (as far as marriage is concerned) that the government has to hold conferences like this. 
I forgot to link to “The frayed knot” this morning. Check it out.
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It’s a shame that the government has to take up the slack for so many slack black men and women who have little regard for getting marriage and creating a home before having babies.
It’s embarrassing that some — not all — black people insist on blaming third parties for every conceivable problem in their lives when everything that’s happened to them has been the result of their own foolish choices and dumb decisions.
They seem ignorant of the harm they’re causing their own children, yet they’re highly aware of the harm others might be causing them.
My stance against such slothfulness and immorality has hardened since I started this blog. Three out of four black babies in this country are born into illegitimacy, which causes untold number of problems, worse than any “racism” ever could. With weak family structures, no stability, no spiritual foundation, no man around to guide and protect them…
I wish people needed a license to have children. There’d be far fewer black babies born, but the ones who were born would have a greater chance of growing up with residential fathers. I’ve said before that people who value marriage and get married before having children are different than people who don’t. A child should be born only to married people.
I can’t say enough about this topic, and I’ve said plenty here, here, here, and here. (Also see “Marriage and Caste,” by Kay Hymowitz, and “Fatherless Boys and Foolish Feminists,” by me)
A post on Joanne Jacobs’s blog prompted this post. While reading “School gives boys the key to becoming real men” (free registration required), I realized that if fatherless black boys are going to have any chance at all for success and good life outcomes, they’ll have to receive guidance from outside their homes.
The children at Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, an all-boys charter school in Chicago, are getting from others what they can’t get from their fathers: learning what it means to be a man. Ninety percent of the boys come from “single-parent households.”
(Side note: Unlike everyone else, I make distinctions between women who have children but never married, women who married, had children, and divorced, and widows with children. The latter two shouldn’t be thrown into the “single mother” category. They are divorced mothers and widowed mothers. Referring to all of these mothers as single mothers is technically true, but it blurs the line between women who at least tried to do it the right way and make stable homes for their children and women who didn’t.)
I got that “lump in the throat” feeling as soon as I started reading the article. In desperation, one mother wrote, “Please pick my son. We need you,” in the margins of the Urban Prep application. Her boy, like most of the others, is fatherless. Her son’s father died of a heroin overdose, and it’s unclear whether they were married. My guess is that they were not.
It’s never too late to reach a child and help him turn his life around, but these adults…the things people do to their children. Her son is a teenager. Didn’t she understand years ago that boys need men? Couldn’t she foresee that her son would be wayward and angry, seeking the wrong kind of guidance and male bonding because of his absent father?
People don’t think. They don’t consider consequences of their actions. They don’t plan or assess possible outcomes of their decisions. It’s easier just to live in the moment, wallow in ignorance, and then become desperate for help after problems are entrenched.
I wish each of those boys well. Most of all, I hope that somebody, somewhere — even the government, at this point — instills in them the value of marriage and building a stable home and taking care of their offspring.
Probably for the first time in their lives, the boys at Urban Prep are learning that boys need men. I pray they learn well and avoid repeating the errors of their absent fathers.
