Contested Identities: The Absent Black Father Stereotype

Mychal Denzel Smith of The Washington Post published a ground-breaking article last January called "The Dangerous Myth of the 'Missing Black Father,'" in an attempt to shatter one of America's favorite scapegoats for African-American crime and other social imperfections. According to Smith, "Responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression . . . By focusing on the supposed absence of black fathers, we allow ourselves to pretend this oppression is not real, while also further scapegoating black men for America's societal ills." Rather, he argues, the true differentiation between white and black success in life lies within "the impact of depressed wages, chronic unemployment, discriminatory hiring processes, the history of mass incarceration, housing segregation and inequality in educational opportunity, not just on family structure but on the resources available to black families to produce results similar to their white counterparts." Such a formula of systematic oppression continuously reproduces the benefits of white privilege, which then fuels the persistence of hegemonic groups to make "missing black fathers" the scapegoat for black criminality and other effects of inequality, rather than allowing for the exposure of institutionalized oppression as the real cause. 

As with nearly every other social stereotype, the myth of the "missing black father" is largely perpetuated through the American entertainment industry, in addition to other popular media forms like "memes" and "vines." It is not uncommon to see single black moms with many young children in media portrayals of the ghetto, for example, or for black fathers to be portrayed as flaky like Mookie in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing or William in the TV series, This Is Us. Both of these misrepresentations pose a dilemma for African-Americans in their everyday lives, as the degrading media portrayals of "missing black fathers" and "welfare queens" greatly affect the way those in power perceive and treat African-Americans as a group in contemporary society.

This begs the question: Why are black fathers portrayed as less responsible than their hegemonic counterparts when fatherhood is colorblind? Perhaps Smith is right in saying that it is nothing more than a tactic used by hegemonic members to mask the structural inequalities from which they benefit. Or perhaps it is a simple matter of producing reality as Herbert Marcuse states in One-Dimensional Man, "In the equation Reason = Truth = Reality, which joins the subjective and objective world into one antagonistic unity, Reason is the subversive power, the 'power of the negative' that establishes, as theoretical and practical Reason, the truth for men and things—that is, the conditions in which men and things become what they really are" (pg. 123).