I love The Root, but Jimi Izrael‘s ridiculous post, “Obama hates black fathers” is hard to take. Izrael’s evidence for this ridiculous assertion is a line from a speech that is more than a year old and hardly inflammatory:
“If we are honest with ourselves,” he said, “we’ll admit that… too many fathers also are missing–missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
With 70% of black children born to single parent families, the above is, quite frankly, a confrontational but mostly banal observation. It’s a pretty low bar for “hate.” Izrael continues:
If the Dad in Chief really cared about the state of black America and the black family, he would retire the worn-out tropes and consider ratifying outmoded laws that encourage and support single motherhood. He would make it easier for men to keep and enforce thier parental rights. And he would stop suggesting that black men are animals with no human connection to their own children and make women at least as responsible for thier own failures and bad choices.
Barack Obama isn’t Jesse Lee Peterson. Izrael’s excerpt from Obama’s father’s day speech last year doesn’t suggest in the slightest that Obama thinks “black men are animals with no human connection to their own children.” As for changing the system, while he was in the Senate Obama did propose legislation to change laws that discourage non-custodial parents from taking care of their children and discourage two-parent families for staying together. In fact, I wrote a whole article about it. Obama’s fatherhood agenda hasn’t shown much movement since he’s been elected, and that’s worth of criticism, but of an entirely different tone and type than Izrael is offering. Moreover, Izrael doesn’t have any actual policy suggestions–quoting Kanye West‘s Gold Digger doesn’t count. Neither does this:
Because a woman can be jobless, degree-less, tooth-less, cooth-less, on crack, living in a house made of crack, sitting on bean-bag furniture filled with crack with six syphillitic mongoloid boyfriends living in the basement cooking crack on a crack-fire and a judge will still make you prove that you are the better parent. Square Biz.
Izrael’s case that Obama hates black fathers ends up sounding more like a case for the idea that Jimi Izrael hates black mothers. I’m sure that’s not what he intended.
— A. Serwer
