From "Ignorant Ass Men and Liars"

Sometimes being a Black man and knowing so many other Black men intimately well, I felt greatly disadvantaged when it came to being optimistic about our collective future as a race. It seemed possible that the social realities of the Black community and Black family that desperately needed to change might not change anytime soon considering the attitudes and ideology some Black men I knew had. Far too many men thought like boys.
No man is fit to lead a family who is unable to place his interests second to the interests and needs of his family. Mr. Green was the paradigm case of this sort of man. In a sense, a man who can lead a family and head a household must derive his satisfaction from meeting others’ needs and being a steward.
 Still, Mr. Green was a dying breed. More men I knew objected strongly to what they thought of as dependent women who didn’t earn incomes outside of the home and could not contribute financially to the maintenance of their families. The notion of going to work and leaving their spouses at home sent so many guys reeling, that I no longer was even willing to discuss the idea publicly. For these same guys, the notion that their spouses should handle all the traditional duties of cooking, cleaning, and serving as the primary caregivers to children in addition to working full-time evoked no rational conflicts. I pitied the women in their lives for the insensitivity they had to live with living with these simple-minded child-men. It was worse for the women because the flawed logic that supported these expectations was subtle and because many of them felt duty bound to perform these roles their discontent often left them feeling isolated. One common denominator between men who thought like this was that they had often grown up in single parent homes with no fathers. They had seen women do everything and while they realized that their mothers had struggled, they stopped short of acknowledging the reality that their mothers had been burdened unfairly with the obligation to raise them alone. These men never conceptually stepped outside their situations to look at them and realize that the dynamics were wrong and that further, though they understood that men were not being men by simply making babies, partnership meant sharing responsibilities and gender shouldn’t imply what responsibilities one might be limited to fulfilling. I can’t even begin to discuss the men who aren’t in the household; their attitudes toward doing for their children were some of the worst. Too many of these men resented paying their shitty little child support obligations, sometimes even avoiding jobs to keep from paying anything to the mothers of their own children. They were narrowly focused on how their money might benefit the women and not how the money was needed to care for the babies. Really, they were only hurting their children and even if they had paid what they were expected to pay, the women who received the pittances that were the child support checks would do well to just put enough gas in their cars to then drive their babies to the welfare office.


I almost got into a fight with a guy once because he insisted that his payments on four kids were too much, but he was making less than $40,000 dollars a year driving trucks for FedEx. “Are you serious? Do you really think that even if you gave your entire after-tax income to your babies’ mommas, that you’d even be giving them enough money then to cover all of the costs of raising your kids, ‘cause that’s what men had to do back before the social welfare system was created?” He was infuriated. “Man, fuck that! I do plenty for my kids. These hoes is gettin’ ova on a nigga! I saw one of my baby mamas at the club the other night, lookin’ like a million dollars, spending my damn money. That bitch shoulda had her ass at home, spendin’ time with my kid and not spendin’ my money on these niggas! You don’t know shit ‘bout me my nigga!” I wasn’t about to get off my pedestal. I saw this guy all the time in the barbershop, and I knew from overhearing his conversations that he was complaining about paying child support that totaled less than $800 a month on all four of his kids together. “Bruh, I’m not knocking the fact that you pay for your kids. That’s good. What I am saying is that the reality of being responsible for the kids you created requires the standard of what you should do for them to be set at you doing whatever it takes to meet 100 percent of their needs, financial and otherwise. To me, that’s the real way to think about fatherhood. How you and their mothers do that is y’alls business. If she stays with them, you might have to pay for everything. If she works, you might have to spend more time with them, though you might have a smaller financial burden. You can’t tell me you actually believe that in this day and time, you can raise four kids and meet all of their basic needs for what child support really requires you to pay? I heard an estimate the other day that it costs about $250,000 dollars at today’s real dollar value to raise a kid and provide them with a decent life for 18 years. That does not include college. So with four kids, you would need to look forward to spending about a million dollars over the next 20 years just to get your kids through with health care, food, clothes, shelter and so on. That’s $50,000 after-tax dollars a year for you. Until you’re doing that much, there is nothing extra for anybody else, let alone your babies’ mamas.” He had been more patient than I expected to listen to my entire rant. “Nigga I do what I can! Most of these niggas out here ain’t doin’ shit for they kids!” I responded, “I hear you. But what I’m saying is that even when you do everything you can, that doesn’t mean it will be enough to cover what’s needed. That’s the way you judge it, if your kids need it, then you provide it. If you do less than what is needed, you need to understand that the resources that are needed to provide what you couldn’t or didn’t for your kids will have to come from somewhere else.” He wasn’t hearing any more talk from me. “Fuck you, bitch ass nigga.” I was being simple. I just saw him as a sore loser. “Fuck you, stupid asshole. I’m sorry you even have any kids.” I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe I was being overly ideal and a little insensitive to a guy who wasn’t entirely the biggest problem in the scheme of things. It was too late to turn back from my proselytizing at that point. He rose and walked toward where I was sitting at the back of the shop, burning with anger. If it wasn’t for Big Mike, the shop owner, I would’ve had to whip somebody’s daddy, or gotten whipped by him, but that didn’t happen. I sensed his anger was real and that his ignorance was too, so I didn’t stay to get a haircut.