A controversy over Jay-Z’s new song “Glory” has him suddenly playing role model to America’s 13.8 million black men. And it casts New York Post columnist Joanna Molloy in the role of mindless cheerleader for holding him up as God’s gift to black dads everywhere.
Yes, yes. All very interesting. But the bluster over Molloy’s most recent column does not tell us anything meaningful about America’s black fatherhood crisis. And it doesn’t address why a black father in the White House — the ultimate role model, if you will — hasn’t made things better for black children.
After the birth of his daughter Blue Ivy this month, the artist formerly known as Sean Carter penned a spoken-word piece called “Glory.”
“Everything that I prayed for,” he wrote. “God’s gift, I wish I would’ve prayed more.”
The world oohed and aahed. Parents everywhere who feared the influence of Jay Z’s other lyrics — like “Guess you was kissin my dick when you was kissin that bitch” and “Faggots wanna talk to Po-Po’s, smoke em like cocoa; Fuck rap, coke by the boatload” — thought they could breathe sighs of relief.
The rapper even reportedly said he would ban the word “bitch” from his repertoire since he now had a daughter. But a few days later he told the New York Daily News that the report was “fake.” So the b-word — to say nothing of the n-word — is once again safe from rap’s more polite censors.
Then Molloy pointed out what she thought was a less debatable positive. “Jay-Z’s ecstatic reaction to being a dad,” she wrote, “will be the strongest boost yet to a growing movement in the black community encouraging responsible fatherhood.”
Really? Set aside for a moment the naïveté of believing that “Jay-Z’s joy could encourage a whole generation.” Who asked rappers to be anyone’s example?
I wrote a few verses when each of my two daughters was born. Nothing as poetic as “Life is a gift love, open it up; You’re a child of destiny.” But I still sing them to my girls.
And I made a few decisions, eventually, about becoming a better person for my children’s benefit. Nothing as petty as swearing off a single speck of my vocabulary. But I’ve kept my promises.
The tale’s third act began shortly after Molloy’s column hit the Internet. Music critic D.L. Chandler vented online Friday that “for Molloy to say that Black men will all of sudden get off their collective deadbeat behinds because of a saccharine rap song is irresponsible and incorrect.”
What black men need, Chandler wrote, “are tangible examples of fatherhood.”
He’s right. A whopping 72 percent of black babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. And the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan reports that 38 percent of black children in the United States live in poverty.
That’s a tragedy of proportions that no song can comprehend, and that no black president can fix.
Not that Barack Obama is actually trying. His National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse personifies the kind of race gutlessness that Eric Holder probably didn’t think of when he called America “essentially a nation of cowards” about racial issues.
Try to search the initiative’s website for an action plan to reverse the cultural genocide of black fathers abandoning their children. Good luck.
How serious is the black illegitimacy crisis? Compare that 72 percent figure with the 29 percent number for non-Hispanic white American children. Nothing north of zero is a good number, but if we’re going to be non-cowards we have to acknowledge that the fatherhood problem in America affects black families more than others.
No one wants it to be so, but pretending otherwise doesn’t make it any less true.
Will it always be this way? I sure hope not. U.S. teen mothers now account for just 20 percent of fatherless babies. That’s lower than ever, and down from 50 percent in 1970. So it’s actually possible to make a dent in a problem like this. The question is how.
I’m hopeful. Here’s why.
I just watched a screener copy of the new documentary “Runaway Slave,” and it’s the most fearless exploration of race in America I’ve ever seen.
In the film, the black minister C.L. Bryant talks to inner-city preachers and community organizers (no, not that kind) and asks them why black America produces statistics that make us both wonder and cry.
The problem, one interview subject explains, began when one of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, pioneered the delivery of welfare payments to families without fathers.
Since one-parent households were more likely to be poor, it seemed logical to subject parents to that litmus test in order to get government benefits. Unmarried with kids? Here’s your check. Two-parent household? You didn’t qualify.
Anyone who understands human nature can write the rest of that story, since unmarried couples stood to collect far more money than married couples.
The trend was most brutal in black families. Within a few decades, the percentage of blacks living in poor single-parent households doubled. A massive majority of those households had mothers, but no fathers. That disaster has never righted itself.
After dozens of interviews with black leaders and thinkers Bryant settled on a philosophical prescription. More black men, he says, should refuse to think “tribally” and do the right thing even when their culture tells them not to bother.
That, he says, means showing the NAACP the door — no small matter for a former NAACP chapter president like Bryant. It means telling Al Sharpton that he doesn’t speak for black men any more than Larry the Cable Guy speaks for white guys.
And it means, at the very least, forcing America’s self-anointed “black leaders” and their political henchmen to earn their keep by helping black families produce results. While 95 percent of American blacks vote mechanically for the same politicians over and over, 40 percent of them are on welfare.
The moral of Bryant’s story is that treating blacks as a monolithic group is a recipe for madness.
It’s silly to think striking the word “bitch” from Jay-Z’s lexicon because Beyoncé gave him a daughter will inspire millions of his fans to take responsibility for their own kids. We’re a nation of individuals, not tribes.
We should judge the people we meet on the basis of their behavior and character, not on what they look like or what group we think they belong to.
Newspaper columnists shouldn’t assume that millions of Americans, whatever their color, are stupid enough to be manipulated by a recording artist.
And we should especially understand that treating men like children is no way to prepare them to care for children of their own. Government is a blunt instrument — a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. It simply can’t do for a man what he should be doing on his own.
“Runaway Slave” is a metaphor that casts government apparatchiks and race hustlers as the new slave masters, and personal responsibility as the shackle-smashing hammer. Its message is dead-on right, and I hope it stirs the pot more than rappers and newspaper columnists can hope to.
See the film and then tell me if I’m wrong.