Most people would agree that a father who walks out on his family and fails to pay child support is the definition of a dead beat. Yet according to California, this label only applies if the father in question happens to be white, Asian, or Hispanic. If he is black, then that’s America’s fault.
The Democrat-led California legislature created a “Reparations Task Force” in 2020 that finally released its final report last week. Among the countless insane and radical recommendations made in the nearly 1,100 page report, the proposition calls to eliminate child support debt for black fathers. This is not only one of the most harmful recommendations in the report, but one of the most indicative of where we are as a society. (RELATED: Charging Interest On Unpaid Child Support Is Racist, Reparations Task Force Concludes)
Today the California Reparations Task Force will submit recommendations based on more than two years of research of public records and hundreds of hours of public meetings. pic.twitter.com/sOHO15Hk1V
— CA Senate Dems (@CASenateDems) June 29, 2023
The recommendation rest on the premise that “discriminatory” laws have “torn African American families apart.” Because of these “longstanding harms,” black fathers owe a “disproportionate amount” of child support debt. This “crushing debt” limits their “ability to attend school or job training, maintain housing, and find employment.”
Thus, the Task Force recommends that California “enact legislation to terminate all interest accrued on back child support,” for black families in the state, “requiring only the payment of the principal owed.”
With this logic, the decision to financially abandon your family is not a decision at all if you are black. Rather, it is a socially conditioned response to American racism that the state must remedy. Yet this proposal, if enacted, would harm virtually all parties involved.
It harms black fathers by disincentivizing the work ethic necessary to pay child support. One may be more likely to find work if he needs to pay child support, but if given a pass, he may be less likely to do so. Wired to protect and provide, idleness is bad for men, particularly when there is a family at stake. (RELATED: California Reparations Task Force Approves $800 Billion Recommendations)
The recommendation also discourages black fathers from being a part of their family’s lives. Without additional pressure, they will certainly be less likely to pay child support, and may even be more likely to walk out on their families in the first place.
This of course doubles the burden for the mother, who must then struggle to fulfill the financial and emotional dimensions of both parental roles. Furthermore, studies consistently show that fatherlessness is associated with virtually all negative outcomes in a child’s life: poor self-worth, behavioral problems, academic failure, delinquency, teen pregnancy, homelessness, unemployment and many other metrics of social mobility. Combined with the drain on taxpayer funds, the recommendation is likely to have an overwhelmingly negative societal impact overall.
While the report ostensibly seeks to repair the “harms” done to black families, it is setting the next generation of black children up for failure. Yet this is totally consistent with the distorted morality of the far-left worldview that has a stranglehold over American society.
To all sane people, fathers have a moral obligation to support their children. When a man becomes a father he assumes the responsibility to feed, clothe, and shelter his offspring. Any man who fails to do so should face moral sanctions by the community whether or not government punishes him as well. Yet the recommendation would remove the legal authority the state uses to reinforce this moral truth. By legally shrugging at dead beat dads, the state will morally condone them as well. It will ignore a very real moral harm in order to absolve one that does not exist.
Reparations waste resources on rectifying a moral harm that is both imaginary and impossible to redress. The proposal would take resources from people of all backgrounds who share no responsibility for America’s woeful racial history and redirect it to people who never experienced systemic racial injustice. Black people alive today did not actually suffer any tangible harm from slavery, and we are now three to four generations out from the civil rights movement bringing an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine. (RELATED: Rapper’s Belated Walk Of Fame Star Reveals How Thug Culture Has Finally Won In America)
The left would counter that the legacy of these institutions leaves black people at a disadvantage today. This assumes personal agency plays no role in life outcomes; rather black people are just perpetually helpless victims trapped in the system. Yet the system no longer has any institutional barriers to black advancement, and today, outcomes are far more a function of personal choices. There are too many variables to ever explain, let alone quantify, individual outcomes as just a function of historical racism. Attempting to do so is virtually impossible and only opens the doors to racially-motivated grifters.
Proponents of reparations have no moral ground to stand on — they are simply engaged in a cynical power play. By advocating for degenerate fatherhood, they only highlight this point. Yet this is the sad state of society today: if you are a “victim,” there is no more obligation, only entitlement.