{Resurrected} Happy Father's Day! Here's your cookie!

Ok.... so I started this blog awhile ago but I never really knew what I wanted to write about. So I wrote about 12 posts, published maybe 3 or 4 and then got "de-motivated" and stopped for awhile. Then I finally got some inspiration (from my muse) and decided to focus my blog and create more posts.

The inspiration came from a conversation about fatherhood, overheard on WEAA this past Sunday. The perfect opportunity to resurrect this old, unpublished post! The show was about Being Black in Baltimore, a continuation of CNN's Black in America program. The host was moderating a discussion on what was wrong with Baltimore specifically and one of the callers was going on and on about how Black men just don't get enough credit for being good dad's, taking care of their kids etc.

....... feeling a pang in my stomach........

He goes on to say that "we" should make more of concerted effort to praise those black men who are taking care of their responsibilities. I suppose the logic is something like this: "Black fathers are stigmatized as not taking care of their children, producing multiple illegitimate kids by multiple "baby-momma's" and then shirking their responsibilities to those kids, forcing the mother to pick up the slack. I'm not about to say that these situations don't exists. In fact I know they do. Although brothers like this bruh here don't agree. He says that he doesn't really know any dead-beat dads. Which raises sort of a valid point. Because even the dudes I know who don't take care of their kids are relatively few. But I do know a good number and one kid raised without one or both parents is too much, especially in instances where this can be avoided. But I don't think that means that we should be celebrating every black man who does what he's supposed to do.

It's crazy. We don't celebrate the mother's for feeding and clothing their babies. Why would we? That's what mothers do. In fact we find psychological explanations for mothers who DON'T take care of their own children. All those stereotypical qualities of motherhood that exist, we don't call out a special day for all those non-dead beat black mothers. Because it is the natural order of things. Likewise is fatherhood. It's not abnormal. And I don't want accolades for doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm exceptional for a number of reasons, and handling my own business isn't one of my exceptional qualities. This lady in the (mall/street/church), was so excited to note how I was such a "good" black man for taking care of my kids. That's outrageous. Any decent human being takes care of their kids. Point blank. And pretending otherwise is a disservice to the countless men who do take care of their responsibilities, and it creates this notion that it's somehow "extra" to be a father to your children. Like it's somehow going above and beyond the call of duty. I call bull--.

You know what I got for Father's Day, --my first Father's Day mind you? A big ass cookie. How fitting, right?