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With 70 percent of African American children born out of wedlock, it is worthwhile pondering a very detrimental mindset of a fatherly rolling stone (player) that may have tainted yesteryear’s male role model for many African American males.
I spoke with two chaps that had overly chauvinistic views during their young adult life in dealing with women. The first chap I guestimate is in his late fifties. This chap said his father abused women as a player.
He adopted this sullied view. Thus he walked away from a fine lady who had his best interest at heart. This want to be player took up with a second lady. Then he morphed into a deadbeat dad.
This fellow found himself going to prison on weekends over not paying child support. He lost his driving privilege that made finding work very difficult. The bicycle became his principal mode of personal transportation.
When he did get his driver’s license back he found himself struggling with the onslaught of cancer. The frightening scourge of cancer put a negative bias on his life for the grim-reaper is ever on his mind. He finds it very difficult to do yesteryear’s jobs for he possesses great talent but lacks the physical strength. He is not able to manage his own home alone. This chap is fortunate to have great children to whom he appears to grow more depended on every day.
The second chap is in his middle sixties who is struggling with the dawning of the diseases of aging. He shared how he watched his father be a rolling stone, so he imitated him. He was always a hustler, so I do not recall his having any child support problems. His nightmare today is he is at the time in his life where loneliness becomes a real curse because his yesterday’s friends are dying out.
In their heyday, these two chaps once appeared to believe that women should be barefoot and pregnant. Their stories have a great deal more meaning when I overlaid them with the comments of a seventy something African American lady who said she watched the men run around leaving women home with a house full of children when she was a child. She vowed that she would never allow that scenario to become her fate.
Today, this seventy something African American lady is a professional replete with a Doctors of Philosophy degree. She did not have a house full of children as she vowed.
It is clear from these stories that the player father image is harmful to boys in their formative years. Will today’s black males continue this harmful player behavior or is parental responsibility the new paradigm in Black America because President Barack Obama is the new fatherly standard of excellence for today’s African American males?
