Ran into an old karate student of mine, who informed me of a fellow student who is now another statistic of the criminal ‘Just-us’ system .
It’s not that the incarcerated young brother was mean-spirited, uncivil, or hung out with the wrong crowd.
He was, however, psychologically corrupted, another statistical result of a dysfunctional family, complete with a ‘Walking Dead Dad.’
The former student was the type of victim, the late Patrick Moynihan—who was a U.S. Senator and author of the controversial ‘Moynihan Report’ about the plight of Black Americans—who predicted eons ago the current ‘family structure’ that casts what seems to be an ever-widening shadow over our ‘village’: three or more siblings by different fathers, raised by a challenged mother, trapped in the ‘Culture of Poverty,’ without the support of her ‘Sperm Donor.’
Ministers won’t talk about it; police only respond to its ramifications; and the government (public) schools can’t overcome it. Surely God (Nyame) didn’t plan on Sperm Donor-hood being the new Black family norm (unless the biblical phrase: ‘be fruitful and multiply’ didn’t include the nuclear family paradigm).
Forty-one percent of Black women are single parents. Subtract the divorced couples, and the majority of Black baby daddies (aka ‘Sperm Donors’) are ‘AWOL’ or ‘MIA.’
Over 70% of Black Milwaukee households are run by a single parent, a majority of whom are poor.
That compares to 14% of Whites, and only eight percent of Asian Americans, who observe nuclear family paradigms.
Not surprisingly, Asian children excel in school and have the highest rates of college acceptance, graduation, and six-figure incomes.
The poverty index follows along the same ratios, as does absentee dads.
Obviously not all of them. My wife was a single parent. She acquired a bachelor’s degree. My bonus daughter has a master’s, and my bonus son is a lawyer.
I was a single parent, and my son followed suit. My son was working on his master’s in educational administration when he died in a car accident.
One of his sons graduated from the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) at 19. His sibling has a business in Atlanta.
Which takes me back to my original premise and the impact of AWOL fathers.
The mother of the now-incarcerated young man asked the sensei (instructors) if any of us would accompany her youngest son (about 10 or 11) to a father/son program.
His brother, one year older, was going to the event with his father.
And therein lay the emotional turmoil that eventually manifested in his criminal behavior (I didn’t ask the adult student what the boy in question was incarcerated for, a factor I now regret).
Each of the five instructors (myself included) offered to accompany the preteen. A minute or two later, the two young boys came into the office.
The mother proudly announced what had transpired and asked the younger student which ‘surrogate’ father he felt most comfortable with.
His response caught all of us off guard. If you have ever seen an uncontrollable outburst by a karate student, well, he broke the glass counter and was about to knock over the filing cabinet before we subdued him.
He was cussing throughout the episode, using a couple of words the late counter-culture comedian George Carlin wouldn’t sanction.
The root of the problem, we were later told, was jealousy; his brother had an active father, while he did not.
A couple of us (Black belts) conceived a plan to take the Sperm Donor to a nearby park to convincehim to ‘do the right thing,’ either financially or time-wise…hopefully both.
Equally important, the counterbalance to financial support is parenting; spending quality time with an impressionable young brother. Show him the way (which might include the truth about his conduct and lack of resources).
We don’t talk above a whisper about unwed births or single parenting. And it’s idiotic that in 2025, a majority of Black teens, according to ‘Mom Junction’ (MJ), an advocacy program, said most got pregnant by accident, and less than a quarter had what they called ‘constructive communications with their parent(s) about sex.’
MJ also revealed in a recent report that teenpregnancy (poor girls) costs taxpayers $7M a year, and the offspring of Sperm Donors a life of grief,disappointment, and mental illness. Moreover,most of the progeny suffer from medical problems, from asthma to lead poisoning.
Teen pregnancy is the number one reason forhigh school dropouts.
Fifty percent of girls said their first sexual experience was unwanted. Eighty-two percent ofteen mothers said their pregnancies were unplanned.
The good old ‘US of A’ has the highest teenpregnancy rate in the ‘uncivilized’ world.
Pregnancies of teens under the age of 20 have adisproportionate percentage of medical complications.
And, various studies show the offspring of achild raised in a ‘poor’ single-parent household are three times more likely to commit a crime, (according to a Holt ‘guess-ta-ment’) fire guns inanger, commit most of the murders and shootings, with 90% getting their girlfriends pregnant to fulfill their manhood appetite.
Less than half pay child support, and most haveas a condition of their visit the seduction (again!)of the child’s mother.
Reading all of that should have given you aheadache by now…too many stats and warnings ofdoom and gloom.
Think about the scenario of the preteen withouta father in his life. Multiply, and take heed.
Hotep.
Leave a Reply