I am a leftist. I am an unapologetic leftist. I am an unapologetic pan-African, pro-black leftist. I am an unapologetic pan-African, pro-black leftist who is critical of everyone, very outspoken, speaks up for marginalized groups, and is an atheist. Because of this, I have many detractors on my social media. As of today, I have nearly 42,500 followers on my Facebook page and over 3000 on my TikTok. My reach is relatively high. This translates to more people who don’t like me or my posts engaging in them. With that engagement comes some… *ahem*… “colorful” comments.
Among those “colorful” comments are those made usually by angry conservative white men who attack me and my character based on anti-black family stereotypes. To them, I am perpetually unemployed due to laziness. I am chronically and happily dependent on government welfare programs to live. I am either a high school dropout, a GED recipient, a high school graduate who was in the lower rankings in his class, or a man who didn’t earn his spot in college but was just given the spot to fill a quota. I don’t believe in marriage, have several “baby mamas,” and don’t take care of my children. This doesn’t count the other stereotypes attached to black men that I get regularly. Just yesterday, a friend of mine called me. he was lamenting about the stereotypes that he has to endure in his comments section as a black man.
Stereotypes About the Black Family
The media often portrays black families in a negative light. Sometimes news programs and movies paint black mothers as unreasonably belligerent “welfare queens” who are prone to violent outbursts, constantly emasculate the men in their lives instead of supporting them (a notion that is shared by many black men in so-called “red-pill content, also known as “the manosphere“), and have multiple “baby-daddies” from several failed relationships that they are culpable of due to bad attitudes or promiscuity. Other times, black mothers are physically large, undesired, asexual women who only live to be caretakers of the people around them, especially white families. Black children are often depicted as coming from impoverished and dysfunctional homes. In these portrayals, they are often involved in criminal activity because of this. Even in cases where black children are “humanized,” they are seen participating in illegal endeavors to assume the responsibility that their absentee fathers and their neglectful mothers couldn’t handle. Thus, they are aged out of their innocence, even in television programs and movies. Black fathers are shown as mostly broke and lazy absentee fathers who love to make babies but don’t take care of them. We are seen as unintelligent, criminal, substance-abusing monsters who beat our wives and children harshly and mercilessly.
The Reality About Black Fathers
In reality, black fathers are the most active fathers with our children out of every other racial group, despite the conflations of black legitimacy with black male parental involvement by people like the late Charlie Kirk and others who used to paint negative stereotypes about black fathers. Most black men that I know personally are involved in the lives of their children. Many of them have at least partial custody of their children, even though they are not married to the child’s mother. In fact, many of the black men who engage in criminal behavior, like selling drugs, often cite caring for or providing for their children as a reason for it.
In the song “Foe Life” by West Coast hip-hop artist Mack 10, he raps:
“Cause a nigga gotta eat, fuck the world
Let the bullets hurl and feed my baby girl”
In the beginning of “Juicy”, rapper Notorious B.I.G. said,
“Yeah, this album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’, to all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin’ in front of [and] called the police on me when I was just tryin’ to make some money to feed my daughter (it’s all good), and all the niggas in the struggle. You know what I’m sayin’? It’s all good, baby baby!”
How Does This Relate to Me?
However, I never been involved in the sale or distribution of illegal drugs. I’ve been working since I was 10 years old and had my first paycheck job at the age of 13. I came from a two-parent home in which my father was an entrepreneur. I married a woman at the age of 24, and we had three children together. Neither of us came into the marriage with children. We were married for 5 years before our first child was born. Our marriage ended after 22 years, and I became the primary parent to my three children, taking care of their daily needs. I was a paid paramedic /firefighter for years, was on the Dean’s List in college, and was an active PTO dad for all my children. I rarely drink or smoke marijuana.
However, let those whose only contact with black folks is in the evening news tell it, and I am some embodiment of negative black stereotypes. These notions are not benign. They have real-life consequences. Such negative stereotypes have gotten me harassed by police when I was younger, and perhaps closed the door on opportunities for me.
Local news stories and the utterances of famous talking heads in legacy media and online push these narratives. What is disturbing is that many people cannot see the racist undertones attached to the “harmless” facts and figures that are constantly thrown out to the public, yet rarely scrutinized.
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