Why the "Black Man Ain't Shit" Stereotype Needs to End. A Blog on how More Black Men are Taking Care of their Children than not.

If you have ever been within a Black community, than you have probably heard someone say... "Black Men Ain't Shit." This can refer to a lot of things other than the notion of them being absent in their children's lives. Though this may be an ideology that most Black women hold on to and believe based off of their negative experiences with Black men, does this necessarily mean that it is true, and most importantly that it applies to every Black man that is walking the earth? I would argue no, but the media definitely wants to display a different image. We may not notice it, but the media is the Black man's biggest critic. The media works overtime and picks certain stories to display Black men as murders, thugs, and animals that simply need to be detained. This is why police officers think that it is okay to kill our Black men, and expect that there should not be any consequences for their actions. In their minds, they are only protecting our communities, and keeping them safe at the expense of Black men being killed at a very rapid rate. The truth of the matter is that the society that we live in never wanted Black men to thrive. This is why they have found other ways to detain our Black men without calling it slavery. Now they have jails, and police officers targeting young Black men in schools, to ensure they become prisoners before they can even dream about walking across the stage for high school. The school to prison pipeline is on a rise and the cases of this phenomenon are only skyrocketing. If the media is against Black men, why are Black women against them as well?

Granted, there are Black men who do not take care of their children, cheat, and do horrible things, but men from all races and backgrounds are capable, and do the same things as well. There is truly nothing new under the sun, and there is nothing that a Black man has done that another race has not done as well. I am not saying that any of these things are right because they are WRONG, but I wanted to make the point that wrong actions has no color nor race. Now in this blog, I am specifically focusing on the correlation between Black men, and them not taking care of their children that they helped to produce. As much as we may want to believe that this is true, statistics actually show otherwise. According to an article called "They're Dragging out the Absent Black Fathers Myth Again" by Josh Levs it states, "The Census Bureau reported that 2.5 million Black fathers were living with their children, and about 1.7 Million were officially living apart." If more fathers are living with their children, then why does the stereotype that Black fathers don't take care of their children still exist? The truth is that there are a lot of factors that has allowed this ideology to be a stigma in the Black community for so long. For starters, there is a high rate of Black children being born outside of wedlock. The percentages are as high as 70%, but this does not mean that the child is fatherless. It is just that there are more Black children who use their mothers address for legal reasons, even if both parents have joint custody, and are both putting in the work to raise their child or children. When it comes to statistics, they just see the address is under the mothers, see that the mother is not married, and just assume it is another fatherless Black child that will probably be a product of the jail system, when that is not the case. The truth of the matter is that Black men are "70 percent more likely to be involved in their children's every day life and needs than White or Hispanic men" (Levs). Though White and Hispanic men may have higher marriage rates, this statistic shows that a lot of the responsibility falls on the wife, and they are simply less involved. Based off of this evidence, the Black community has a larger issue with marriage, not fatherless children. 

In a world where Black men are being targeted and degraded by the systems that have been put in place by our whitewashed society, it is only right that as Black women we uplift our men, so that they can in return uplift our communities. Black men have a lot of obstacles to go through, and it can seem like even more of a burden if Black women are also pointing the finger and simply saying "You ain't Shit!" It kinda reminds you of what the slave master would tell us as he whipped the flesh off of our backs, and told us to "Keep picking cotton Nigger!". My beautiful Black queens and my resilient Black kings, please uplift one another, so that we can pass down the torch to the next generation, like our ancestors did so graciously for us.