Why black men can't be absent from their child's education

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As a kid, I remember watching documentaries about African village life, and I was always intrigued. The women would be inevitably pounding maize with one hand, knitting a shirt with the other hand, while their feet seemed to plant the fall cotton and harvest the winter wheat simultaneously, all while looking after the kids. And where were the men, you ask?

Well, the men would be found sunning themselves under an acacia tree, drinking a beer, and doing what my aunt called, “big time philosophizing” about life in the village, the tribe, or whatever else was on their mind. It wasn’t that the men were lazy, it just didn’t occur to them that maybe, just maybe, they could take a break from solving the big problems of their world, and should lend a hand in solving the immediate tasks at hand. Instead, the men looked at the work as being women’s work, and as a result, did nothing.

I thought about that African scene last week, when I was sitting on a hard metal chair at my son’s middle school. The occasion was a town hall meeting where parents got a chance to listen to two candidates for principal. This was an important meeting because as parents, as we’d fought and won a battle against our previous principal because of what we perceived to be incompetence, and here was our chance to have a voice in who would be hired to guide our children. And yet, when I took a look around the packed room, I could count the number of black men in attendance on one hand.

So who was there? Moms, single moms, foster moms, guardians, baby mommas, grandmothers, and aunts, all who’d left their jobs early, missed college classes, or gathered multiple children from multiple schools to show up. And guess what? I’m guessing that many of them would go home after the meeting, only to pound maize with one hand, knit a shirt with the other, while making dinner and going over vocabulary words for the next day test.

And this isn’t an isolated incident. Throughout the country, black men are absent from the day to day education of their children to the point of crisis. It’s like the idea of being involved in checking math problems, speaking up at PTA meetings is beneath us.

So what does this mean? It means that we black men are screwing up. We’re leaving the main bulk of education to the women in our community, and we’re either not thinking about the education of our children, not involved in our child’s educational lives (beyond the clichéd questions like “study hard in school”) or we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we’re looking out for the big picture, like figuring out how to pay for college, and that’s our job as black men. Well, that’s not good enough.

It’s time for us to get off of our collective butts and sit with our children and start being intimate with the educational process. That means looking at parent teacher conferences as being black men’s work. Helping your child study for test as being black daddy’s work. Understanding and exploring educational opportunities for your child that can make the difference between raising a scholar and raising someone in the prison system needs to be the work of a black father.
Every so often, I see a news segment that intends to be inspiring, as it lauds groups of black men who volunteer in schools, say to read or tutor. And while volunteering is fine, and needed, those scenes also highlight the fact that our community is so devoid of black fathers who are involved in the daily educational lives of their children, that we need to import black men to provide some sort of black male presence. That’s a massive fail.

But why are we not there? Why are we not at the meetings, going over the tests, helping the children study? Is it laziness? Do we not care?

No, I don’t think so. Plenty of black men work hard to provide for their families and want the best for their children. But there has to be something else. My theory is fear. We have black men who are fearful of being revealed as not being as smart as they think they are. All of that barbershop knowledge doesn’t work when your child is bringing you an algebraic equation.

We also have black men who are fearful of being seen as being effeminate by taking an interest in something as “corny” as education. And most of all, we’re fearful of not doing as good a job as the women in our lives.

This fear taps into the hidden vulnerabilities many black men feel about themselves. Perhaps the façade we show the world of the bad ass black man, intimidated by no one, and mean mugging their way their way through life via hip hop videos, complete with guns and f bombs, is actually paper thin. That we’re actually scared of the thing that resides in our heads: our brains and our capacity to use them. Because in order to truly affect change in the lives of our children, we need to get over those vulnerabilities and use those brains to help our black children do better educationally than we did.

So my challenge to the fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and baby daddy’s out there: What are you going to do to work day to day with your child in their education? Can you show up to each and every school meeting, no matter how inconvenient? Can you look your fifth grader in the eye and say, “I don’t know the answer. Give me a second to look it up?” and reveal a vulnerability in order to help educate your child?

The lucky thing is that it only takes effort, not a PhD, to become involved in the day to day details of your child’s education. You just have to simply show up and try in order to be effective. The question to the absent black men who are big time philosophizing under their own mental acacia trees: Are you man enough to help with homework, go to meetings and help your child study? And if you aren’t, can you really call yourself a black man?