If white privilege is real, then “father privilege” is real. Whatever benefits might have accrued to me as a result of my skin color, I can’t help but recognize that I’ve been tremendously blessed to have had a loving, caring father in my life from infancy onward. I’ve worked with kids who don’t have a father in their life, and have seen the struggles they face. No Head Start program, no Medicaid, no Church youth group leader can take the place of a child’s father. Children of all races and ethnicities suffer from absent fathers–but who to blame? I blame the (mostly WHITE) political influencers and social theorists of the last 50-70 years (up through and including those of today), who have told us that consenting unmarried adults sleeping with each other was a matter of moral indifference to the rest of the community, that if we destigmatized extramarital sex that everything would be OK. Affluent white people (because of their increased access to monetary and social capital) have been largely shielded from the disastrous consequences the hookup culture, whereas those of low socioeconomic status and racial minorities have reaped the terrible consequences which include fatherlessness and poverty. Kids grow up not knowing who their dads are, and the “answer” is simply to pass out more condoms and to start putting girls on birth control when they’re 13 years old. How does this honor the dignity of the human person? That’s what you do with cattle or sheep in a pasture when you don’t want them to breed; that’s NOT human dignity. And the children that result when birth control goes awry (which it inevitably will) are victims of a vicious social experiment for which no one will take any responsibility.

Because if human beings were just machines or animals, then the answer would need to be a mechanical one. But mechanical solutions can have a dehumanizing effect when they’re applied to something as important as sexuality. While sexuality is not solely for the purposes of reproduction, when you create a society in which sexuality is largely divorced from reproduction, the consequences you get look something like what we have now; kids don’t know who their fathers are, or they hardly ever see their fathers. because we have taught young people that sexuality has little to do with reproduction (because our technology can magically make it so) or with commitment. But it’s rather silly of us to be surprised at the rates of single motherhood that we see, the high number of children raised in poverty, etc. I don’t rail against the young mothers and fathers in these situations, because I think they’ve been lied to. They’ve been lied to by their parents, by society, by Hollywood, by all those who hold social power who never taught them the truth about human sexuality. The lion’s share of the blame belongs to the people in power, those with real social influence who have the ability to promulgate ideas and persuade millions of people from their mainstream media and social media pulpits, who refuse to acknowledge the obvious causal link between rampant sexual activity between young, unmarried people, and the pregnancy and single parenthood that results. This situation can’t change, you say? It’s human nature?

Human nature is malleable as heck. I’ll bet if you looked at the numbers of fatherless children in, say, 1950, that it would be much lower than it is now. I’m not saying that people then didn’t do anything outside of marriage, but I’m saying they did it a lot less because the social taboos made such errors a lot more costly. Human nature ain’t changed much in 70 years. Do we need to bring back all the severe social taboos? Not necessarily, but we need to admit that sexual acts that are not a true act of self-gift, that are done primarily to meet one’s own needs, are part of what has brought us to the situation that we find ourselves in, in which children of low socioeconomic status and minority children increasingly don’t have the privilege of being raised by their father. I think that a good place to start is teaching children and teenagers that it’s irrational and an affront to human dignity to have sex with someone you’re not committed to and that you don’t selflessly care for.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/black-lives-matter-black-fatherhood-curtis-hill