By Willie Johnson
Guest Commentator
It takes courage and sacrifice to raise a family. To Black fathers in Minnesota and across America, Happy Father’s Day. It’s a great privilege to be a father, especially a Black father with so many trials and tribulations they face daily in America.
With the daily struggle for a Black father it’s hard to make ends meet. It’s not so much financial as it is with the social communication with his family. Black men are under so much pressure simply to be around their family.
So many Black men and fathers are incarcerated, in-over-their-heads victims to the revolving doors of America’s judicial system. In America the deck has been stacked against Black fathers both economically and socially. Black men are on the outside, looking in. Black women make Black men feel ashamed and inadequate, which adds to the stigma put on Black fathers, that questions their manhood, their perseverance and their dignity.
No society can last when the fathers are shut out from the nurturing, protection, discipline, and can’t show an example of leadership for his family. America takes away all these attributes of Black fathers, so that the Black family is left without the father at the helm.
Forget about the ABC’s. A Black father needs a plan all the way to Z. Black children don’t want to learn their history, now our streets are filled with outlaw Black children, especially young Black boys, who don’t believe in social principles or themselves. American Society makes them outcasts because of the various reasons their fathers aren’t around to dictate the proper discipline of leadership. Our Black children desperately need positive Black male role models.
Black men, stop treating our women like a girlfriend when in all actuality she is your wife. If you make a home and rear children with all the amenities that go with being a family, then you are married in spite of legality. As Black fathers we must take back the heart of our home in order to service our family.
America has helped to make Black fathers obsolete by undermining the Black home and the leadership within the home. It’s hard to be the leader of the home when you are denied jobs, financial assistance or the ability to be enterprising. Every Black father dreams to be the hero for his family. There must be a new resurrection, a fight for the new soul of the Black family.
Black fathers must play a major part in the business of the family belief system to show love and to receive love. So many of our Black children are fatherless and loveless. Love is the missing chemical for family stability.
As Black fathers in the 21st century we have a challenge we haven’t faced since slavery. That is how to replenish the love, morality, positivity and balance in a family. What have we learned from history from Black fathers in the past who had little of nothing in material wealth but still maintained their families?
It doesn’t matter if you are a hip hopper with saggy pants or a farmer wearing overalls. If you bear a child, you still have the responsibilities of being a father. We are being consumed by the beasts of chaos, a sinister hidden agenda by the ruling powers of America to play down Black men leadership in the homes.
By taking Black fathers out of the scenario and replacing that leadership with a failing public school system as a substitute for parental leadership a rift is bound happen in a dysfunctional family, which leads to a failed familyship.
We need every day to be Father’s Day, to bring about a new meaning of being family. To nurture hope, experience real love and replace the devil ideology with God ideology. To reawaking the Black family and Black fathers to a new sunrise of hope for the Black family.
Willie Johnson lives in Minneapolis.
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