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Agreed, but as a black man who grew up fatherless be mindful why black fathers are absent. Many times it's not by choice. There were and still are intentional s

Agreed, but as a black man who grew up fatherless be mindful why black fathers are absent. Many times it's not by choice. There were and still are intentional systems in place to make it difficult for fathers to get jobs, stay within the prison system, and have access to quality education. I urge people commenting to ask their black friends for their insights. I came from an inner city and graduated from CMU. The two worlds are stark and mind blowing. But in the end, more mentors at an early age can help break the cycle. That's how you can play your part.

robmiller 7y ago
Specifically, I understand a 1968 law put into effect the Man in the House rule. Black families had to decide if welfare would pay better than the father's job. Many left the house so the mother and child(ren) could receive the welfare payment. The Moe Factz podcast has been helpful to me in understanding these structural problems in society. https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Man-in-the-House+Rule https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Man-in-the-Ho... http://www.moefactz.com/ http://www.moefactz.com/
- haecceity 7y ago
  What was the justification for this rule? It almost seems intentionally malicious.
  - wolco 7y ago
    It sounds progressive at the time. Men worked, if one wasn't part of the home then women needed more support.
    - chepaslaaa 7y ago
      poor women worked for decades prior to 1968
  - Nerdfest 7y ago
    I'm guessing the justification was intentional maliciousness.
  - nealabq 7y ago
    The authors of this regulation probably assumed that married couples would not be induced to split just to collect money, and that single moms would stay chaste in order to collect, and thus not have more out-of-wedlock children. So they set up a law that incentivized behavior they were trying to avoid. It's like the Marriage Penalty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty ) except worse. So it probably wasn't a result of maliciousness but rather a lack of imagination and empathy (aka stupidity).
- ScottBurson 7y ago
  According to your first link, the rule had been in place in some jurisdictions prior to 1968, but was struck down by the US Supreme Court at that time.
  - robmiller 7y ago
    I'm at the end of my knowledge on the issue. Someone else will need to weigh in.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    Such systems exist today, at least in Alaska. The GRA is only available to single parents. https://singlemothersgrants.org/single-mothers-assistance-in-alaska/ https://singlemothersgrants.org/single-mothers-assistance-in...
    - ScottBurson 7y ago
      To clarify: the Supreme Court did not say that assistance could not be restricted to single parents. The "Man in the House" rule said that a woman was not single if she even had a boyfriend who was not her children's father, if her boyfriend ever visited her house. That's the part that was struck down. As for the restriction to single parents, I can certainly see the potential for unintended consequences. Paying people not to get married means fewer people will get married — just as paying people not to work, as the "welfare cliff" effectively does, means fewer people will work. I broadly support the idea of helping people who need help, but it needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't tend to trap them in their situations.
datashow 7y ago
I just happened to read a story where an Asian was killed while two blacks trying to steal laptop from him https://abc7news.com/5811847 https://abc7news.com/5811847 The story mentioned one suspect's sister saying " I have 4 kids and no daddy in their lives ". I simply can't understand this. One kid , I can understand. But four? ... Four (Add: non has daddy present)? I just have too many questions. Add: I interpreted "no daddy in their lives" as they never had a daddy present ever. This could be my mistake.
- fwip 7y ago
  You can't understand someone having four kids?
  - datashow 7y ago
    No. Non of them has father present. I thought the context was obvious.
    - fwip 7y ago
      Currently, no. We don't know what the situation was like when they were having kids. The dad (or dads) might not be around for a lot of reasons. Maybe they divorced five years after the last kid was born, maybe he got arrested, maybe he died.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Four kids as a baby mama, I'm guessing. A couple with an extended family can handle four kids, but an individual who may not be all that tight with anyone who can keep an eye on the kids... Well, chances are they'll fail at a lot of important things.
- fao_ 7y ago
  Ignoring the other possibilities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_birth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_birth
- scarface74 7y ago
rayiner 7y ago
That’s certainly true, but I’m not sure it’s a complete explanation. Jobs and education are less available in say Bangladesh than in US inner cities, and even among impoverished people families remain intact. Strong cultural and religious taboos on divorce and single parenthood play a big role in that. It’s worth noting that the percentage of white children raised without fathers has tripled since the 1960-1970s: https://images.app.goo.gl/SkTaWF9nyoZwXUbBA https://images.app.goo.gl/SkTaWF9nyoZwXUbBA. That’s not a change that’s caused by institutional factors. Of course, systematic racism impacts culture too. People in Bangladesh may be materially poorer and less educated than those in inner cities in the US. But they have standing within a social framework that institutional racism denies to African Americans.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Surely you must have met lower caste people in Bangladesh? You mean standing with respect to what?
galangalalgol 7y ago
I have a friend who switched worlds in adulthood simply because someone convinced him it was possible to do it. When he describes it, it isn't like it was a pep talk, it was more like someone telling you that you can change your own oil in your car and sends you steps. Part of that is that he was ready to hear it, and was quite smart, but if no one had said anything.
- esotericn 7y ago
  I like the phrase 'switched worlds'. It's quite apt. I chose to switch worlds when I left school. It really is a complete bifurcation - you can go back, but it's a foreign land now.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >you can go back, but it's a foreign land now. It is and it isn't. Every society has some sort of proverb like "you can leave the X but the X will never leave you" because on some level people can't undo their upbringing.
trentnix 7y ago
I struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic of single-parent (and no parent) households among blacks (or any ethnic or economic group) is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism. Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'. Those horrible blights on American (and Western) society have mostly been buried yet the numbers of black children growing up without a father has exploded. Whatever contribution systemic racism, institutional racism, conscious bias, unconscious bias, etc. (which I concede are real things) have on health of the family unit within black American culture, something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction. Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat. Stuff like our code didn't work not because our programmers wrote bad software, but because our process is broken. Those FISA warrants that were granted because FBI agents and lawyers lied need to be fixed with 'better safeguards'. Or those banks get taxpayer bailouts and nobody goes to jail because there wasn't sufficient regulation to prevent systematic fraud and excessive risk-taking. Nobody has to be embarrassed for their own behavior or held responsible for their own actions when the nameless, faceless system gets the arrows. If you want to talk about real privilege, it's the privilege of growing up in a healthy family unit. The greatest advantage I've ever received was a loving father and mother who were there to provide support, instruction, and discipline. All children - everywhere - deserve and desperately need good, loving, present parents. It breaks my heart that's become the exception and not the rule.
- rexpop 7y ago
  > Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'. Unfortunately, they are. Those clumsy relics of explicit bias were too reliant on individual antipathy, which is dissipating in a connected world, where others' experiences area available through books, movies, and the Internet. What we have, instead, is a much more sophisticated, and less error-prone system. It's not a "convenient scapegoat," it's actually very, very inconvenient. Institutional biases are hard to change, especially when they're baked into the ends, and not incidental means.
BuckRogers 7y ago
>I urge people commenting to ask their black friends for their insights. I avoid talking matters of race as much as I can, because I don't want that person to feel that they're a "black" person in my mind or view. Because if I were a black man, I wouldn't want to define me. So I don't let that define those I contact. I strive to treat everyone the same. Most of the time, it works, you CAN train yourself to treat everyone the same. If you think "black" when you see a black person, then you need to keep working at it, like everything in life. After you're done, you'll still have some level of innate subconscious racism that comes with human nature, but the key is to not actively embrace or act on it. That said, I work with a black guy (we're both developers). His dad was never around, he is a wanderer today and he called him a deadbeat. He said something about his dad being resentful that he turned out so well, and had nothing to do with it. My colleague attributes his success to his mom. In his case, it sounded like his dad was absent by choice. My coworker is not a deadbeat dad, has children, an expensive home and a wife. Hard worker, as you have to be to be a successful developer. I think being born with a good mind helps, as well as a stable home even if it's just a mother. A little luck (circumstances) helps all of us.
Simon_says 7y ago
> stay within the prison system Is it too much to ask black men to not commit crimes?

robmiller 7y ago

Specifically, I understand a 1968 law put into effect the Man in the House rule. Black families had to decide if welfare would pay better than the father's job. Many left the house so the mother and child(ren) could receive the welfare payment. The Moe Factz podcast has been helpful to me in understanding these structural problems in society. https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Man-in-the-House+Rule https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Man-in-the-Ho... http://www.moefactz.com/ http://www.moefactz.com/

haecceity 7y ago
What was the justification for this rule? It almost seems intentionally malicious.
- wolco 7y ago
  It sounds progressive at the time. Men worked, if one wasn't part of the home then women needed more support.
  - chepaslaaa 7y ago
    poor women worked for decades prior to 1968
- Nerdfest 7y ago
  I'm guessing the justification was intentional maliciousness.
- nealabq 7y ago
  The authors of this regulation probably assumed that married couples would not be induced to split just to collect money, and that single moms would stay chaste in order to collect, and thus not have more out-of-wedlock children. So they set up a law that incentivized behavior they were trying to avoid. It's like the Marriage Penalty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty ) except worse. So it probably wasn't a result of maliciousness but rather a lack of imagination and empathy (aka stupidity).
ScottBurson 7y ago
According to your first link, the rule had been in place in some jurisdictions prior to 1968, but was struck down by the US Supreme Court at that time.
- robmiller 7y ago
  I'm at the end of my knowledge on the issue. Someone else will need to weigh in.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Such systems exist today, at least in Alaska. The GRA is only available to single parents. https://singlemothersgrants.org/single-mothers-assistance-in-alaska/ https://singlemothersgrants.org/single-mothers-assistance-in...
  - ScottBurson 7y ago
    To clarify: the Supreme Court did not say that assistance could not be restricted to single parents. The "Man in the House" rule said that a woman was not single if she even had a boyfriend who was not her children's father, if her boyfriend ever visited her house. That's the part that was struck down. As for the restriction to single parents, I can certainly see the potential for unintended consequences. Paying people not to get married means fewer people will get married — just as paying people not to work, as the "welfare cliff" effectively does, means fewer people will work. I broadly support the idea of helping people who need help, but it needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't tend to trap them in their situations.

datashow 7y ago

I just happened to read a story where an Asian was killed while two blacks trying to steal laptop from him https://abc7news.com/5811847 https://abc7news.com/5811847 The story mentioned one suspect's sister saying " I have 4 kids and no daddy in their lives ". I simply can't understand this. One kid , I can understand. But four? ... Four (Add: non has daddy present)? I just have too many questions. Add: I interpreted "no daddy in their lives" as they never had a daddy present ever. This could be my mistake.

fwip 7y ago
You can't understand someone having four kids?
- datashow 7y ago
  No. Non of them has father present. I thought the context was obvious.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Currently, no. We don't know what the situation was like when they were having kids. The dad (or dads) might not be around for a lot of reasons. Maybe they divorced five years after the last kid was born, maybe he got arrested, maybe he died.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Four kids as a baby mama, I'm guessing. A couple with an extended family can handle four kids, but an individual who may not be all that tight with anyone who can keep an eye on the kids... Well, chances are they'll fail at a lot of important things.
fao_ 7y ago
Ignoring the other possibilities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_birth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_birth
scarface74 7y ago

rayiner 7y ago

That’s certainly true, but I’m not sure it’s a complete explanation. Jobs and education are less available in say Bangladesh than in US inner cities, and even among impoverished people families remain intact. Strong cultural and religious taboos on divorce and single parenthood play a big role in that. It’s worth noting that the percentage of white children raised without fathers has tripled since the 1960-1970s: https://images.app.goo.gl/SkTaWF9nyoZwXUbBA https://images.app.goo.gl/SkTaWF9nyoZwXUbBA. That’s not a change that’s caused by institutional factors. Of course, systematic racism impacts culture too. People in Bangladesh may be materially poorer and less educated than those in inner cities in the US. But they have standing within a social framework that institutional racism denies to African Americans.

selimthegrim 7y ago
Surely you must have met lower caste people in Bangladesh? You mean standing with respect to what?

galangalalgol 7y ago

I have a friend who switched worlds in adulthood simply because someone convinced him it was possible to do it. When he describes it, it isn't like it was a pep talk, it was more like someone telling you that you can change your own oil in your car and sends you steps. Part of that is that he was ready to hear it, and was quite smart, but if no one had said anything.

esotericn 7y ago
I like the phrase 'switched worlds'. It's quite apt. I chose to switch worlds when I left school. It really is a complete bifurcation - you can go back, but it's a foreign land now.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >you can go back, but it's a foreign land now. It is and it isn't. Every society has some sort of proverb like "you can leave the X but the X will never leave you" because on some level people can't undo their upbringing.

trentnix 7y ago

I struggle to buy this line of thinking that, somehow, the epidemic of single-parent (and no parent) households among blacks (or any ethnic or economic group) is the consequence of discriminatory systems or conspiracy or racism. Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'. Those horrible blights on American (and Western) society have mostly been buried yet the numbers of black children growing up without a father has exploded. Whatever contribution systemic racism, institutional racism, conscious bias, unconscious bias, etc. (which I concede are real things) have on health of the family unit within black American culture, something else is clearly doing the lion's share of destruction. Additionally, I'm suspicious when I hear the 'system' being blamed because it's a convenient scapegoat. Stuff like our code didn't work not because our programmers wrote bad software, but because our process is broken. Those FISA warrants that were granted because FBI agents and lawyers lied need to be fixed with 'better safeguards'. Or those banks get taxpayer bailouts and nobody goes to jail because there wasn't sufficient regulation to prevent systematic fraud and excessive risk-taking. Nobody has to be embarrassed for their own behavior or held responsible for their own actions when the nameless, faceless system gets the arrows. If you want to talk about real privilege, it's the privilege of growing up in a healthy family unit. The greatest advantage I've ever received was a loving father and mother who were there to provide support, instruction, and discipline. All children - everywhere - deserve and desperately need good, loving, present parents. It breaks my heart that's become the exception and not the rule.

rexpop 7y ago
> Such systems of discrimination surely aren't more powerful now than when the government was enforcing Jim Crow, when schools were segregated by force, when the Ku Klux Klan was not only active but had active members sitting in Congress, and when academics openly claimed that non-whites were inferior to whites and proposed eugenic 'solutions'. Unfortunately, they are. Those clumsy relics of explicit bias were too reliant on individual antipathy, which is dissipating in a connected world, where others' experiences area available through books, movies, and the Internet. What we have, instead, is a much more sophisticated, and less error-prone system. It's not a "convenient scapegoat," it's actually very, very inconvenient. Institutional biases are hard to change, especially when they're baked into the ends, and not incidental means.

BuckRogers 7y ago

>I urge people commenting to ask their black friends for their insights. I avoid talking matters of race as much as I can, because I don't want that person to feel that they're a "black" person in my mind or view. Because if I were a black man, I wouldn't want to define me. So I don't let that define those I contact. I strive to treat everyone the same. Most of the time, it works, you CAN train yourself to treat everyone the same. If you think "black" when you see a black person, then you need to keep working at it, like everything in life. After you're done, you'll still have some level of innate subconscious racism that comes with human nature, but the key is to not actively embrace or act on it. That said, I work with a black guy (we're both developers). His dad was never around, he is a wanderer today and he called him a deadbeat. He said something about his dad being resentful that he turned out so well, and had nothing to do with it. My colleague attributes his success to his mom. In his case, it sounded like his dad was absent by choice. My coworker is not a deadbeat dad, has children, an expensive home and a wife. Hard worker, as you have to be to be a successful developer. I think being born with a good mind helps, as well as a stable home even if it's just a mother. A little luck (circumstances) helps all of us.

Simon_says 7y ago

> stay within the prison system Is it too much to ask black men to not commit crimes?