The Audacity of Hope

good men who treated me with affection. But my relationships with them were
necessarily partial, incomplete. In the case of my stepfather, this was a result of limited
duration and his natural reserve. And as close as I was to my grandfather, he was both
too old and too troubled to provide me with much direction.
It was women, then, who provided the ballast in my life—my grandmother, whose
dogged practicality kept the family afloat, and my mother, whose love and clarity of
spirit kept my sister’s and my world centered. Because of them I never wanted for
anything important. From them I would absorb the values that guide me to this day.
Still, as I got older I came to recognize how hard it had been for my mother and
grandmother to raise us without a strong male presence in the house. I felt as well the
mark that a father’s absence can leave on a child. I determined that my father’s
irresponsibility toward his children, my stepfather’s remoteness, and my grandfather’s
failures would all become object lessons for me, and that my own children would have a
father they could count on.
In the most basic sense, I’ve succeeded. My marriage is intact and my family is
provided for. I attend parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals, and my daughters
bask in my adoration. And yet, of all the areas of my life, it is in my capacities as a
husband and father that I entertain the most doubt.
I realize I’m not alone in this; at some level I’m just going through the same conflicting
emotions that other fathers experience as they navigate an economy in flux and
changing social norms. Even as it becomes less and less attainable, the image of the
1950s father—supporting his family with a nine-to-five job, sitting down for the dinner
that his wife prepares every night, coaching Little League, and handling power tools—
hovers over the culture no less powerfully than the image of the stay-at-home mom. For
many men today, the inability to be their family’s sole breadwinner is a source of
frustration and even shame; one doesn’t have to be an economic determinist to believe
that high unemployment and low wages contribute to the lack of parental involvement
and low marriage rates among African American men.
For working men, no less than for working women, the terms of employment have
changed. Whether a high-paid professional or a worker on the assembly line, fathers are
expected to put in longer hours on the job than they did in the past. And these more
demanding work schedules are occurring precisely at the time when fathers are
expected—and in many cases want—to be more actively involved in the lives of their
children than their own fathers may have been in theirs.
But if the gap between the idea of parenthood in my head and the compromised reality
that I live isn’t unique, that doesn’t relieve my sense that I’m not always giving my
family all that I could. Last Father’s Day, I was invited to speak to the members of
Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t have a prepared text, but I
took as my theme “what it takes to be a full-grown man.” I suggested that it was time
that men in general and black men in particular put away their excuses for not being
there for their families. I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant
more than bearing a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the
home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have
fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle; and that if we