Barack Obama deserves credit for his speech celebrating Father’s Day. He spoke before a packed church audience in Chicago and lectured black fathers about the failure of too many black men to live up to the responsibilities that go along with fatherhood:
We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled–doubled–since we were children. We know the statistics–that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.
He’s been relatively silent on this subject through much of the campaign, so it is especially noteworthy that he decided to talk about it now. But even more interesting was the venue he picked to deliver his message. You can’t tell everything from a website, but one thing is clear from the Apostolic Church of God’s website: this is no Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama’s old praying grounds. There are no Black-nationalist trappings, no dashiki clad preachers or kinte cloth. No radical rhetoric or appeals to black solidarity. In fact, I couldn’t find any specific appeal to race, though the pictures and church history made it clear this is a traditionally black congregation. There was a lot more religion and a lot less radical politics. It looked like pretty standard Pentecostal fare.
A cynic might say that Obama is simply re-positioning himself for the general election. But I’d like to believe it’s more than that. I’ve said before that Obama could play an important role in speaking about the absence of fathers in the black community given his personal history as a child abandoned by his own father. And it’s good he chose a church that is far more representative of the black religious community than Jeremiah Wright’s temple of hate. Better late than never.
