In Search of James Evans

The Illogic of the Absent Black Father

by Aaron R. Dare

Before I understood the language of structural racism, I understood James Evans.

He was the first Black father I remember seeing on television who was not merely present in the family portrait, but active in the life of his household. He loved his wife. He disciplined his children. He worried about their future. He carried the burden of providing for a family in an economy that seemed determined to keep him one paycheck away from disaster.

James Evans was not wealthy or perfect. He was proud, frustrated, stern, and sometimes angry.

But he was there.

And then he was removed.

John Amos, the actor who gave James Evans his force and dignity, objected to the direction of Good Times. He believed the show’s increasing emphasis on J.J. Evans and buffoonish comedy was reducing a complicated Black family to a collection of familiar stereotypes. Amos clashed with writers over storylines he considered inauthentic, was eventually fired, and James Evans was killed in an automobile accident that occurred offscreen. [1]

The irony is difficult to miss.

One of the first active Black fathers I remember seeing on television disappeared not because the character abandoned his family, but because the man portraying him refused to remain silent while that family was being reduced to caricature.

America loves to ask what happened to the Black father.

It asks as though it arrived late to the scene, discovered an empty chair at the family table, and had no idea how it got there. It surveys the Black household with the practiced bewilderment of an innocent observer. Then it offers its familiar diagnoses: irresponsibility, welfare dependency, promiscuity, criminality, wounded masculinity, and cultural decay.

The Black father, if ever present, we are later told, simply left.

He left because welfare made him unnecessary. He left because the Black woman became too independent. He left because she earned a degree, established a career, and found the success he could not locate for himself. Intimidated by her accomplishments and humiliated by his own shortcomings, he withdrew from the home.

America believes this shit because the alternative would require a confession.

The absent Black father is not merely the man of American folklore who went to the corner store for a pack of Kools and somehow disappeared into the ether.

He is also a historical construction.

He is the product of a nation that repeatedly separated Black men from their families, denied their authority, obstructed their ability to provide, criminalized their presence, and then transformed the resulting distance into evidence of their moral inferiority.

The mythology begins by collapsing several different men into one convenient caricature.

A father who does not live at the same address as his child is called absent. A father who cannot provide consistently is called absent. A father who has been imprisoned, displaced, impoverished, or excluded is called absent. A father whose relationship with the child’s mother has ended is called absent.

A father who genuinely abandons his child is also called absent.

Those are not identical conditions.

Residence is not devotion. Income is not love. Marriage is not the only measure of fatherhood. Physical separation does not automatically establish emotional abandonment. Yet America prefers a vocabulary crude enough to hide the difference.

Any honest account of Black fatherhood must begin not with welfare policy, the Moynihan Report, or the alleged failures of modern Black men.

It must begin with slavery.

Slavery did not merely separate Black families. It constructed a legal and economic system in which their separation enriched white people.

In 1662, colonial Virginia enacted the principle later known as partus sequitur ventrem, meaning that the legal condition of the child followed that of the mother. A child born to an enslaved woman would also be enslaved, regardless of whether the father was enslaved, free, or white. The law reversed the usual English common law presumption that a child’s status followed the father and enabled enslavers to reproduce their labor force through the bodies of Black women. [2]

This was not merely a method of determining lineage.

It was a business model.

Each child born to an enslaved woman became another commodity. Another worker. Another body that could be sold, leased, mortgaged, inherited, or used as collateral.

Reproduction became production.

The Black womb became part of the plantation’s capital infrastructure, producing wealth for white men and bondage for generations not yet born.

The arrangement operated largely for the benefit of white men. A white enslaver could sexually exploit an enslaved woman, father a child with her, and assume no legal obligation to either of them. The child inherited neither his freedom nor his name, neither his property nor his protection. The child instead inherited the condition of the mother and could become the property of the biological father himself.

White paternity created no obligation.

Black maternity created a commodity.

Within such a system, Black fatherhood could not be allowed legal permanence. An enslaved man might love a woman, commit himself to her, build a family with her, and consider himself bound to her before God. But his marriage possessed no legal force capable of preventing either spouse from being sold.

In some communities, enslaved Black men and women honored their unions through ceremony, including the tradition of jumping the broom. But ceremony was not legal recognition. However sacred it may have been within the community, it carried no force or effect against the power of the enslaver. [3]

The broom provided dignity.

It held no legal power.

It could mark a covenant between two people, but it could not stop a sale. It could not protect a wife from being taken, a husband from being leased, or a child from being sold away. Nor did it give the father any recognized legal claim over his family. The ritual honored the bond, but the law refused to defend it whenever that bond interfered with white ownership.

This was not collateral damage.

It was integral to the institution.

A legally recognized Black husband would have possessed some claim upon his wife. A legally recognized Black father would have possessed some claim upon his children. Those claims would have interfered with the white man’s ownership.

Slavery could tolerate affection among Black people.

What it could not tolerate was an enforceable Black claim upon the people they loved.

The first absent Black father was not a man who walked away.

He was a man whose wife could be sold beyond his reach, whose children could be taken without his permission, and whose fatherhood disappeared whenever it conflicted with the white man’s balance sheet.

And still, Black families persisted.

Enslaved people formed marriages without legal protection. They created networks of kinship and care. They preserved names, rituals, memories, and obligations across plantations and generations.

After emancipation, formerly enslaved people traveled across counties and states searching for spouses, children, parents, and siblings who had been sold away. They wrote letters, placed advertisements, petitioned officials, and formalized marriages that slavery had refused to recognize. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped newly freed people document marriages and locate family members as Black families attempted to reconstruct what enslavement had deliberately scattered. [4]

That history should have destroyed the myth before it was ever born.

One of the first great collective acts of Black freedom was the search for family.

We did not emerge from slavery running away from one another.

We emerged searching for one another.

But emancipation did not end the machinery of removal. It forced the machinery to change its language.

The Black man who could no longer be openly sold as property could be arrested, fined, convicted, and leased through systems of racial criminalization. Black Codes and vagrancy laws helped funnel newly freed Black people into convict leasing systems that extracted their labor for private profit. [5]

The plantation removed the Black father through sale.

The post slavery criminal system removed him through arrest and forced labor.

The modern penal state would later industrialize the process.

Through each transformation, America preserved the outcome while changing the explanation. The man was no longer property. He was a criminal. He was no longer being sold. He was being sentenced. His separation from his family was no longer presented as an injury committed against him. It was offered as proof that something was inherently wrong within him.

The country created the distance and then interpreted the distance as desertion.

Economic exclusion deepened the distortion.

American patriarchy traditionally measures manhood through provision. A respectable man is expected to earn, own, protect, and financially sustain his household. Yet Black men were systematically denied equal access to the jobs, wages, property, credit, education, and civic authority through which that version of manhood was supposed to be performed.

America denied Black men many of the traditional ways this country measures manhood, then mocked us for not possessing them.

First, it restricted our ability to provide.

Then it defined our value by whether we could provide.

Finally, it looked at the strain inside our homes and called it proof that we had failed as men and fathers.

Research on economic mobility confirms that these disparities cannot be reduced to family structure or individual motivation. Controlling for parental income, Black boys had lower adult incomes than white boys in 99 percent of the census tracts studied. Differences in parental marital status, education, and wealth explained little of the racial income gap. [6]

That is not merely racism operating beside patriarchy.

It is racism operating through patriarchy.

But the economic strain placed upon Black families was never about wages alone.

Income helps a family survive the present. Wealth gives a family protection from the future. It pays for emergencies, opens doors, creates choices, and gives children something to build upon.

America loves prescribing financial literacy to Black people, as though our grandparents simply forgot to invest wages they were never paid, purchase land they were denied, and inherit homes banks refused to finance.

Apparently, we should have diversified the plantation portfolio, maxed out the retirement account during Jim Crow, and bought property in neighborhoods where the deed said we could not live.

Those deeds were real. Racially restrictive covenants were written into property records to prevent Black people from owning, renting, or occupying homes in designated communities. Redlining, discriminatory federal policy, and unequal mortgage access further restricted Black homeownership and the accumulation of property wealth. [7]

The racial wealth gap did not survive because Black people refused to work.

It survived because white wealth was allowed to grow while Black wealth was repeatedly interrupted, undervalued, seized, burned, redlined, and financed at a higher cost.

And still, we built.

We bought land, opened businesses, established communities, educated our children, and created something from almost nothing. But every generation of Black progress remained vulnerable to a law, a bank, a mob, a government agency, or a market prepared to take back what we had managed to gain.

By the time civil rights laws began removing some formal barriers, accumulated capital already mattered as much as, and often more than, earned income. White families entered that period with property, inheritances, investments, and generations of protected advantage. Black families entered it carrying the cost of generations of interruption.

Federal Reserve figures for 2022 placed median white family wealth at roughly $285,000 and median Black family wealth at roughly $45,000. Black families made significant proportional gains during the preceding years, but the absolute gap still widened. [8]

That is the trick hidden inside the bootstrap sermon.

It keeps examining our shoes while refusing to discuss who owned the road, controlled the bank, wrote the deed, and collected the interest.

The racial wealth gap is not evidence of Black financial failure.

It is the accumulated interest on American policy.

And that history matters to any honest discussion of the Black father.

America did not merely expect him to love his children. It expected him to provide housing, stability, education, security, and inheritance while repeatedly obstructing his access to the wealth that made those things possible.

Then it judged his fatherhood by what it had prevented him from providing.

The same racial and patriarchal order imposed a different burden upon Black women.

Black girls are frequently denied the protection culturally associated with childhood. Research on adultification found that adults perceived Black girls as less innocent and more adult like than white girls of the same age, particularly between the ages of five and fourteen. Black girls were also viewed as needing less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort. [9]

Society does not make the Black girl into a man.

It denies her girlhood.

She learns vigilance before she should need it. She is assigned adult responsibilities without receiving adult authority. She may be expected to care for siblings, manage instability, suppress vulnerability, and defend herself against adults who have already decided that she is old enough to know better but rarely young enough to require protection.

Then, when the Black girl becomes a Black woman, society renames the survival skills it forced her to develop.

Her independence becomes aggression.

Her vigilance becomes hostility.

Her decisiveness becomes domination.

Her endurance becomes proof that she does not require tenderness.

The world first refuses to protect the Black girl.

Then it condemns the Black woman for learning how to survive without protection.

This adultification flows directly into the emasculation thesis.

According to that theory, the Black woman became too strong, too educated, too independent, too professionally successful, and too accustomed to leading. The Black man, having failed to locate comparable success, became intimidated by hers. Unable to tolerate her income, education, confidence, or authority, he abandoned the household.

The theory insults both parties.

It reduces the Black woman to a domineering matriarch whose strength has rendered her incapable of partnership.

It reduces the Black man to a resentful and emotionally fragile child who cannot stand beside an accomplished woman without feeling diminished.

Neither is treated as fully human.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave federal legitimacy to this framework in his 1965 report on the Black family. The report described the Black community as having been forced into a matriarchal structure that conflicted with a larger American society organized around male dominance. It characterized that structure as a crushing burden upon Black men and an impediment to the progress of the Black community. [10]

The report’s great error was not that it observed Black women carrying extraordinary burdens.

Black women were carrying extraordinary burdens.

Its error was treating the woman carrying the burden as part of the pathology rather than asking who placed the burden upon her.

The Black woman became the explanation for the Black man’s marginalization.

The Black man became the explanation for the family’s instability.

White supremacy quietly escaped the room.

The emasculation thesis also rests upon a patriarchal assumption that deserves greater scrutiny. It assumes that a relationship can remain stable only when the man possesses more income, status, authority, or social power than the woman.

Under that logic, a woman’s success must diminish a man because masculinity has been defined through superiority rather than character.

Partnership becomes hierarchy.

Cooperation becomes competition.

A woman’s accomplishment becomes a referendum on the man standing beside her.

Some Black men have internalized those beliefs. Some Black men have been threatened by accomplished women. Black men are human beings, not saints drafted into a countermyth.

But male insecurity is neither uniquely Black nor sufficient to explain a racial pattern that reaches across centuries.

The more important question is why America has defined manhood in terms that require a woman to possess less.

Black women and Black men do not experience racism identically. Black men often encounter particularly severe exposure to incarceration, labor exclusion, police violence, premature death, and downward economic mobility. Black women encounter racism through a gendered structure that includes wage inequality, occupational segregation, sexual vulnerability, caregiving burdens, adultification, and the systematic denial of protection.

Difference is not immunity.

A Black woman’s degree does not mean racism missed her address. Her professional title does not erase discrimination, domestic responsibility, or the additional labor often required to prove that she belongs in the room.

Black women and Black men catch different versions of the same hell.

The mistake is turning those differences into a competition.

America obstructed Black men’s access to stable employment and conventional authority. It required Black women to labor, adapt, and hold families together under extraordinary pressure. Then it taught each to interpret the other’s adaptation as the source of the problem.

Her survival became his emasculation.

His struggle became her disappointment.

The system injured both and persuaded each that the injury was the other.

Welfare mythology continued that miseducation.

The popular story suggests that Black women pursued government assistance and removed Black men from their homes to protect a welfare check. This caricature portrays Black women as schemers chasing benefits and Black men as willing to surrender their families because government had replaced them.

Certain welfare regulations did police male presence. Alabama’s substitute father rule denied assistance to children when their mother was believed to be cohabiting with an able bodied man, even when he was not their father and had no legal obligation to support them. The Supreme Court invalidated that regulation in King v. Smith in 1968. [11]

Those policies could discourage open cohabitation, subject poor women to invasive surveillance, and treat male presence as evidence of concealed financial support.

But welfare policy did not invent Black family separation.

It arrived centuries after slavery had already refused to recognize Black marriage, sold children away from their fathers, exploited Black women’s reproduction, criminalized Black men’s freedom, and tied Black survival to white economic benefit.

Welfare was not the origin of the absent Black father.

It was another chapter in America’s long history of regulating whether and how Black men could belong inside their own households.

Mass incarceration brought that history into the modern age.

The enormous expansion of imprisonment beginning in the 1970s resulted from policy choices that increased the use and severity of criminal punishment. Its effects were concentrated in poor Black and Latino communities and extended beyond prisons into families, neighborhoods, employment, housing, and civic life. [12]

A prison sentence does not confine one body alone.

It reorganizes an entire family around forced absence.

Children learn to recognize their fathers through visiting rooms, monitored telephone calls, letters, photographs, and promises interrupted by lockdowns. Mothers become sole daily caregivers by government decree. Affection is placed on a schedule. Communication becomes a commodity.

Ordinary acts of fatherhood are made physically impossible and then used as the standard by which the imprisoned father is judged.

The state creates the empty chair and later lectures the family about who failed to sit in it.

The consequences have not been evenly distributed. Research reviewed in public health scholarship found that approximately one in four Black children born in 1990 experienced parental incarceration during childhood, compared with roughly one in twenty five white children. The same body of research links parental incarceration with family hardship, housing insecurity, and disruption in children’s lives, although the precise causal pathways are complex. [13]

America also confuses residence with fatherhood.

A child living primarily with the mother does not establish that the father is emotionally absent, financially indifferent, or uninvolved in the child’s life.

Nonresidence and abandonment are not interchangeable categories.

Federal research on fathers between 2006 and 2010 documented substantial involvement among Black fathers in several daily caregiving activities. Among fathers living with young children, Black fathers reported particularly high participation in sharing meals and helping with bathing, dressing, diapering, and toileting. [14]

These findings do not establish that every Black father is present or responsible.

They establish that the caricature cannot survive honest measurement.

The mythology depends upon counting where a man sleeps while ignoring where he shows up.

It recognizes the address but not the relationship.

This is not merely an argument I inherited from books. It is a complexity I recognize from my own life.

My biological father did not live in our home. Drug use and mental illness created a distance that he was not always capable of overcoming. His absence affected me, but it cannot be explained by the familiar caricature of a Black man who simply decided that fatherhood required too much of him. Human lives are often more complicated than the judgments assigned to them.

I was also fortunate.

My mother met a man when I was nine who was already raising his own son, of whom he had full custody. He demonstrated that fatherhood was not an abstract title to him. It was a daily responsibility, one he willingly extended to me.

He did not treat me merely as his wife’s child or as an addition to be tolerated. He accepted me, raised me, corrected me, protected me, and treated my future as part of his responsibility. I did not recognize him only as a stepfather.

I recognized him as my father.

My life therefore contains two truths at once.

A biological father can love a child and still be unable to remain fully present. Another man can already be carrying the responsibilities of fatherhood for his own child and still choose to make room in his home, his heart, and his obligations for another.

That experience taught me that fatherhood cannot be measured by blood alone, just as absence cannot always be explained by indifference. A household may contain loss, illness, addiction, sacrifice, adaptation, and unexpected grace at the same time.

I was fortunate that when one father could not remain, another chose not merely to enter the home, but to expand his understanding of family.

Not every child receives that gift.

That is why the national mythology is so inadequate. It flattens complicated men, complicated families, and complicated forms of love into a single accusation. It sees who was missing but rarely asks why. It sees who stepped forward but often fails to honor the man who chose to stay.

Still, perhaps the most troubling part of this mythology is not that America created it.

It is that many white Americans will read this history and call it an excuse.

They will hear slavery, forced family separation, racial criminalization, economic exclusion, stolen wealth, welfare surveillance, adultification, and mass incarceration, and respond that Black men must simply accept responsibility.

But explanation is not exoneration.

To identify the forces that shaped an outcome is not to claim that every person affected by those forces is innocent of every failure.

Some Black fathers have abandoned their children. Some have been selfish, violent, careless, or emotionally unavailable. No serious argument requires us to deny that.

What is unserious is pretending that individual misconduct explains a racial pattern produced across centuries.

Personal responsibility may explain what one man did.

It cannot explain why similar forms of family disruption repeatedly appear within communities subjected to enslavement, labor exclusion, discriminatory housing, aggressive policing, and mass imprisonment.

Accountability without history becomes propaganda.

Part of the resistance comes from a fundamental miseducation about racism itself.

Many Americans confuse bias with racism.

Bias is primarily a matter of perception. It is an assumption, preference, fear, or judgment about another person or group. It can be conscious or unconscious. It may influence how an individual interprets intelligence, danger, beauty, competence, innocence, or belonging.

Racism, as I use the term here, is what happens when racial bias is joined to power.

It is the organization of law, policy, property, education, policing, employment, banking, housing, and political authority in ways that repeatedly advantage one racial group and disadvantage another.

Bias may cause an individual to clutch a purse or cross the street when a Black man approaches.

Racism determines whether that Black man can purchase a house, obtain financing, receive equal treatment from police, secure employment, attend a properly funded school, exercise authority over his family, or pass accumulated wealth to his children.

The distinction matters because personal bias can die with the person who holds it.

Institutional power can preserve its consequences for generations.

A prejudiced person may insult you.

A racist system can confine you, impoverish you, remove your children, deny your marriage, devalue your labor, restrict where you live, and then teach the country to interpret the resulting injury as evidence of your inferiority.

Racism does not require every participant to possess personal hatred.

Hatred may provide the language, but power writes the law.

The slaveholder dies, but the wealth remains.

The discriminatory law is repealed, but the distribution of property it created remains.

The racial covenant becomes unenforceable, but the segregated neighborhood remains.

The openly discriminatory hiring policy becomes unlawful, but the professional networks, inherited advantages, and assumptions about competence remain.

Institutions do not require each generation to recreate the original prejudice. They require only that each generation inherit the mechanisms, accept the outcomes, and refuse to examine who continues to benefit.

Bias explains what someone believes.

Racism explains what power permits that belief to do.

That is why some white readers will rename this history an excuse. Accepting it would require them to understand racism not merely as something cruel people once felt, but as a structure through which wealth, authority, protection, and opportunity were transferred across generations.

It would require them to accept that innocence is not established merely by the absence of hatred.

A person can harbor no conscious hostility toward Black people and still defend arrangements that preserve racial inequality. A person can reject racial slurs while protecting inherited advantage. A nation can celebrate diversity while maintaining institutions built upon exclusion.

Racism is not made harmless because it has learned better manners.

The accusation of excuse making therefore performs a protective function.

If Black family instability is merely the result of irresponsible choices, then the country owes no accounting. There is no policy to reconsider, no institution to indict, no stolen history to restore, and no inherited advantage to examine.

The problem remains inside the Black household.

White America remains outside it, clean handed and morally untouched.

The Black father must answer for every failure.

The country must answer for none of its design.

These were not natural defects within Black families.

They were created conditions conveniently interpreted as character flaws.

The instability was created, then called irresponsibility.

The poverty was created, then called laziness.

The distance was created, then called abandonment.

The strength of Black women was created by necessity, then called domination.

The struggle of Black men was created by exclusion, then called weakness.

That conversion makes America’s excuses more palatable. It allows the country to describe structural injury as personal failure, policy as pathology, and history as bad behavior.

That is how America sleeps at night. It converts its own design into our deficiency. It manufactures the pressure, studies the bruise, and announces that Black people must be naturally damaged.

None of this absolves individual Black men of responsibility.

Some fathers leave. Some refuse to provide support even when they are capable of doing so. Some cause injury that cannot be blamed upon racism, poverty, public policy, or incarceration.

Structural analysis must never become a hiding place for personal misconduct.

But America cannot take the failures of some Black men, detach them from the history surrounding Black men as a people, and use those failures to explain the family damage produced by centuries of policy.

The absent Black father stereotype survives because it performs valuable political work.

It converts slavery into culture.

It converts dispossession into irresponsibility.

It converts economic exclusion into laziness.

It converts incarceration into personal failure.

It converts the Black woman’s resilience into domination.

It converts the Black man’s struggle into jealousy.

Most importantly, it absolves the country.

Once the Black father is declared naturally irresponsible, America no longer has to account for the laws that denied his marriage, the markets that sold his children, the employers that devalued his labor, the banks that restricted his ownership, the courts that criminalized his freedom, or the prisons that removed him from his household.

The nation can stare into the Black home and avoid looking into the mirror.

The absent Black father is therefore not merely a stereotype.

He is an alibi.

He permits America to begin the story after the separation and assign responsibility to the people who survived it. He allows the country to manufacture the conditions of absence, misname that absence abandonment, and then condemn Black families for failing to remain whole beneath the pressure.

The Black father, if ever present, we are told, simply left.

But history tells a different story.

He was sold.

He was denied legal authority over his wife and children.

He was criminalized after emancipation.

He was excluded from work, property, and accumulated wealth.

He was imprisoned.

He was measured by his residence instead of his relationship.

And yes, sometimes he left.

But the empty chair is not always evidence of indifference.

Sometimes it is evidence of removal.

That is what made James Evans matter.

He was present. He was providing what he could. He was fighting to hold his family together under conditions designed to wear him down. Yet even that image of Black fatherhood proved difficult for American television to sustain.

When John Amos objected to the family’s descent into stereotype, the actor was dismissed and the father disappeared.

America then continued searching for the Black father it had just written out of the story.

Before this country asks why the Black father was not home, it should answer for every institution that made home a place he was not permitted to own, protect, afford, or return to.

America did not simply discover the absent Black father.

It helped create his absence, taught us to mistake it for abandonment, and then blamed Black men and Black women for the vacancy.

Hatred helped justify the arrangement.

Power made it permanent.

Endnotes

[1] John Amos discussed the creative conflicts around Good Times, including his objections to inauthentic portrayals of Black family life and J.J.’s buffoonery. Reporting on Amos’s death also notes that he was fired after disagreements over the authenticity of the show’s storylines and that James Evans was killed in a car accident. (PBS)

[2] Virginia’s 1662 statute declared that children would be held bond or free according to the condition of the mother. (Encyclopedia Virginia)

[3] The National Archives notes that unions between enslaved couples were not legally sanctioned or protected, that couples could be separated by sale, and that the Freedmen’s Bureau later helped legitimize marriages after emancipation. (National Archives Museum)

[4] Freedmen’s Bureau records include marriage certificates of recently freed people and other records containing information about formerly enslaved families. (National Archives)

[5] The Library of Congress describes convict leasing as a post Civil War system of involuntary servitude used to fill labor shortages in Southern states; Facing History notes that Black Codes criminalized conduct such as loitering and helped force African Americans into unpaid labor for white owned businesses and plantations. (The Library of Congress)

[6] Chetty, Hendren, Jones, and Porter found that differences in parental marital status, education, and wealth explain little of the Black and white income gap conditional on parental income, and that Black boys have lower adult incomes than white boys in 99 percent of census tracts. (Opportunity Insights)

[7] Mapping Prejudice defines racial covenants as clauses inserted into property deeds to prevent nonwhite people from buying or occupying land; Chicago Fed research identifies FHA policies as a primary means of propagating discriminatory effects in mortgage access and housing wealth. (mappingprejudice.umn.edu)

[8] Federal Reserve data from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances show that the median white Black wealth gap exceeded $220,000 in 2022, while Brookings reports median Black wealth of about $44,890 and median white wealth of about $285,000. (Federal Reserve)

[9] Georgetown Law’s adultification research found that adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult like than white girls, especially between ages five and fourteen, and as needing less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort. (Georgetown Law)

[10] The Moynihan Report described the Black community as having been forced into a matriarchal structure that, in the report’s framing, imposed a crushing burden on Black men and women and impeded group progress. (DOL)

[11] In King v. Smith, the Supreme Court invalidated Alabama’s substitute father regulation under the Social Security Act. (National Academies)

[12] The National Academies concluded that harsh penal policies over the prior forty years fell most heavily on Black and Hispanic communities, especially the poorest. (National Academies)

[13] Public health scholarship notes that one in twenty five white children born in 1990 had an incarcerated parent during childhood, compared with one in four Black children, and links parental incarceration to multiple negative outcomes for children. (NCBI)

[14] CDC research on fathers’ involvement documented substantial Black father participation in several daily caregiving activities, including sharing meals and helping with bathing, dressing, diapering, and toileting among fathers living with young children. (CDC)