The Scourge Of Racism
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Happy Father’s Day! I am posting the following blog after praying through reservations that came to my heart due to the racially motivated murder of nine and wounding of other black Americans at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC this past Week. The issue I deal with is that urgent! Indeed, both racial prejudice leading to violence and the concern of my blog have existed together since slavery and as those martyred in the church slayings instantly learned in His presence, equally occupy the heart of God. That said, I continue to stand with all who are praying for God’s comfort of the grieving families and the church along with the salvation of the gunman.
This is an important post-script to my two-part Blog, 150 Years After Slavery in which I was led by the Lord to examine especially the spiritual condition of America’s freedmen at the 150th Juneteenth. In this Blog, I address a severe consequence of one of the generational patterns of sin that has followed black Americans from slavery: the beyond crisis number of boys without fathers at home primarily due to sexual promiscuity. If as an unmarried father you are now handling your business, I commend you. But we still have a problem and since I was an unsaved, teenaged father of twin children born out of wed-lock, I am part of it too.
I make this acknowledgement to avoid any charge of hypocrisy for not disclosing the truth and also because I want absent fathers reading this to know that I have been there. I continue to feel the sting of my irresponsible conduct now over forty years later as I deal with the reality that all of my grand-children and great grand-children to date have been conceived out of wed-lock. Illegitimacy will sadly continue unless there is repentance in the thinking and sexual behavior of our community. That truth was painfully brought home to me at a mentoring event when several usually unruffled by cool black male teens came to tears as they spoke of fatherless homes.
It used to be that calling a young male "mama's boy" was fighting words. That was because he was being insulted as weak, tied closely as he was to his mama's apron strings. In those days as today, young males that were teased as mama's boys came just as easily from intact families as those headed by single females. I confess to having been a bit of a mama's boy due to my married mother holding us kids very close while my dad was away in the military. As the streets go, the mama's boy moniker could be escaped if a guy could act cool, be tough and fight. Today, being a mama's boy is not as much of an insult as it is a description of the facts.
As I share in my book, The Strong Man Of God: Back To Basics, over 70% of black children are born out of wed-lock and live mostly in female headed households. Why? Many single fathers (as I once was) are purposely and irresponsibly absent doing their own thing including impregnating other women with children they do not plan to fully embrace either. A few of these even proudly boast of their many children by different mothers as a badge of masculine superiority and sexual potency. Other fathers are on lockdown or in the graveyard due to early deaths caused by their engagement in “the life;” the urban mindset of hustling, survival and fast living.
How much harm does 70% of a community’s children born out of wed-lock and into households largely governed by single female parents do long-term? Much! Damage is done to the entire community, for example, as the economic cost of supporting and dealing with the many adverse needs of fatherless households is in the billions. The spiritual, psychological and sociological impact on the children is generally negative and still being tabulated. However, hurt the most are young black males as they become part of a longstanding generational underclass of spiritually and materially impoverished mama’s boys; boys that are supposed to develop into responsible men and future family leaders with few positive role models to emulate.
In God’s design of the human family, children are imprinted on by both of their parents (Proverbs 1:8-9). Men as His designated lead teachers teach whether we do so intentionally or not. Mama’s boys learn from and imitate their absent fathers, the bad example of other men from the streets and media as well as each other. This is one reason gang love is so attractive. It is male bonding complete with a leadership structure and rules where there is punishment for violations and rewards for conformity. Additionally, the full expression of natural and fallen masculinity such as risk taking, conquest through violence and all forms of pleasure seeking are encouraged.
The unrestrained seeking for sex as pleasure, of course, with the cooperation of all too willing females desperate for scarce male interest and relationship, leads to mama’s boys becoming fathers as young as Middle School! For them like many of their fathers it is a status thing. At the end of the day mostly female grandparents are left scrambling about if they bother, to take care of another mouth to feed.
When the baby is a boy, he will soon enough be ready to perpetuate the endless cycle of out of wed-lock births if he is not killed first since murder is the leading cause of death among young black males. Meanwhile, many surviving mama’s boys angrily vent through media on females that at once draw them because of hormones, but also repel them out of bitter resentment for their ambitious self-assertion, societal favor, achievements and ubiquitous dominance.1
1 This Blog is not my first trek into the harsh realities of urban life. Besides dealing with responsible fatherhood from God’s Word and my own failures in my book, The Strong Man Of God: Back To Basics, Strong Man Ministries has used radio in which I transparently share positive encouragement with males young and old in the Strong Man Minute as part of our Urban Radio Campaign. I invite you to take a look and listen to the newly re-launched page on our Web Site then e-mail the link to someone you would like to hear these still timely public service announcements.
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