Evolving Folks Project

Fatherhood is one of the most important life journeys a man can take. It is challenging, rewarding, and thankless. But countless proud parents, including many fathers, would say it’s worth seeing their baby grow from childhood to adulthood successfully. Black fatherhood is often surrounded by misinformation and stereotypes. These racist and troubling stereotypes about black men and fatherhood can easily be dismissed by data and research. 

We can not equate the number of unmarried dads to the number of “fatherless” children. First of all, marriage rates don’t necessarily reflect the number of Black fathers living with their children; as writer Josh Levs points out, the majority of Black dads (2.5 million of around 4.2 million) do live with their kids, even if they’re not married to their partner.”

The report also reveals that, among dads who don’t live with their children, Black dads are more likely to be involved in care, including reading to their children, helping them with homework, talking to them about their days, and taking them to activities, than Hispanic or white dads who live apart from their kids.

While I am not a father, I am a son, nephew, brother, and uncle. But I’m still not a father. Who knows what the future will hold for me when it comes to fatherhood? But I do know a few fathers, and I want to get some insight about being a dad. Today, I’m interviewing my friend, professor, fellow Evolving Man Project contributor, and new father, Dr. Michael Thomas. 

So Mike, what is the hardest thing, in your opinion, about being a father? 

This may be a philosopher thing, but it’s learning to take on that role for me. There’s levels to it. 

On the practical side, it’s the 24-7 of it. From the beginning, a new chunk of your life is caring for someone who can’t tell you their needs. So you’re learning to read them and adjusting your life to ensure they’re happy, healthy, and comfortable. I still have my job and time, but that gets adjusted around naps, backing up my wife when she needs it, and keeping all the admin stuff in order. It’s a whole other job. I’m someone who likes “my time” so it’s a lot to take on. 

Then there’s what it means for you to be a father. My early joke was that I love kids, but I hate parents because I would meet many folks who shifted their whole life to observing and talking about their kids. It makes sense cause it’s stressful, and you spend so much time just trying to get through those first few months and years. Plus, especially for younger parents, there’s all this social pressure and marketing about everything being the best, but I don’t play that. It’s just capitalist and, in some cases, eugenicist ideology at work. I spend a lot of time resisting that because you can see how it starts to frame people’s experiences and project them onto the child. 

Where I get worried is how my actions and guidance will help give them what they need to develop well and handle what’s coming in life. My kid is a sponge, and I see how much they mirror your actions and behaviors. If you’re physical, they get physical. If you’re loud, they can take that on. So there’s an extra layer of self-scrutiny there that you have to watch, which is sometimes good. But it can be scary when you see them acting out parts of yourself that you don’t like either. 

What’s the greatest joy you find in being a father? 

So, my first answer to this question had me dancing around it, because I don’t know if I feel “joy,” and I know how people feel about that. At least in conversations I had, parents talk about this new sense of joy they feel with their child, and for me, it’s been more of a struggle. I always say this, but the big part is that I didn’t want to be a father. And I will still repeat it because I think more people need to say it. If you’re a relatively stable person or someone people like, they’re happy to get you into parenting. But I don’t think it’s for everyone. And I think more people should feel comfortable opting out. 

What that means is that I came into being a parent aware of all its negative aspects: fatigue, lost time, less autonomy, etc. When I would experience them, it  was extra frustrating because I could say, “I knew it was going to be like this.” I’m better with that part now, but it took some time. I would say that when I felt joy at that stage, it was more about how much joy it brought everyone around me, and I felt some joy in that. Having moved around a lot, I think I’d lost a sense of family that you get from being nearby, and Aimé has helped reanimate that. 

Still now, what I feel more is a sense of responsibility for him that I sometimes make too heavy. It’s helped to know that he’s also his own tiny person and needs to learn autonomy as much as he needs discipline. I can get mad and frustrated, but he’s more responsive now. I know that when he’s acting out, it’s a growth spurt, toothache, or something else going on, and he just needs some help or some patience. 

Along with the responsibility, I feel a certain kind of love that feels like a deep sense of care and wanting to help someone walk through the world as best they can. I feel like my job as a dad is to cultivate an environment and relationship that allows Aimé to find the best way he can through an unjust world and maintain some integrity and a sense of happiness. 

And let me quit tripping because humor is big with us here, so there’s tons of laughing and playing. So there’s joy in that, but I feel it like a sense of sharing love and levity as a bond with other people. We laugh cause the world is funny, and you gotta keep from crying. 

How has fatherhood changed your marriage and family relationships? 

It’s a new kind of bond because your relationship takes on a new dimension. It’s been a challenge in my marriage because a big part of our relationship was traveling and working together. Aimé has slowed that down for a while. In one way, it’s good because I’m a climber and overachiever, so I’m always trying to do too much at once. Having less time and energy forced me to slow down. While a part of me still feels a way about it, the part that knows what burnout is knows that it’s a blessing. 

On the other side is that there was less time and opportunity to go out, money gets tighter, and you’re pretty much on call…and you’re so tired you’re not gonna make it to a show. Now, we get out a lot more than others we know, but it could feel claustrophobic sometimes in the beginning. Some folks say they don’t like that it makes your relationship more practical, but we’ve been that way. All the moving, immigration, etc., means that we’d gotten good at coordination. It’s one of the reasons I was ok having a kid with (Emilie) Em (even when our systems break down). It’s kinda like the joy thing. Romantic love is wonderful and necessary, but I also need someone that I can work with to keep things in order. 

As a family, you’re ALL responsible for this little kid in some way…ideally. I’m lucky to have two good folks who love us and love Aimé. So when we’re together like I said, it’s great to share that love with them and feel a new bond that washes over issues I may have had as a kid and then things you don’t like about your parents. It also feels like we can approach each other as parents, which makes me feel more confident talking to them on that level, though I know there’s a lot more to come.  

How has your relationship with your father impacted how you handle yourself as a father to your child? 

For me, that thing about you hearing your parents come out of you is accurate. I say things that I know he told me, and they are in the same voice and tone I heard them in. You can see why I know to be careful. 

I think I try to spend a lot of time not repeating things that felt wrong to me as a child while also not overcompensating for it. I feel like a lot of people want to avoid being their parents so badly that they push too hard in the other direction, especially with people who have really strict folks and resent it. 

My father was a disciplined guy. He’s now a Deacon, so there’s an immense sense of responsibility and faith with him, and that be a lot for a kid. I absorbed a lot of that and saw a lot of places where it may have been too much. So, I want to ease up in some ways, but I also want to remember all the things that a sense of responsibility and faith gave me. Over time, I see that many things that I fought him on were beneficial, so I want to do an excellent job of explaining why to Aimé in a way that gets him on board. 

What are your thoughts on the pervasive stereotypes that black fathers are absentee fathers when it comes to their children? 

I absorbed this, and it had some bad psychological impacts from early on. I was young when there was a heavy focus on black teen pregnancy, so thing like “any fool can have a baby, but it takes a man to raise it.” were common. There was both a big push to avoid getting someone pregnant and the responsibility of having a child so that pops up when I think about having it. Also, I knew folks black, white, and anyone else, who had kids earlier than they should have and saw the results. It wasn’t always bad, but it reinforced the idea that I should not have a kid unless I was absolutely ready. 

Then, when we were thinking about having a kid or splitting, when I thought about backing out or leaving, my inner monologue was pre-loaded with, “And then you’re the black man who walks out when someone asks you to be a father.” I don’t know that I’ve ever said that out loud. But the general pathological portrait of black men is that we’re n-words, hucksters, players, useless, we fuck around and leave our kids. That may be true of some men, but that’s not particular to Black men as a race.

The fact of the matter is, Black men are not unique in leaving children, but it’s another way of pathologizing them. If anything, we should be working on the issues that lead men to leave. The stereotype is a pathologizing concept used by black and white people to either denigrate us or support a respectability politics that may actually reinforce what it’s trying to solve. If you tell someone they’re something long enough, they may believe it, or at least spend their whole life fighting that rather than imagining what they *could* be.   

Last note on that. I haven’t done the work on this, but people interested can check out critiques of the Moynihan Report as one spot to examine how this fiction was made and what it’s meant to do. 

A special thanks to Professor Michael Thomas for this candid interview. Michael was a Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at JFK Institute for North American Studies, at Freie Universität Berlin and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Susquehanna University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. You can follow him on LinkedIn. You can also check out his website and other writings as well.