Obama’s Best Hope for Change

President Obama’s new outreach initiative to help at-risk boys of color — “My Brother’s Keeper” — is cause for cheer.

It isn’t that we haven’t known for some time that minority boys are in trouble. Poor school performance, truancy, delinquency and,ultimately, high incarceration rates cannot be separated from theabsence of fathers in many homes. Out-of-wedlock births are at 72percent in the African American community and 53 percent among Latinos,compared with 29 percent among non-Hispanic whites.

But sometimes things can change only when the right messengercomes along. Obama is that man, though he seems to have realized it late in his game. Or perhaps he feared criticism for focusing on the blackhalf of himself and waited for a second term.

Whatever brought him here, he may as well be reading from an old text — the 1965 Moynihan Report, when then-Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan firstsounded the alarm about family disintegration and fatherlessness in theblack community.

Wrote Moynihan the following year: “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up inbroken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stablerelationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rationalexpectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Moynihan was clobbered by civil rights leaders who felt that other concerns — school integration, voting rights andthe end of Jim Crow laws — were more crucial to black ascendance thanfamily organization. But today, with an African American in the highestoffice, we can afford to take another look. It would seem that Moynihan had a point — and back then theout-of-wedlock birthrate among African Americans was just 25 percent.

Since the 1960s, as women have made strides toward greater empowerment, thetrend of fatherlessness has been largely overlooked except by a fewlonely voices in the media, including yours truly and, notably, Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young. Otherwise, the noisemakers were men, mostly white, who garnered more mockery than consideration, drowned out by feminists who dismissed fathers as nonessential, often conflating the incidence of abusive or “bad” fathers with anindictment of men generally. Those who insisted otherwise werecharacterized as heretical pawns of the patriarchy.

Though thisinterpretation persists in smallish circles, we seem to have transcended such facile branding. It is harder to hold the antagonist’s ground,moreover, when the president himself — a black man who experienced thepain of father abandonment — reiterates Moynihan’s observations.

Whatever one’s politics, this is great news for the country. A nation can’t long flourish without the commitment of fathers to raise their sons — and,yes, their daughters, too.

Announcing $200 million in private funding for the initiative whereby businesses will connect young men with mentors, the presidentspoke about his personal history as a young son growing up without afather. This first-person connection is Obama’s most powerful weapon inencouraging two-parent homes, as well as highlighting societal trendsthat have minimized the importance of men and the need for role modelsto teach boys how to be men. Who better than the president of the United States? Well, of course, a father, but meanwhile. . . .

In minority communities, fathers became scarcer in part owing to a welfare program that was predicated upon no man in the house. It wouldnot take long before marriage and fathers made little economic sense tomany mothers. Three generations later, two-parent families have become a quaint memory.

Rather than tackling the source of problems inminority communities, we have embraced a pop culture that celebratesdestructive behavior via movies and music.

Magazine covers and chatty television shows, meanwhile, cutesifythe tragedy of casual procreation by touting baby-daddies andbaby-mamas, who aren’t so adorable in the inner city where thebiological offspring of such lyrical liaisons are most often doomed to a life without much promise.

A culture faced with such challengescan only benefit from the president’s attentions, especially as he hassway with the media that shape so much of our culture. The uniqueness of his outreach isn’t only that he is a man of color and has shared thesorrow of having to imagine his father’s dreams but also that he is inoculated from criticisms that might have beenraised against a different politician. This is gratifying progress andmarks a victory of common sense over ideology.

Hurray.