The little girl put her hands on my cheeks and turned my face toward hers. Looking directly into my eyes, she asked, “Will you be my daddy, too?”
Now I was on the verge of tears. I couldn’t say anything.
Seconds later the boy said, “Put me down now.” I complied, lowering both of them to the ground. They ran off to my left. I tried to refocus on the news conference, with difficulty.
Today, each of those children would be in their early 40s. What’s clear is that as small children, they didn’t care if the man holding them was white: They just wanted a daddy.
About 20 years later, while working with an attorney on a complex legal case’s public relations and communications issues, we got into a discussion about poverty. We agreed that data show children do better, even in poor families, when a mother and father are in the home.
I mentioned that in Tennessee, 62% of Black children were born to unwed mothers. The attorney, a political liberal, said that such a number couldn’t be true, and that I was sharing false information. I got on my computer, conducted a search, and said she was right: In Tennessee, it wasn’t 62%; instead, it was (at that time) 72%.
The percentage of unwed births among white women is growing as well. The Philadelphia Inquirer explored the subject in 2018, beginning its report with, “Rate of births to white single moms accelerates; Research shows that while unwed motherhood contributes to poverty, poverty itself is a cause of unwed motherhood.”
Several years ago, when working on communications projects at a large organization, I asked a young white woman about her goals, and her answer was that she planned to get pregnant, seek a public housing apartment, and collect welfare payments. Sometime later, noticing she was no longer at the organization, I asked where she’d gone, and was told she’d fulfilled her ambition.
It’s always “sharing false information” if it’s something they don’t want to hear.