Dwyane Wade and his sons Zaire (age 8) and Zion (age 3)
If the African-American community is going to throw a Holy Ghost party because Dwyane Wade has decided to do what the overwhelming majority of black men refuse to do — take full responsibility and custody of his two sons — then I’m afraid the crisis of absentee fatherhood, perhaps the single biggest contributor to the disproportionate number of black men in prison compared to whites, still isn’t resonating as it should.
A U.S. Census Bureau Report issued last Oct., revealed that while blacks make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, in 2006 41 percent of the nation’s 2 million inmates were black. I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of them grew up without a father active in their lives.
On Monday, the image of a smiling Wade and his sons, eight and three, respectively, was all over the Internet. Over the last two years, an image of Wade’s ex-wife, Siohvaughn, has emerged as a woman who physically abused the NBA superstar. She accused Wade of passing on to her a sexually transmitted disease, not spending enough time with their children, and of adultery.
Upon winning custody, Wade, named the 2007 “Father of the Year” by the National Father’s Day Committee, reiterated that he wanted his boys to have a healthy relationship with their mother, who was awarded alternate weekends with the boys in Miami.
“My life changed in a huge way,” a relieved Wade said. “Mentally, I’ve been preparing for it for over a year now. To me, it’s bigger than that. For me, it shows a lot of people that you need to fight to be in your kids’ lives sometimes. You fight until you can’t fight any more. That’s all I was trying to be, a father in my kids’ lives.”
Unfortunately, the reality in the African-American community is that this type of thinking by black men is almost an alien notion if we are to believe most studies on the absentee black dad.
Revel in Wade doing what he should do; what he feels is his natural duty, what any real man should feel compelled to do the moment his child springs forth from its mother’s womb. But viewing this as some sort of civil rights benchmark is almost as foolish as cheering the not-guilty verdict in the O.J. Simpson case while ignoring the freshly minted black convicts who that same day in 1995 flooded into penitentiaries across the nation, 90 percent of them — and that’s probably on the low end — for crimes committed in their own neighborhoods, against their own people.
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