Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

Dean Lloyd hosts William Raspberry for a conversation about “Race and Civic Life in America.”

Raspberry has devoted much of his career to writing about African American life, focusing on sensitive social issues and questions of justice. He says that in recent decades, “fatherlessness [is] virtually the norm now in lower-income African American communities; it’s getting to be the norm now in lower-income communities that aren’t African American.”

“It’s possible…to talk about it in terms of new lifestyle options, but it seems to me that it’s more than just an option. It seems to me that there are positive dangers that come with father absence. It shows up in all kinds of ways: social, criminal, academic,” Raspberry observes. When whole communities are fatherless, he says, “the results are not good.”

In the 1960s, about one in four African American children were born out of wedlock, according to Raspberry. Today about 75 percent of African American children, and a quarter of white children, live in households without fathers. Raspberry asserts that the absence of a father is an even stronger predictor of criminal behavior than race, family income, or education. He likens vulnerable members of society with the coal miner’s canary. “When there are toxins in the social environment,” Raspberry warns, “those weakest organisms are the first to fall over.” He calls for a renewed discussion about the importance of marriage.

Strikingly, marriage has not fallen out of favor. Many unmarried young parents aspire to marry at some time in the future, after they have children and a home. “They want to do all the right things, but out of sequence,” Raspberry summarizes.

Raspberry has recently founded Baby Steps, a program aimed at training and empowering parents of children from birth through age five. Based in his home town of Okolona, Mississippi, the program seeks to change attitudes and mindsets of parents, many of whom are high school dropouts, so that their young children are better prepared for elementary education.

About William Raspberry

William Raspberry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy Studies at Duke University. As an urban affairs columnist for the Washington Post for nearly four decades, he wrote widely on education, crime, justice, drug abuse, and housing issues.