households. how do we lift people out of poverty, not how to get them married. the thing that struck me, i feel when we talk single parent families, it s almost the blame of the mom. it s the shame game. you can t have a husband or something. the real thing we should do is how are we going lift you up so you have the job you need, the child care you need so you as a single parent, you and your child can succeed. it s a really tough thing about sacrificing a father in a different kind of way than a mother. that s the whole kind of push/pull that s going on here. i didn t like it when romney said it. it was so if you are a single mom your kid is going to have a gun and go out and shoot somebody. it s also the retrograde element of the right or the republican party that found romney talking binders for the women.
of fatherhood. it s interesting because my research suggests even among those men who tend to maintain the expectations firefighter themselves still must find a way to kind of reconstruct their notions of fatherhood often without a good script for doing so. i wanted to ask you a little bit about exactly that question because i think part of how people respond to president obama is as a great dad. he seems to enjoy children and others, he s a baby whisperer. we have all kind of great photographs of the president with children. there s a pleasure in watching the kind of performance of, i don t mean that in a bad way, watching a nurturing father figure especially from an african-american man. i also wonder if there s a kind of blaming, sort of self-blame
for everybody. rates of children growing up in single parent households are through the charts in white america. yeah. there s no way that he can articulate a politics of responsibility just for blacks and somehow say that he s doing this as a president of all the united states. i guess part of what i say, he did not racialize. he s standing in a racialized space. there is, on the one hand a critique of president obama. i guess it s less interesting to me than the critique that i experience not so much about what president obama says, but the reception of it. the audience that says yes, this is what is wrong with us. what is wrong with us is us. we need to do better. if we do better, everything will be all right. my angst is whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. does it keep you from asking
i think people tend to see there s a they see a separation. what i want them to see is a togetherness. the same movements are happening whether it s monks or others, non-violence, how the movements progressed. they say they have gone forward. we need to focus in on there s another way to do this tharks way is non-violent protest. that s an important piece especially in america. we think of protest as a violent component to it. that makes a difference. there s an interesting narrative that goes back to personal responsibility. they were both men who thought a great deal about their personal individual life choices, but in a more political way rather than this narrow amorality. if you go back to the letter from birmingham jail, a great american document, it s a blueprint people used around the
households as jared who drew his pistol on gabby giffords. it s more complicated than just add dad. to the extent fatherlessness is the problem, there s little the president can or should do to create a solution. all of us watching that speech felt genuine empathy for the very human moment the president shared, on friday, about his own fatherlessness. while the president does have a powerful bully pulpit, president obama cannot make men marry the mother of their children. he doesn t have the power to make men be responsible parents and by the way, we shouldn t want him to. just imagine all the implications of giving the state how to choose to con trux or families. we don t have to imagine. we know what happens. for example, based on the track record of the well means