black fatherhood
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What Juneteenth and My Father Taught Me About 'Expectations'
I wouldn’t know Juneteenth without my father. He’s the Texan. He grew up celebrating the holiday that started on June 19, 1865, when slaves on Galveston Island, Texas, finally learned they’d been freed under the Emancipation Proclamation two years prior. Even though he now lived in St. Louis, he’d always make the same jokey reference…
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If You Piss Off My Youngest Kid, the Way His Petty Is Set Up, You Are Absolutely Not Coming to His Birthday Party
You know, as I watch my kids grow, I’ve come to the realization that, in life, the 3-5 age range is really the sweet spot. For kids, it’s the age before they are required to know better and thus do better so they can pretty much say anything they want (short of curse words around…
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For Colored Dads Who Have Considered Kindness When French Fries Wasn’t Enuf
I planned to explain my leave of absence from The Root before it happened. Then, during my wife’s routine doctor’s visit on the last Friday of August, everything went to shit. We thought we had a week and a half before she would give birth but she was on the phone telling me that the…
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Chance the Rapper Postpones Tour, Opts for Paternity Leave After Birth of Daughter
Mere days before his #TheBigDay World Tour was set to kick off comes the shocking news that Chance the Rapper, born Chancelor Bennett, is taking paternity leave. After welcoming his second baby girl, Marli, the “No Problems” spitter revealed on Monday that as much as he loves his fans, his family will always take precedence.…
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Daughter of Rodney King Launches ‘I Am a King’ Scholarship to Celebrate Black Fatherhood Just in Time for Father’s Day
For residents of Los Angeles, April 29 is a day that lives on in infamy. Twenty-seven years ago, the streets of the city I now call home descended into chaos in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, in which a jury acquitted four LAPD officers of charges related to his brutal assault, which was…
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You Don't Have to Ask About My New Baby When You See Me (You Can If You Want To! But It's Fine If You Don't!)
It’s too early to make a definitive determination, but I think my 3-year-old daughter has transitioned out of her Boss Baby stage. She no longer asks to watch Boss Baby when she returns home from preschool, she no longer hurls non sequitur quotes from it at me while she’s in her car seat, and she…
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Our Parents Might Not Have Known Better About Spanking. We Do
In two weeks, my daughter will be 3 years old. And then, two weeks after her birthday, if things happen when we’re expecting them to, she’ll be a big sister. This will make me, for lack of a better term, a fucking dad. I mean, I’ve been a dad already for (almost) three years. But…
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Negative Parenting Milestones They Don’t Tell You About in Baby Books
I don’t remember the first time I bumped the back of my daughter’s head on the top of the passenger-side rear door when attempting to put her in the car seat, but I remember the last time I did it—Saturday afternoon. We were on our way to Whole Foods (whose hot bar is a surprisingly…
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These Portraits of Dads in Madagascar Offer an Intimate Glimpse of Black Fatherhood in Other Parts of the World
With an endless array of pristine landscapes and animals that are native to no other region in the world, the country of Madagascar—located in the Indian Ocean—draws in hundreds of thousands of tourists every year from nearly every country in the world. But beyond the images of lemurs and baobab trees that were made famous…
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I’m About to Be a Father to a Black Boy and I’m Scared to Death for Him (and Me)
My wife and I had gone to the doctor’s for a routine appointment. We weren’t married then; in fact, we weren’t even engaged, but we were ready for a baby. We had a name. We’d gone to Target and purchased a pair of crocheted bunny ears and a rubber duck that can tell the bath…