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Fatherhood, Privilege, and Rac(e)ism

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Fatherhood and Masculinities

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences ((GSSS))

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Abstract

One Monday night, I am sitting around a table with a group of men at one of the monthly meetings with the Fathers’ Group, a support group for a dozen of men who have been meeting for 15 years. Each monthly meeting is about a particular topic. This one in particular is about parenting and the issues of race and racism. The meeting occurs after a consecutive string of high-profile police shootings of Black men happened throughout the country. Pete recalls out loud a private conversation with Mathias, who he is friends with, about the recent events, a conversation which “brought up the dynamics of us and how there’s so many … types of men that we are as parents, as men, as races”. The meeting’s agenda was to “raise awareness”. Mathias and Pete, two Black men, were running the meeting.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Fathers’ Group is a support group for men that I joined as a participant from February to December 2016. The name has been modified for anonymity purposes.

  2. 2.

    All the meetings were recorded and the fathers signed consent forms.

  3. 3.

    The Annual At-Home Dads Convention is organized every year or every two years by the National At-Home Dad Network.

  4. 4.

    From field notes.

  5. 5.

    Manuel prefers the term ‘dad’ rather than ‘father’.

  6. 6.

    From field notes.

  7. 7.

    Kyle participated in a filmed conference on mothers and families organized in the 2010s; no more details will be disclosed for anonymity purposes.

  8. 8.

    The term was coined in the 1990s to refer to a type of racial profiling where Black people, and especially males, are pulled over, searched, questioned, and arrested at higher rates than White people in America (Louis and Reed 2015, 89).

  9. 9.

    Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old teenager who was shot in 2012 by White Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer Zimmerman in Florida. Martin was unarmed. Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter. The Black Lives Matter movement began in response to Martin’s death. Martin has become a symbol of “the overwhelming violence and oppression faced by Blacks in the United States” (Wills 2013, 227).

  10. 10.

    Terence Crutcher was shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in September 2016. The police report initially said he was shot because he did not follow the order to put his hands up. The footage of the video taken from a helicopter showed that he did.

  11. 11.

    North Carolina “adopted House Bill 2 in March 201, a statute forbidding people to use public restrooms that do not correspond to their birth certificates” (Shilling 2017, 34–48).

  12. 12.

    From field notes.

  13. 13.

    Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, was shot and killed by the New York Police Department in 1999 in the Bronx. They fired 41 shots and hit with 19 bullets (Yancy 2008, 26).

  14. 14.

    Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy, was killed by a police officer in Ohio in 2014. The latter was not indicted.

  15. 15.

    From field notes.

  16. 16.

    From field notes.

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    Catherine Gallais

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Gallais, C. (2023). Fatherhood, Privilege, and Rac(e)ism. In: Fatherhood and Masculinities. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34132-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34132-8_5

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