Abstract
As I am writing the last lines of this book, I come across the news of Keenan Anderson, 31, a Black father, a cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who died in January 2023 after being repeatedly tasered and restrained in the streets of Los Angeles. Sinzae Reed, a 13-year-old, died in October 2022 with bullets in his back that were fired by a White man in Ohio, a man who had already been convicted of domestic violence charges. “I was never supposed to be planning a funeral for my 13-year-old baby”, cries the child’s mother (Siefert 2023). In May 2022, an 18-year-old opened fire in an elementary school in Ulvade, Texas, killing nineteen children and two adults. The children’s ages ranged from 9 to 11 years. Ninety percent of the children in that school are Hispanic. Ten days before that, another teenager drove to a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing ten Black people fatally. Some were fathers and mothers. The suspect had allegedly written a document of 180 pages arguing that the decline of White birth rates equated to genocide, feeding White supremacist conspiracy theories (Jones 2022). Black father to a five-year-old girl, Georges Floyd, died in 2020 while a White officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes. In January 2023, Floyd’s four-year-old niece was hit by gunfire while she was sleeping in her bed. Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teens (Goldstick et al. 2022). Black and Hispanic children are six times more likely to be killed by police than other children (Badolato et al. 2020). Police use of force is among the leading causes of death of young men of color (Edwards et al. 2019).
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Notes
- 1.
The names of the fathers’ groups have been changed.
- 2.
From field notes.
- 3.
The quotes in this paragraph are from field notes.
- 4.
In 2013, only 17 percent of custodial single parents were men (Grall 2016).
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Gallais, C. (2023). Painting a Diverse Picture of Fathers. In: Fatherhood and Masculinities. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34132-8_7
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