A child does not choose his parents. The man who helped create that child does. This book is about that obligation—and why it falls with particular weight on Black men.

The numbers are not in dispute. Most Black children in America are still born outside marriage. Too many grow up without a father in the house. The costs show up in school, in poverty, in crime, and in the next generation of households. Present Black fathers are among the most involved in the country. The crisis is not a shortage of love among the men who stay. It is a shortage of men who stay.

Dozier writes as a conservative, a Project 21 member, and a man who rejects the two insults that have excused absence for decades: that Black men are too dangerous to be fathers, or too damaged to be asked. He reads Moynihan honestly, follows the Census and CDC data without flinching, and refuses the claim that 'the system is the father.' Discrimination is real. So is duty. One does not cancel the other.

This is not a ten-point plan and not a sermon against single mothers. It is a moral argument with a historical spine: Black families were more intact under worse law than they have been under better law. The work that remains is ordinary and non-negotiable marriage when it is possible, presence when it is hard, and a standard young men can see.

The boys are watching. The girls are watching. The line from a man to his child is the one no program can replace.

Father’s Duty, The

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