Speech on Black Fatherhood in the 21st Century

Fatherhood speech to Runnymede Trust

Click here for more information on the Black Fatherhood in the 21st Century project

Introduction

It’s great to have you all here today.

I had hoped to give this speech somewhere beyond the Westminster Village but it’s harder than you would imagine to escape this place.

In any case we have the next best thing – a room full of people and chance to discuss something that really matters.

I want to thank a few people who have made today possible and who have been involved in the project behind it over the last year.

Firstly, Rob Berkeley and the Runnymede Trust. We first discussed the idea of a speech about fatherhood in the black community well over a year ago now, and I want to thank Rob for sticking with this idea since its inception.

When we first talked about this, we both reflected on the number of conversations we’d been involved in the black community about the role of fatherhood.

People were talking about it in their front rooms, in barber shops, in snooker halls, bars, pubs and fast food shops.

Teachers were raising it with me when I visited schools. Mums were saying the same thing at the school gates, or at the local Surestart Centre. Youth workers had the same message.

People were – and are – worried about the status of fatherhood in family life but somehow this issue doesn’t always figure in public life.

Those many, disparate conversations weren’t being pulled together to create any sense of momentum or belief that we can address this together.

I got that sense very strongly from a young man from outside the Westminster bubble who I met up with about a year ago.

His name is Femi Oyeniran. You may know him as one of the hugely talented young actors in the films Kidulthood and Adulthood.   

Femi and I were discussing the issues surrounding young men, masculinity and fatherhood and I talked about the idea of doing a speech.  

We hit upon the idea of taking a video camera along to record some of these disparate conversations; to inform the speech and to give people the chance to speak for themselves.

So in my eagerness I found myself out on a Sunday evening – on my birthday in fact – sitting with a group of young men and a video camera in a barber shop five minutes from my house on Hornsey Road.

And a few weeks later, this time on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I sat and talked with a second group of men, this time mostly older than me, talking about our experiences as sons and as fathers.

This brings me to my second round of thank yous – to Femi and also his colleague Darwood Grace who have spent countless hours masterminding these filming sessions, and who will be producing a short documentary, a trailer for which has been released this week to capture some of those conversations we had.

Those conversations were too rich for me to do justice today.

They involved university students, young dads, comedians, youth workers, actors, entrepreneurs, gay men and straight men, fathers and grandfathers.

Just like the many conversations I have had with people over the years on this issue, they were full of the wisdom of everyday life and the connection to reality that is often missing in Westminster.

These clips are designed to get people talking and thinking about fatherhood – from how different models of fatherhood affect the lives of mothers, to the support and structure that children need in the twenty-first century.  

So while I am thanking people I must say how grateful I am to all the men who agreed to take part in those conversations, including some faces you may recognise, like Charlie Dark, Tinie Tempah, Dean Attah, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Eddie Kadi and Sir Trevor McDonald.

Their contributions have not just informed this speech but also, I hope, help make this a more inclusive, worthwhile conversation for us all to be having.

Personal connection

Now the issue of fatherhood has been on my mind for a long time.

It’s been on my mind, in fact, since about 1985.

That was the year that my father walked out on my mother and our family.

Not all relationships last the distance – that is one of the great tragedies in life.

But what made the difference was this: he didn’t just leave the family home.

He left the country.

Aged eleven, I watched my father walk away from all of his responsibilities.

He had always been someone that I would look up to when we lived together.

He became unimaginably important the day he left.

My mother was left with the enormous, lonely, frightening responsibility of looking after all four children on her own.  

She had to carry the financial burden for the whole family. Doing two, sometimes three jobs at a time.

And at the end of the day, this tireless woman would come home to her children to do the job of two parents.

Feeding us.

Reading to us.

Listening to us.

Helping with our homework.

Picking us up when we were down.

Telling us off when we were out of line.

And getting ready to do it all again, on her own, the next day.
    
And while her life became one of almost complete sacrifice, my own youth was coloured by shades of anger and self-doubt.

There is no doubt that I struggled to cope with what felt like a personal betrayal.

It meant finding other sources of advice about how to negotiate life as a teenage boy, from learning how to shave to how best to deal with peer pressure at school.

It meant making demands on my mother that I took for granted at the time but will never, ever forget.  

And it meant leaning heavily on other figures in the community. Teachers, priests and youth workers all helped to fill the great, father-shaped hole in my life.

Wider story

Now I understand that my story was far from unique.

Kids across London were growing in up in single parent families, going through many of the same feelings and experiences that we did.

They also had to get used to watching other people’s fathers turn up at parents evening.

They also used to dread father’s day each year, or recoil at the sight of other people’s dad’s cheering them on in the school play or on the sports field.

But they learned to cope with it, just as I eventually did.

Nor did any of this mean I was given a life sentence.

Growing up with an absent father didn’t mean I suddenly had to lower my sights.

It just meant I had to work harder so that his choice didn’t define my life.

And when I meet kids across the country I tell them to same. Never underestimate what you can achieve with hard work, good teachers and a great mum.

Instead, the most lasting impact of my father walking out was on my values and the way that I look at the world.

•    It means that when I see testosterone-filled boys hanging around in gangs, I ask myself how many of them have a father in their life?

How many have learned what it means to be a man from someone they can sit and talk to – rather than from an image they have picked up from films, magazines and music videos?

•    When I see young girls pushing their own daughters around in prams I wonder on the relationships they’ve had with men in their lives.
I wonder how many ever received affirmation from a man without the implication of sex? How many were told how special they were without being asked for something in return?

•    And when I see working mums performing miracles, doing all that they can to maintain the precarious balance between work and home life – yet never quite fulfilling their ambitions – I wonder how much support they are receiving from the men in their lives?

I wonder whether the glass ceiling exists as much in the home as it does the workplace.

In short, I wonder about fatherhood.

Concerns in the community

Now this is a difficult subject – I well understand that.

But we have to be brave enough to talk openly about it.

Public figures, from community leaders to academics and elected representatives need to be able to take part in the conversation, without holding ourselves up as model fathers.

Because no-one is suggesting that we hold all the answers.

Nor should we tar the whole community with the same brush. We have some great fathers in the black community and we always have done.

But as a community we need to have the strength and determination to address this, without closing ranks or deciding it is just too difficult.

I also recognise that there is no easy time to hold this conversation.

We all know that there is an election looming and the atmosphere in Westminster is at its febrile worst.

Any suggestion from a government minister that that we can do better in Britain is taken as an admission that society is somehow broken.

I don’t subscribe to that view.

And I don’t enjoy the cat-and-mouse game played with political language.

But I also know that real life does not stop for election years. I get a sense of real urgency from people in our community. People are ready to start talking about what fatherhood means to us in this century.

They don’t want to put this on hold and I agree with them. They think we need an open discussion and I think they are right.

Facing up to the challenge

First of all we must start with the facts.

59 per cent of black Caribbean and 44 per cent of black African children in this country are looked after by a lone parent. Figures for the children of mixed race heritage are high too.

This compares to 22 per cent for the UK population as a whole.

Nine in ten single-parent families are headed by women. Overwhelmingly, the children in these families are not living with their fathers.

Those figures won’t be new to people in this room – and nor do they tell the whole story.

We know that, if the relationship is stable, having two parents living under the same roof is an advantage for a child.

But what also matters is whether fathers continue to play a role in their children’s lives when relationships between parents break down.  

The end of a relationship between two adults should not mean the end of all contact with the children.

Yet too often it does.

Between a quarter and a third of children with separated parents have little or no contact with their fathers.

So it is not just the structure of families that matters here. It is whether fathers continue to contribute to their children’s lives whatever the circumstances.

Fatherhood is a responsibility we take on for life.

And what worries me most is the idea that in another five or ten years’ time there will be a group of people, sitting in a room like this, worrying about the same problems.

Because there is no hiding from it: this is holding us back.

It’s limiting our potential to lift ourselves up…to determine our own future as a community…and to contribute as fully I know we can to British national life.

All the research tells us that children who grow up without strong relationships with their fathers are:

…more likely to get into trouble at school and to suffer from depression
…more likely to smoke, drink and take drugs
…more likely to go on to become parents themselves as teenagers
…more likely to drop out of education and end up on benefits
... more likely to go to break the law and end up in prison

We know, in short, that having an engaged father around matters. A lot.

Now of course some of this is financial.

Nearly half of all lone parents live in poverty.  Single parenthood halves the earning power in the family and doubles the caring burden.

This has obvious effects on the children in those families. Wealth matters as well as warmth.

So before we get into a simplistic debate about ‘broken Britain’ we should remember that in the countries with higher levels of equality, the penalty that children pay for losing a father is much reduced.

Lone parents have it the hardest, so we are not going to solve this problem by diverting money away from them and their children.

But we’re also not going to solve it unless we start facing up to this sense that too often fathers are becoming estranged from their own children.

Until we address this

•    We know that our high aspirations for educational achievement for Black children are less likely to be met. Our boys in particular falling behind the rest, with Black Caribbean boys three times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than the average.

•    We know that many of those boys will continue to find their way into gangs and police custody rather than an apprenticeship or a university place. Today black youths account for 6% of all those in the youth justice system but just 3% of the population.

•    We know that we’ll still have girls looking for affirmation with men in all the wrong ways, with teenage pregnancy rates for black girls well above the national average.

•    And we know that the cycle risks repeating itself as they grow up without the self discipline to father a child, but no less likely to produce one though a one-night stand.

Impact of history

Now I think most of us recognise that there are cultural legacies that have contributed to some unhealthy ideas about what masculinity means in our community.

Two years ago we commemorated the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.

In that anniversary year I spoke of the long-term consequences of the systematic emasculation of generations of black men.

As I said then, I have no doubt that depriving these men of their freedom and their dignity helped sow the seeds of a rebellious culture among black men that sons have picked up and mimicked for generations.

Equally, I think most people understand that, long after the slave trade had been confined to history, there were other social forces that added to this sense of injustice and indignity.

In our fathers’ generation, seeing signs outside pubs and boarding houses reading ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ was a brutal blow to black men’s sense of self worth.

The experience of being turned away for a job because of your heritage and your skin colour had the same effect.

The sense that the police and the government were not with you but against you brought men out onto the streets of Brixton and Tottenham in the 1980s with terrible, violent consequences.  

And today the experience in parts of our community of poverty, underachievement and unemployment continues to breed a sense of powerlessness that men have sought to compensate for in other, unhealthy ways.

Today violence, promiscuity and materialism are the cousins of this injustice.

They are the behaviours that too many men in our community have mistakenly come to associate with status and respect.

Our own choices

I say these things to help explain, not to excuse, the behaviour of men who wilfully ignore the idea that sex has consequences or who choose to walk away from their children.

In the end we make each make our own choices.  We recognise our past but we cannot be prisoners to it.

Most of all, we should understand that having a child is one of the most morally significant choices we will ever make.

Bringing children up – being there for them, loving them, caring for them – is a moral act.

We can’t equivocate about those things. They are the building blocks of a decent, civilised society.

So I hope the conversation that we are starting today can serve as a call to action – for each one of us as individuals and for all of us together as a community – to begin to restore fatherhood to its rightful place in family life.

1. Get active in politics

There are things we can do together to affect the place of fatherhood in national life, beyond our own community.

There is a policy agenda here but it needs a movement behind it banging the drum for fatherhood. That means getting active and getting organised.

So if you think that paternity rights need to be extended, or that the funding for paternity leave is the problem, then start campaigning on it.

If you think that services aren’t meeting the needs of fathers as well as they do mums, then start saying so – and loudly. I’m proud of Surestart, it’s one of the most important institutions this government has built. But I don’t see nearly enough dads in those centres.

If you think the fact that UK fathers have the longest working hours in Europe is part of the puzzle then it’s time to start saying that too. The picture of the father coming home to find his kids asleep and his wife exhausted is one I recognise only too well. We need to start talking about the burdens of working patterns on the family.

If you believe that couples need more help, or clearer obligations, when they split up so that fathers don’t drift away from their children, then now’s the time to start spelling that out.

If you think we need more role models outside of the family, let’s start working out and explaining how we can make that happen.  There are local authorities in England without a single male primary school teacher – that has to be a problem.

But if you think these things matter, we also need to recognise that change has to be argued for and fought for.

I’ve been a minister for nine years now – and I recognise that sometimes we need pushing along.

I like using a quote from the American President Franklyn Roosevelt who met a group of activists and allowed them to make their case to them. He concluded the meeting by telling them:

"You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it."

You have allies out there – faith groups, pressure groups, community organisations, the academic community.

Everyone in this room has an MP they can start writing to.

Everyone has access to the web and the campaigning tools it makes available.

This is how politics works, so it’s time to get organised.

2. Don’t wait for politics to catch up

Second, let’s not wait for politics to address this issue for us.

Let’s exercise some self-determination and start to help one another.

Each of us needs to add not just our voices but also our energy and our time.

All of us have a role to play – whether it is helping out the local scout group, running a football team, joining a mentoring programme or helping out at a youth centre.

The point is this: we can’t rely on footballers, or rappers, or reality TV stars to provide role models. They won’t.  

Nor can we expect government to do it all for us. It can’t.

Ask young people themselves and they’ll also tell you that they want role models from within their community rather than from on the TV.

Surveys show an overwhelming majority feel that way.

Children today desperately need people they can depend upon.

We all have a role to play in fulfilling that.

So let’s get active in our communities as well as in politics.

3. Self worth and responsibility

Third, whatever we are able to do together, what matters most is the way we conduct ourselves in our own lives.

That starts with responsible attitudes towards sex and to having children.  

Young women in our community need to understand that they are worth more than a one-night stand.

They need to know that they can and should say no unprotected or unwanted sex.

They have to believe that they don’t need to give in to men who say they want to father a child but aren’t ready to take on that responsibility.

Let’s keep reinforcing that message.

Our young men need to recognise what the real mark of a man is.

•    A boy cannot control his own urges or delay gratification. But a man takes ownership of his life and thinks about his future.

•    A boy can think only of himself. A man understands there are other people in this world. His family. His neighbours. His colleagues at work. And it is from this recognition that he exercises restraint and responsibility.

•    A boy wants status symbols – the gold watch or yet another child – to prove his worth. A man understands that this doesn’t fool anyone. That ultimately we are judged on the choices we make.

So yes we need sex education in schools. Yes we need to stop the corporate sexualisation of little girls.

But we also need young men and women growing up with different ideas of self worth and personal responsibility.

4. Discipline

Fourth, let’s not shy away from the role of the traditional father.

Let’s understand that in this century more than ever children need structure, boundaries and discipline in their lives.

We live in a world where young people are surrounded by commercial messages encouraging them to believe that they can have whatever they want, whenever they want it.

This is the ‘on demand culture’. The 24/7, wall to wall advertising culture. It’s the iphone, Sky Plus, fast food culture.

It’s a world in which there are teams of advertising executives sitting in rooms right now, considering how best they can expand their share of the £99 million market in children’s consumer goods.

It’s a world where children are spending twice as much time in front of a TV or computer screen than in the classroom

Where 90 per cent of teenagers have a TV in their room – a figure that rises to 98 per cent for those from deprived backgrounds by the way.

So what happens in the home really matters. We can’t roll back time and wish away this technology. Nor would most of us want to.

What we need instead is a healthy relationship with it.

What we can do as fathers is insist that the playstation goes in the drawer sometimes.

We can tell our kids that if they’re going to watch MTV Base then they’re also going to read a book before they go to bed every night.

These things are in our power – and they are our responsibility.

So we should draw on those traditions of strict discipline that many of us remember from our own childhoods and make use of them today.

Fathers have been doing this for centuries. Let’s not stop now, of all times.

5. Love

Finally, I think we also have to recognise that in this century fatherhood also needs updating from the traditional model.

In many ways the ‘provider-protector’ model is in our comfort zone.

Many of us will have grown up expecting to be the bread winner in the household and the disciplinarian in the family.

But what young people also need today is an emotional bond with their father.

In many ways being tough is the easy part – our fathers, if they were around – set that example and we understand it well.

The harder thing to do is to develop a relationship with our children where they feel they can talk to us when they have problems. That we will be there to listen and that we’ll do everything we can to help.

I’m not sure this is always the case.

One survey found that only one in ten children would go their father first if they had a problem. More than three quarters would go to their mother.  

When asked, more than four in ten men say they do not spend enough time with their children.

Another poll found that only 3% of fathers in Britain read to their children, compared with 89% of mothers.

The problem is that we are asking women to be full-time employees and full-time parents, while men continue with lifestyles that their fathers and grandfathers might have recognised.

The research tells us that both boys and girls are both likely to have higher self-esteem when they have sustained and positive engagement with their fathers.

And some of the evidence suggests that as fathers we are better at offering this emotional support to girls that we are to boys.

This may be because girls are more confident in revealing vulnerability than boys, or that they are more adept at discussing their problems, but whatever the reason it presents us with a challenge.   

When the images of black men in popular culture so often involve hubris and violence, we need to be able to confound those ideas by building loving, lasting relationships with our kids.

Conclusion

So the message from today has to be this.

Be active in politics and demanding of your politicians to play their part.

Be ready to lead, in your own families and communities, while Westminster plays catch-up on fatherhood.

Be clear to the next generation that sex has consequences and that fatherhood is a moral choice.

Be tough on your kids: don’t be afraid to set high standards, enforce boundaries and provide discipline.

Be engaged with your kids on an emotional level: play with them, read with them, laugh with them and to listen to them.

But above all be there.

Be there for them, whatever the twists and turns of the rollercoaster of life.

Be there whatever the highs and lows of your relationship with their mother.

Be there, be available and be in contact.  

Having a child is the greatest, most important, indelible, mark we leave on the world.

They say it takes a village to raise a child and I agree – but we can’t leave it to the village

We’ve made great strides as a community in recent years. We’ve watched role models emerge not just on the other side of the Atlantic but here in Britain,  In part due to the considerable efforts of black fathers and mothers.

We’re watching school results improve at faster rates than the national average.

And we’re seeing the emergence of a black middle class for the first time ever as black men and women make their mark in business, in academia and in public life.  
These things we should be proud of.

And they should inspire us to believe that whatever our history, we determine our own future.

Whatever role our own fathers played in our lives, we can do better.

And however much we learn as fathers, our children will do better still when, one day, it is their turn.

Thank you very much.