Lessons From, For First Dad

Obama Is Right To Focus On Fathers, But His Life Story Suggests A More Complex Reality

This Father's Day, I have been thinking about President Barack Obama's relationship to black fatherhood. His loving engagement with his daughters is the very embodiment of idealized male parenting.

In his role as "good" father, Mr. Obama has been critical of "bad" fathers. During his campaign, he appalled some in the African-American community during a guest sermon at a black church when he harshly criticized absent black fathers. To some, this criticism seemed liked a cheap and easy way for Mr. Obama to distance himself from black communities in order to gain white votes. His goal may have been racially strategic, but I suspect that Mr. Obama sincerely believes in the absolute centrality of black fathering.

So it is interesting that Mr. Obama's role as good and loving father allows us to ignore the simple fact that the first black president of the United States did not have a present and available black father. I suspect that had the elder Barack Obama remained married to Ann Dunham and present in the young Barack's life, he would not now be the president of the United States. President Obama's particular life experiences, his challenges, his search for self-identity and his exceptional achievements were possible, in part, because his father was absent.

Had his father remained, Mr. Obama would never have lived in Indonesia,and his grandparents would have taken a less active role in his upbringing. Had his father been present, he might have had less adolescent angst - but that angst was part of what sent him into a world of books from which he emerged a formidable intellectual. Part of Barack Obama's greatness is his fatherlessness.

I don't mean to suggest that it is better, in general, not to have a father. President Obama is right when he points to the importance of loving, involved, financially responsible men in the lives of their children and their communities. I do want to suggest that President Obama lacks some imagination when it comes to analyzing the necessary ingredients for childhood success. That lack of imagination is odd given that the recipe is readily apparent in his own biography.

Barack Obama survived and even thrived even though his own father was absent because he had an intergenerational support network, access to quality education and opportunities for travel and enrichment.