The Happy Black Man and His Light-Skinned Children

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“Image BLACK MAN and son in Black & White - ODT, B&W Portrait by jfinnirwin is licensed under CC BY 2.0.”

For quite some time, I’ve noticed a familiar occurrence in my neighborhood that typically takes place every Saturday at the food market on the corner of 110th Street, near the park. This phenomenon is the peculiar sight of dark-skinned black American men pushing their lighter-skinned children in strollers or carrying them on their shoulders while speaking in a loving and affectionate fatherly manner. “Oh, look over there, that’s a duck, ducks make quacking sounds, quack, quack, quack.” The children laugh and imitate their daddies. The wives, whom I seldom see, are most likely light-skinned Negroid or Caucasian.

These black men always observe me with wide-eyed curiosity; perhaps I’m a reminder of what their biracial children might look like in the future. They especially want white people to see them as good, responsible, loving black fathers, fully capable of supporting a family, even though I suspect their absent wives are the real breadwinners, paying the rent or mortgage and working long hours to provide them with a comfortable New York lifestyle. When these wives and mothers finally emerge from the shadows, they’re often out of shape and quite ordinary. But to these black men, they are the prize, the epitome of beauty, more exquisite than any black woman who has ever walked the planet.

I couldn’t care less who these black men choose as their female preferences; what bothers me is the hypocrisy of their behaviour. Many of these same black men will eventually go online and talk shit about mulattoes, especially mulatto males, even though their own children resemble the very people they seem to have a problem with. Also, it makes me wonder why so many American black men never show the same degree of parental love or responsibility for all the dark-skinned babies they produce.

Whenever I spot these black American men on the streets with their black children, I never hear any tender, loving words or positive interaction. Instead, they’re usually uncivil and verbally abusive (one can only imagine what happens behind closed doors when the mother is at work). Why is there a difference? Because these black men despise their own color and, as a result, the color of their offspring. They long to be white or mulatto, but they never will be.

Most African American women, keenly aware of the black male preference for white or biracial women, seldom protest, and many will continue to have children with the same men who want nothing to do with them. And, sadly, the majority of these black women steadfastly refuse to partner with accomplished men of other races, including lighter-skinned black men and mulattos. Crazy, right?

As a result, an alarming number of black American women—over eighty percent—struggle to raise two, sometimes three, young children alone, without any financial or emotional support from these deadbeat black men. And now, with the recent passage of President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”, many black children will soon lose their Medicaid benefits and food stamps.

If this trend continues, I believe that African Americans will remain at the bottom of the social and economic ladder for generations to come.