I found the clip that Khytie played of Barack Obama’s speech on the black family very interesting, and would like to think through its implications in this blog post. I later read the full transcript of the speech on Huffington Post and noticed a few things. Many newspapers and media outlets posited that the speech consisted of Obama reprimanding black fathers for “[abandoning] their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” As a result, it was possible that readers just browsing the newspaper could use such a piece to support the culture argument, that many of the economic ills plaguing the black community could be attributed to the individual behaviors and decisions of members of the black community.

And in a way, Obama’s sort of does agree with that argument. Many of his assertions, though crafted to relate meaningfully to his audience, the predominantly black Apostolic Church of God, point out individual actions such as “sit[ting] in the house and watch[ing] ‘SportsCenter’ all weekend long” or not emphasizing education or passing on the value of empathy. In this way, he places some of the burden of gang violence or incarceration on the missing fathers of these black families. However, in the second half of his speech, Obama does mention that the government has also a responsibility of “making it easier for fathers who make responsible choices and harder for those who avoid them,” citing reforms of financial penalties around marriage and divorce, and child support, as well as expanded tax programs, education, and employment opportunities as methods of realizing this responsibility. Here, he invokes the structural argument that disadvantage is often embedded in institutions.

I’m not yet quite sure of what I think of this speech. On one hand, Obama plays straight into the heteronormative standard of the nuclear American family, in how describes the roles of mothers and fathers. On the other hand, he was speaking on a holiday that celebrates the father in the family structure. He does mention the structural components that influence the black family, but spends so much time on cultural implications that I’m afraid that it might have put too much emphasis on them. Obama’s background of growing up in a single-parent household, though he did have the support of his grandparents, lends also an interesting perspective to the issue. Perhaps the biggest question I am grappling with is the question of Obama’s responsibility in speaking about black family. To bring about change to the structural forces impacting the black family, should he have only mentioned those?