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The Sunday Forum, May 18, 2008 Race and Civic Life in America |
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Sunday Forums
Sunday Forum On-Demand:
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Sunday, May 18, 2008, 10–10:50 am Race and Civic Life in America with Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry
Dean Lloyd hosts William Raspberry for a conversation about “Race and Civic Life in America.”
“It’s possible…to talk about it in terms of new lifestyle options, but it seems to me that it’s more than just an option. It seems to me that there are positive dangers that come with father absence. It shows up in all kinds of ways: social, criminal, academic,” Raspberry observes. When whole communities are fatherless, he says, “the results are not good.”
Raspberry has recently founded Baby Steps, a program aimed at training and empowering parents of children from birth through age five. Based in his home town of Okolona, Mississippi, the program seeks to change attitudes and mindsets of parents, many of whom are high school dropouts, so that their young children are better prepared for elementary education. 
About the GuestWilliam Raspberry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy Studies at Duke University. As an urban affairs columnist for the Washington Post for nearly four decades, he wrote widely on education, crime, justice, drug abuse, and housing issues. Raspberry is the creator of Baby Steps, a parent training and empowerment program based in Okolona, Mississippi.
(also listed in Cathedral worship service leaflets) For more information, please contact Deryl Davis at (202) 537-6382 or e-mail ddavis@cathedral.org. |
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Raspberry has devoted much of his career to writing about African
American life, focusing on sensitive social issues and questions of
justice. He says that in recent decades, “fatherlessness [is] virtually
the norm now in lower-income African American communities; it’s getting
to be the norm now in lower-income communities that aren’t African
American.”
In the 1960s, about one in four African American children were born
out of wedlock, according to Raspberry. Today about 75 percent of
African American children, and a quarter of white children, live in
households without fathers. Raspberry asserts that the absence of a
father is an even stronger predictor of criminal behavior than race,
family income, or education. He likens vulnerable members of society
with the coal miner’s canary. “When there are toxins in the social
environment,” Raspberry warns, “those weakest organisms are the first to
fall over.” He calls for a renewed discussion about the importance of
marriage.
Strikingly, marriage has not fallen out of favor. Many unmarried
young parents aspire to marry at some time in the future, after they
have children and a home. “They want to do all the right things, but out
of sequence,” Raspberry summarizes.