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Obama and the Black American Family DonÂ’t Jibe By William Owens If Black Americans honestly believe Barack Obama truly has the best interests of their families in mind, then Black Americans had better pay attention to Obama on paper and not merely on skin. Barack Obama has consistently shown his opposition to several key factors that protect the Black American family: On Gay Marriage: By a large margin, Black Americans widely oppose same-sex marriage. 67% of Black Americans favor a constitutional amendment that would define marriage between that of a man and a woman. A national survey by the Pew...

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio talk show when a black man called in to take Barack Obama to task for suggesting that black men were sloughing off their responsibility as fathers. The caller didn’t deny recent data that indicated that 80% of black babies were being born to unwed mothers. Instead, he said that this dire situation wasn’t the fault of irresponsible young men and women, but, instead, was the logical result of rampant racism in our country. He claimed that black American males simply can’t find jobs, and that’s the reason they don’t support...

Congressional Leaders, Scholars Gather to Strategize on Black Male Issues by Jamal Watson NEW YORK — For the third consecutive year, more than a 1,000 academics, activists and political leaders gathered in New York on Friday to strategize on the problems that beset young Black males. The gathering, which was convened by Charles J. Ogletree, who teaches and directs the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University’s Law School, is part of “The Pipeline Crisis/Winning Strategies Initiative,” a national effort aimed at identifying ways to tackle the many barriers that limit the number of young Black...

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., says that he won’t back down on his “tough love” message to African Americans -– a subject that prompted Jesse Jackson's angry open-mic gaffe this past week. Obama told reporters aboard his plane to San Diego that Americans need to recognize that there is a problem when more than a half of African American children are growing up without a father in the house. “That is a problem and I won’t back up one bit in asserting that that’s a problem that we have to be honest about," he said. Obama’s tough love message to African...

The larger point of Jesse L. Jackson's criticism of Barack Obama -- if not the crude way he expressed it -- touched a nerve among some African American political activists who have been unhappy about the senator 's pointed critiques of absentee fathers and other problems in the black community. Eric Easter, a blogger on the joint Web site of Jet and Ebony, two black-oriented magazines, wrote yesterday that some of Obama's rhetoric "smacked of calculated political expediency" in an effort to win over white voters. The criticism was similar in some ways to the reaction to comedian Bill Cosby,...

IF YOU'RE wondering where Jesse Jackson got the idea to cut off someone's nuts, consider this theory: It probably came from his wife. No doubt Jacqueline Jackson had the same thought when she was hit with the news that her philandering husband had a daughter with a woman who wasn't her. It was in 2001 that word surfaced that the civil-rights leader had had an affair with a Rainbow PUSH Coalition staffer, a relationship that resulted in the birth of a baby girl. Seven years later, a black politician from Chicago not named Jesse Jackson, who's on the verge of...

Barack Obama took a "tough love" message to African American youth, telling that finishing high school is a better route to success in life than an unlikely trip to the NBA or the top of the rap industry. "You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Lil' Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school," Obama, D-Ill., told a cheering crowd, brought to a standing ovation at a town hall meeting in Powder Springs, Georgia. The presumptive Democratic nominee was speaking about high school drop out rates and the need...

Barack Obama's gave a carefully calculated political speech on Father's Day calling attention to the problem of children growing up without a father.  In one important respect, Obama was absolutely right:  Far too many children are being raised without the attention, discipline and care of a father in the home.  But in another equally important respect, Obama took the easy, fast and safe path in his speech. The problem of children being born into fatherless homes is, perhaps, the defining social problem of our times.  The starkest possible contrast with the fatherless children of America decried by Obama, was tacitly drawn...

Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city's largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama invoked his own absentee father to deliver a sharp message to black men, saying "we need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception."

RUSH: Since we're talking about Obama, he went out there and he did a Father's Day speech. It was the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Sunday morning. Don't you love all these Democrat politicians that go deliver sermons in churches? They're making a big deal out of Obama's speech, as if nobody's ever said these things before. We have a montage here of the Drive-Bys, we have Jake Tapper, we got John Roberts, Kiran Chetry, and Robin Roberts, Jeff Glor all going nuts here over Obama's speech. We've got sound bites of Obama's speech coming up. TAPPER: It was...

Two weeks after breaking with his long-time church after pastors there made inflammatory and anti-American sermons, Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama went to a new church on Sunday to discuss fatherhood. Obama, accompanied by his wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia, took part in Father's Day services near their house at the Apostolic Church of God -- a large, predominantly black church in the South Side of Chicago. This was Obama's first time attending a church service since he announced last month that he had quit Trinity United Church of Christ, which he had attended for 16 years,...

Barack Obama asks fathers to take responsibility By Alex Spillius in Washington Last Updated: 12:51AM BST 16/06/2008 Senator Barack Obama has called on black American men to accept their responsibilities as fathers and to stop "acting like boys instead of men". Barack Obama speaking at the Apostolic Church of God In a Father's Day speech at a black church in his home city of Chicago, the Democratic presidential nominee listed the disadvantages faced by single parent families in the community, and urged men to realise that their responsibility as a father does not end at conception. "If we are honest...

Obama talks tough on 'AWOL' fathers By MIKE ALLEN | 6/15/08 2:08 PM EST Talking tough on Father’s Day, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) challenged African-American men on Sunday to play more of a role in raising their children and warned them that “responsibility doesn’t just end at conception.” “Too many fathers are MIA. Too many fathers are AWOL,” he told a huge African-American congregation in Chicago. “There’s a hole in your heart if you don’t have a male figure in the home that can guide you and lead you and set a good example for you.” “What makes you a...

Walter Dean Myers, a best-selling author of books for teenagers, sometimes visits juvenile detention centers in his home state of New Jersey to hold writing workshops and listen for stories about the lives of young Americans. One day, in a juvenile facility near his home in Jersey City, a 15-year-old black boy pulled him aside for a whispered question: Why did he write in "Somewhere in the Darkness" about a boy not meeting his father because the father was in jail? Mr. Myers, a 70-year-old black man, did not answer. He waited. And sure enough, the boy, eyes down, mumbled...

Bill Cosby pleaded with blacks to stop blaming the "white man" for their problems on Thursday, and he reiterated his harsh critique of the current state of African-American culture. "It is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us, and it keeps a person frozen in their seat. It keeps you frozen in your hole that you are sitting in to point up and say, 'That's the reason why I am here.' We need to stop this," Cosby said in an address before Jesse Jackson's 33rd Annual Rainbow/PUSH Coalition conference in Chicago.

I haven’t heard one fellow yet say, “I went to medical school all because my gang members encouraged me to do so while we were breaking into the gas station.” While some people don’t want to hear what I’m saying, others have said: Why don’t blacks listen to Bill Cosby and not Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. But I say, don’t pit me against Jesse and Al because they speak the truth. The things that Jesse has come out for and he’s been against, these are things I’m talking about, too. Yes, there is such a thing as institutionalize racism.

"We are living in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal…No longer is a person embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child" -- Bill Cosby, speaking to African-Americans at St. Paul Church of God in Christ, Detroit, July, 2007. As Mother's Day approaches, it seems a fitting moment to point out the truth of Bill Cosby's observation. Left unsaid but well understood by him: This "new time" and these "abnormal ways"...

“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’ “I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now...

<p>Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties...</p>

<p>Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X.</p> <p>He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father.</p>