Kathleen Parker, a right-leaning columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote an article commenting on President Obama’s recent initiative to help support minority men (entitled, “My Brother’s Keeper”). In recognition of the disproportionately high number of minority men who are struggling with poverty and becoming entangled in the criminal justice system, the initiative appears to be a multi-pronged approach to try to help this group. Ms. Parker seems to have chosen this opportunity to make her case for personal responsibility, to criticize “feminists” who have argued that fathers are nonessential, and to decry media that glorifies single motherhood. At one point in her column, she states that:

Rather than tackling the source of problems in minority communities, we have embraced a pop culture that celebrates destructive behavior via movies and music. 

Magazine covers and chatty television shows, meanwhile, cutesify the tragedy of casual procreation by touting baby-daddies and baby-mamas, who aren’t so adorable in the inner city where the biological offspring of such lyrical liaisons are most often doomed to a life without much promise.

This superficial consideration of a complex societal problem is, unfortunately, not unique to Ms. Parker. What is particularly disappointing, however, is that in this article lamenting the absence of minority (read: African American) fathers, Ms. Parker does not anywhere mention the legal justice system, and the ways in which the “war on drugs” has contributed to this problem. In Ms. Parker’s world of personal responsibility and media messaging, it is an inconvenient and probably irrelevant fact that minority men are no more likely to consume drugs than White men, yet much more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug use. It is probably also inconvenient and irrelevant that “convicted felons” have a more difficult time finding employment upon release, thus contributing to the elevated unemployment rates. It is also probably irrelevant that incarcerated men are less likely to be around to mentor their children. What apparently is most important to Ms. Parker in perpetuating this societal problem are father-bashing feminists, movies, and music that glorify single motherhood.

In support of her article, she provides a link to a recent report put out by the Urban Institute revising the famous Moynihan report in which former senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan investigated the root causes of Black poverty. Of note, nowhere in this report are listed these dangerous feminists, movies, and  music. Instead, what are explored are the labor market, the educational system, segregation and poverty, and the criminal justice system. Hmmmm…