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Reparations: Black fathers must be first in line [1]

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Date: 2025-09 

Across the US, increasing numbers of Black children are growing up without fathers. Some of these families have been fatherless for up to four generations, which has profoundly impacted the wellbeing of their children for decades.

These families’ fathers are absent because of systemic racial violence and the many societal practices that led to this violence. Children – especially boys – who grow up without their dads are more likely than their peers to get caught up in that cycle of violence themselves.

Black boys are disproportionately more likely to end up in prison than their white peers, and Black people are more likely to experience police misconduct than white people. Large cities with the largest Black populations suffer from some of the highest levels of community violence in the United States. From murders to shootings and carjackings, the statistics are bleak.

We want to interrupt this cycle. Many of the egregious racial injustices which formed our current system constitute crimes against humanity. These are crimes which should be accounted for, and justice should be had. I believe there’s no better place to start than with Black men growing up fatherless. This country needs widespread reparations to heal the wounds caused by institutional racism, slavery, segregation and the War on Drugs.

I am a reparations scholar and activist, and the executive director of Reparations United, a US organisation educating and organising people for restorative justice. We have designed a programme to support fatherless men to stay in and help heal their families and communities, through a combination of reparative basic income grants, training and community support.

We’ve set up a new entity, the Federal Redress Advancement Network, and we’re currently asking the Department of Labor to establish a work and skills restoration initiative with a reparative basic income to redress the Jim Crow-era crimes that it, the department itself, committed. Our plan is ready: it now needs to be put into action.

The community impact of absent fathers

The term ‘fatherlessness’ refers to a home where a father or father-figure is not present or engaged in nurturing, educating or supporting children in the household. Numerous studies show a correlation between fatherlessness and community violence, as well as truancy and school drop-out rates.

Where one has a low chance of employment in the formal economy, one must turn to the informal economy. Although informal work includes a wide range of legal and benign jobs –from babysitting and home barbers to street mechanics and repair work – many young people find opportunities in non-legal work that can sometimes lead to violence.

Fatherless Black men are also susceptible to being drawn into the drug economy, which has low barriers to entry. Many enter after being referred by someone else, and start off in roles such as a ‘lookout’ or a ‘runner’. Often their first packages are given on consignment or ‘fronted’ to them – requiring no upfront cash to start.

This flow into criminalisation – which is facilitated by over-disciplining in schools, and Black boys often being undereducated, misunderstood, and devalued – creates what is effectively a school-to-prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline refers to the policies and practices that effectively push children out of schools into the juvenile justice system. Forty to sixty percent of juvenile offenders become adult offenders. And once suspended from school, they face many challenges in returning and many never graduate.

RBI could interrupt the cycle

For many men, breaking out of this and entering the formal labour market would require going through an intentional process of employability. This could include participating in courses and programmes such as life skills, trauma counselling, anger management, job skills, parenting skills, high school, and vocational education.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/reparations-for-racial-injustice-black-fathers-must-be-first-in-line/

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