CALLING ALL DADS
Engaged, loving fathers are essential to curing Pittsburgh’s epidemic of violence
There’s no single story to tell about the crisis of fatherlessness and family breakup in Pittsburgh. It’s about structural racism, but not just structural racism. It’s about drugs, but not just drugs. It’s about mass incarceration, but not just mass incarceration. It’s about economics, but not just economics. It’s about culture, but not just culture.
But one thing is for sure: The collapse of the family, especially in poor and Black communities, is at the heart of the city’s, and the country’s, epidemic of violence.
The story could start anywhere: with the systematic breakup of families during the transatlantic slave trade and on plantations; with the clearing of the slums and anti-family public housing policies; or with the cultural changes of the 1960s and beyond. But this time, we can start in the 1980s, when crack cocaine first reached American shores.
This highly addictive and cheap alternative to traditional cocaine flooded communities around the country, eventually reaching Pittsburgh. Compared to other street drugs, crack offered a cheap high, and soon dealing it came to be seen as a way to escape misery and poverty.
Over the next decade, hundreds of thousands of people, largely in America’s inner cities, become addicted to this toxic substance. Caught in the throes of addiction, everyone from teenagers to middleaged parents would literally do anything to “get a hit.” Community leaders watched helplessly as previously responsible wageearners were terminated from jobs due to their increasing erratic behavior.
Children were forced to grow up early and fend for themselves. Marriages broke up. Teen pregnancies and homelessness surged. And many women bought into the narrative — in part due to the broader culture, in part due to the unreliability of the men in their communities, and in part due to aggressive incarceration policies — that men were unnecessary to raising a family.
As the crack crisis faded in the 1990s, many politicians saw the opportunity to position themselves as being “tough on crime.” Habitual offender laws, or “three strikes” laws, proliferated across the states, from liberal California to conservative Tennessee. These laws mandated harsh sentences for anyone caught selling illegal substances, including marijuana, with life sentences imposed after the third offense.
I’ll always remember the sight of men in orange jumpsuits, shackled and handcuffed, being escorted from vans into the County Jail on a daily basis. Men were incarcerated, and families were separated. Children were often shifted to grandparents and or foster care.
In Pittsburgh, the crack epidemic hit at the same time as the final collapse of the steel industry.
Unemployment rates skyrocketed to 18% for whites, and 30% or higher for Black workers. My brother, a 20-year employee, was permanently laid off and lost his pension. He had two school-age children. After several years of underemployment, he finally secured a job that paid a decent wage.
During this time, I worked as a credit counselor. I met hundreds of people who came to our offices for help, faced with overwhelming debt and mortgage foreclosure with no chance of finding jobs that paid wages that would enable them to rebuild their lives. Babies continued to be conceived and born, because that’s what people do, but the long-term commitment of
marriage seemed out of reach to many people. Everything that holds a culture of strong families together had been taken away.
Today, families in Pittsburgh’s poor communities are less stable than ever. Forty-two percent of Pittsburgh families are headed by single parents, mostly women, and 78% of these families live in poverty. Crack has been replaced by opioids. Unemployment or underemployment make the financial security essential to thriving families feel impossible. And our wider political and popular culture disdains the idea that families, and especially fathers, matter.
Youth feel the lack of responsibility and support that should come from intact, loving families.
They become angry and hopeless, and carry out acts of rage and violence. Drugs and weapons are easily accessed. Depression is common, particularly among young people. Many family relationships that do exist are scarred by conflict, estrangement, incarceration and further violence. Participation in other social institutions, such as churches and community groups, has plummeted.
This is a crisis that everyone must face. It cannot be ignored or swept under the rug. Words are not enough. It’s time to take action and corrective steps that will heal families, and not punish them further. This is why, on the Friday before Father’s Day, I joined anti-violence and anti-racism groups from around the city in announcing the National Summit on Fatherhood initiative, right here in Pittsburgh.
We aim to be a national model for engaging with families and communities to restore faith in the importance of active, loving, present fathers.
If we don’t take action to heal families, no other anti-violence and social justice initiatives can have sustainable success. A culture of peace will only be possible when there is peace and love in the homes of the children of Pittsburgh.
Diane Powell is the director of Community and Family Builders, which supports the National Summit on Fatherhood alongside the South Pittsburgh Coalition for Peace, the Black Political Empowerment Project, the Greater Pittsburgh Coalition Against Violence and Washington, D.C.-based 100 Fathers, Inc.