Cantrell: A reflection on Father’s Day and Juneteenth

There is a piece of fried chicken my family called “Daddy’s back.” The back was bony, more cartilage than meat. It was really just pot meat, the kind of thing that ends up in a pot of greens and not a platter of fried chicken, that my father took every time. “Daddy’s back” was for him, and my mom and the six of us kids left it for Daddy.

My relationship with my father is complicated. He was not always the man I needed him to be, and never actually the man I wanted him to be. But I have lived long enough now to understand what I was watching at that dinner table. He was consciously giving more and taking less, and he had made his peace with it. He took less so that his family could have more, and he did so without needing acknowledgment. He did it as part of the load he carried.

That is the load squarely placed on Daddy’s back. It wasn’t just a piece of chicken — it was how he lived. I inherited this trait, taking on the burden of keeping my kids safe, happy and fed.

I carried the burden as a single father with two young children on my own, then a third who came later when we were still on our own. No partner, just me. I did what the work required because it was mine, not anyone else’s. Taking on that load was not always graceful, and often more than I thought I could bear, but it was always there, and it was my load to balance alone. Daddy’s back is the story of Father’s Day for many Black men.

This is not a story about one man, it’s the story of many Black men. The narrative that Black fathers are absent from their children’s lives is a lie. Not a misunderstanding, not a gap in the data, but really just a lie.

The CDC’s National Health Statistics Reports, No. 71 from December 2013, tracked what Black fathers were actually doing. Among those living with children under five, 70.4% bathed, diapered or dressed their children every single day, the highest of any group surveyed, compared to 60% of white fathers and 45% of Hispanic fathers. For school-age children, Black fathers helped with homework daily at 40.6%, compared to 28.1% of white fathers.

Further, the Institute for Family Studies reports that 59% of Black non-resident fathers are more likely than white fathers (39%) or Hispanic fathers (35%) to see their children regularly. This data has been available for years, but the lie has been trumpeted for generations.

We Black fathers have been carrying this load in a country that has spent generations making it an impossible burden — through incarceration, through economic exclusion, through the systematic dismantling of Black family life that began in slavery and has never fully stopped. Yet through all of that, we have carried it anyway.

Father’s Day and Juneteenth often fall in the same week in June, and that proximity is not accidental. It is a metaphor for Black life. It is the story of men who carry a load for a freedom promised, but never delivered.

Juneteenth is June 19, 1865, the day the last enslaved people in Texas learned they were free — two and a half years after emancipation had already been declared. The news was withheld. The agency was withheld. Someone else decided when Black people were allowed to know about their own freedom.

That is the story of Juneteenth, not just a celebration, but a warning. A warning about what happens when those in power decide that Black people’s freedom, Black people’s agency, Black people’s right to determine their own future is something they get to manage, control and release on their own schedule.

Like the news of freedom for Black people was delayed until Juneteenth, the news of Black fatherhood has suffered the same delayed recognition of truth. While the facts are publicly available, the lie is continually repeated. Denying this truth has facilitated a violent and continued assault on Black men, and supporting this narrative has driven more incarceration, more denied employment, more stolen time with their children and more blame placed on Black families for harms that were done to them, not by them.

The lie does its work. It feeds a system that needs a reason to cage Black men and call it justice, to shut them out of jobs and call it merit, to treat their children as already abandoned even when their fathers are standing right beside them. The lie justifies policy choices that separate families. We see it in child welfare systems that assume Black children are on their own, in schools that treat every Black boy as one bad decision away from a mugshot instead of a diploma. That is not a cultural failure — it is a structural one.

The lie distorts how we see Black men. It erases their daily presence in their children’s lives, which becomes how teachers, employers, police and policymakers see Black men and their families. When people believe fathers are absent, they design systems that leave them out. A present-day example in Santa Clara County is the limited number of homeless shelters that accommodate single fathers with their children. The real harm is not just that Black fathers are mischaracterized, but that the mischaracterization is used to justify decisions that actively undermine their ability to parent.

In many ways, the truth about Black fatherhood has been similarly delayed in much the same way as Juneteenth. While the data exists, and Black men’s presence is undeniable, the recognition of that truth has been held back, managed and obscured. Just like in 1865, the delay is not neutral. It costs. It costs Black men their dignity. It costs families stability. It costs children the full recognition of the love and labor already present in their lives. And it costs this country the opportunity to build policy grounded in reality instead of myth.

Daddy’s back still carries the load. See the man who’s been taking the smallest piece so everyone else can eat.

Chuck Cantrell is an economist, San Jose planning commissioner and creator of “Dying to Stay Here,” a video and podcast series that explores the entrenched economic and social barriers facing Black communities in Silicon Valley. His columns appear every third Thursday of the month. Contact Chuck at [email protected].