Protect, Provide, and Prepare: Illuminating the Ways Schooling Norms Subvert and Support Black Fatherhood Values

• In Event: Complicating Black Fatherhood as a Site of Educational Theorizing and Practice

Abstract

Upon news of my marital engagement and eventual fatherhood journey, my father—a Christian pastor—gave me very specific instructions on what it meant to be a husband and father. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that the term husband in the Judeo-Christian context was the combination of two words in the English language: “house” and “band”, forming the basis of the word”. He told me it was my job as a good husband and eventual father to form a “band around our house”. This, in his estimation (and exegeses), was my primary role. It was to protect my spouse and family from anything that might function to harm us.

Unfortunately, the nuanced cultural contexts of Black fatherhood, as reflected in my account above, continue to be under-examined in K-12 education. Meaningful and sustained Black parent engagement in schools continues to be a challenge for a number of reasons that include but are not limited to: limited opportunities to engage; prescribed engagement roles; and, culturally irrelevant engagement strategies (Hannon, 2020). Black fathers, particularly, continue to be marginalized, and even excluded, from the discourse on Black parent engagement with schools. Given the ways researchers have reported on how Black fathers positively influence their children’s development (Authors, 2017; Authors, 2017; Cooper et al., 2023; Jones & Mosher, 2013; Riina & McHale, 2010), it behooves schools to leverage the collective insights, expertise, and presence of Black fathers to support student wellness and success. However, this leveraging must take into account that Black father engagement has to be informed by McAdoo’s (1993) critical insights that various forms of anti-Black racism have undermined, and continue to undermine, Black fathers’ ability to fulfill their roles in their families and communities.

In this paper, I draw on the constructs of protection, provision, and preparation as a means of foregrounding Black fatherhood values to illuminate the various ways schools have subverted and supported the demonstration of these values. Drawing on the recent personal narratives of Black fathers of school aged children (Butler, 2022; Rogers, 2022; Steen, 2022; West, 2022; Williams, 2022)—as well as my own Black fatherhood scholarship and personal experiences—I offer examples of the ways Black fathers of school-aged Black children have attempted to protect their children/students from anti-Black racism in schools, provide for their children/students with requisite resources (e.g., sociocultural consciousness) to remain culturally, academically, and emotionally healthy in the face of anti-Black racism, and prepare their children/students for anti-Black school practices (e.g., disciplinary policies, exclusion from school-based opportunities, etc.) that are a consequence of anti-Blackness while in the pursuit of racial justice in P-12 settings.

Author

• Michael D. Hannon, Montclair State University