Presiding over what he called a “black dad summit,” host of “The Nightly Show” Larry Wilmore marked Black History month on Wednesday night by discussing the thorny issues around fatherhood in the black community.
Wilmore began the show with a statistic, delivered by CNN anchor Don Lemon, that over 72 percent of children in the black community are born out of wedlock to largely absent fathers.
“Now of course, I hardly believe 72 percent of all the things Don Lemon says,” Wilmore joked.
Rapper Common remarked, “when I hear 72 percent I think, that’s the number of unwed but that doesn’t mean the father is absent.”
New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who recently wrote a column about his own relationship to his son as a black father, addressed some of the root causes of the situation.
“Married black women used to have more children,” he said. “Their rate of childbirth has dropped tremendously, so that leaves only unmarried black women having children.”
The war on drugs is another huge factor, Blow said: “We are sucking massive numbers of African American men out of the community who are marriage age.”
Wilmore and Blow also pointed out that the rate of participation of black fathers in family life is among the highest of any ethnic group.
Watch the clip below, courtesy of Comedy Central:
