“Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood” was a deep dive into the absence and uninvolvement of African-American fathers in the lives of their children. Like many observers, I inferred that absence and uninvolvement from statistics showing a decline in marriage among African Americans so that the average black baby was now born to an unwed couple.
For years, I've used that book as a defense when white people taunted me that the dysfunction so often afflicting black kids has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with the failure of their fathers.