I grew up watching Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, old Crosby reruns thinking that this is what the normal black family looks like. When I turned the TV off and looked around my household my father was not there. He was in prison doing time. All of my closest friends also were in single mother households. This was our reality. Now you have grandmother’s at 33 because they had a daughter when they were 17 who in turn had a son at 16. Both the daughter and the grandson’s father are absent. If you are lucky enough to know who your father is then you will find out that you probably have brothers and sisters that you never knew about. There’s a reason why statistically as a black male raised in a single mother household you are more likely to drop out of school and or go to jail. That reason is the lack of a male figure in the raising and upbringing of the child. That trend is not changing anytime soon with many of the males who joined a gang during the 90s and early 2000s and had children their kids have either had kids of their own or are on the cusp of having kids. Imagine a 16 year old boy right now who all he knows about his father is that he was a GD from the projects on the low end of Chicago. His grandmother gets relocated with his mom when the projects are torn down now he grows up in a neighborhood with a gang presence. So he meets a girl from the neighborhood gets her pregnant and now the cycle continues. Our families are functioning dysfunctional fractured families. We had a black family in the white house for the last eight years and seeing them on TV living in the most known house in the world should have inspired our people to do better but sadly I don’t think it has. Regardless of what role models we have on TV or in the white house the inner city family will only change if our people truly wants better for our next generations.