My father and the system that replaced him

My father didn’t yell. He didn’t come in hot. He didn’t throw things. He was quiet. And that calm, yet tense demeanor paired with a look of disapproval was the closest I ever felt to awaiting a prison sentence. He looked at me the way a man looks at something he built and is not going to let fall apart. Then he handled his business.

His belt hurt for about 60 seconds.

The lesson lasted 30 years.

He wasn’t teaching me pain. He was teaching me what happens in the absence of discipline. It was immediately clear the world outside our doors would not stop when I failed, and the only thing standing between me and that world was the man I was becoming.

When was the last time a welfare check taught a black boy any of that?

I did not have the warmest relationship with my father, but I always knew to respect him. The first thing about him was that he worked. Born at the latter cusp of baby boomers, he worked the way men of his generation worked: without complaint, without an audience, without waiting for conditions to improve. He always expected the same from me.

Not someday. Not when I was ready. Now, and do not make him say it twice.

His rules weren’t negotiable, and his expectations didn’t bend to my feelings or exhaustion. He wasn’t restricting my life, he was constructing it. Every demand was a refusal to accept less than what he knew I could do.

Before President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called Great Society, black family structure was remarkably resilient, not in spite of Jim Crow and segregation, but in direct defiance of it. Two-parent households were standard. Marriage rates were comparable to or exceeded those of white Americans. Fathers were present.

Then came the public policy architecture of the mid-1960s, allegedly well-intentioned, but catastrophically designed. Welfare rules reduced benefits when a man was in the home. Fathers became economically redundant. The offer to mothers was clear: The government will do what he does, and the paychecks won’t leave as long as he does.

Fathers became optional and arguably inconvenient.

Over time, father-led households became rare, and their absence became all too normal. Boys raised without fathers face dramatically higher rates of incarceration, dropout, and poverty. Why? Because of the lack of discipline and guidance. The system sold as compassion produced exactly the chaos it claimed to be solving. The black father’s belt built men who could withstand the world. The replacement built dependence and then called the dependence a win for “society.”

Now, as I approach the age of 30, living a life I always prayed for, it pains me to see so many people who look like me take paths originating from a fatherless home. We need criminal justice reform that keeps nonviolent fathers in the homes with the families who need them. Tax and benefit structures should stop penalizing marriage. All students, especially black students, need education freedom, and the government needs to return power in education to families. And our culture must stop pathologizing paternal authority and instead start celebrating it. Masculinity isn’t toxic, the absence of it is, and we’ve all seen statistics to prove it.

The founders designed this republic for a self-governing people, and every philosopher who shaped them understood that self-governance begins at home, under a father who holds you to a standard before the world does.

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My father’s presence in our house, his refusal to lower the standard, and his insistence I was always capable of more was far greater than any government program. He left no room for excuses.

The belt hanging on my father’s door was not the point. He was the point.

Xaviaer DuRousseau is a PragerU personality and host of Respectfully, Xaviaer.