On the wall hung a picture of the Last Supper.
Adrian Roberts, 61, remembers it over the couch in his grandmother’s drawing room in Jamaica, back in the 1970s. There were also two rocking chairs, mahogany with woven straw seats. But he usually sat on the floor when Mr. Nation taught him how to play chess.
“The piece I was really attracted to was that knight,” Roberts says. “It moves unlike any other piece. It’s the only one that technically jumps over. I don’t know if that relates to me feeling unique. I was separated from my parents and my brother. Being alone, maybe that’s why I identified with the knight.”
Mr. Nation was new in town, a reserved teacher who needed a place to stay. Roberts’s grandmother – being the well-connected and generous soul she was – knew the school principal and agreed to host him.
“I wasn’t in his class at school, but we used to go to school together and he looked out for me,” Roberts says. “When he came to live with us, it was another presence, a male figure, which was great.”
What counts as a father or father figure is proven by repetition: the men who show up, stay in the picture long enough to leave an impression, and remain committed for life.
“In a community, we tend to use the same middle class white lens to understand all networks,” says Natasha J. Cabrera, professor of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. “But in the network of kinship, all those men play a different role. It doesn’t have to be biological. You just need someone who’s madly in love with you.”
The Gambit
If social fathers help fill the gap, where are the biological fathers? It’s a question researchers like Cabrera have been asking for decades.
Her entry point was the mid-’90s, after the Clinton Administration directed federal agencies to pay more attention to fathers. An interagency statistical forum produced Nurturing Fatherhood, a 1998 report identifying data gaps around paternal involvement. But if these men were absent, as the reports claimed, where did they all go? In looking for the answer, Cabrera says she kept getting pushback.
Her first study took three years. The men she interviewed were usually working two or three jobs, but still made time to talk to her between shifts. Many spoke about their children in intimate detail. They knew their personalities, their quirks, specific things from the birth.
So why does mainstream media paint such a different portrait? Cabrera blames economic structures in the U.S., which she says devalue men with low or unstable incomes, especially in marriage and family formation.
“The narrative is: If you’re poor, it’s because you’re dumb, stupid, deserve it,” she says. “It’s a cauldron of racism and the anti-poverty belief that if you’re poor, you’re weak. We have neglected to validate men for emotional connection. Men can love children, even if they’re poor.”
How It Feels to Be Cut Off
Beyond economics, a man’s love for his child isn’t always given space in systems meant to support families, according to Alvin Thomas, associate professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In a 2021 study on the experiences of Black fathers and mothers in Milwaukee, Thomas and colleagues found that when fathers showed up to prenatal appointments, they were sidelined, the ultrasound angled toward mom. Doctors rarely invited them into the conversation.
“I’m seen just as furniture in the room,” one father told Thomas.
Mothers said they wished their partners were more involved. But Thomas says involvement isn’t the issue. How institutions engage fathers is what needs to change.
“Fathers have been telling us for decades that they don’t see themselves in these spaces,” he says. “They don’t feel welcome. We discounted that. All the pictures on walls are flowers, women in dresses, children – nothing to counterbalance the image of traditional masculinity. Nothing to do with outdoors or fishing or something more active. I think our spaces don’t speak men’s language.”
Thomas, who started as a primary school teacher in St. Lucia before moving to the U.S., built his research and practice to create that space. Like Cabrera, he saw men who truly wanted to be part of their children’s lives. A 2013 CDC study found that 70 percent of Black resident fathers – higher than any other group – reported bathing, dressing or diapering their young children daily.
“The narrative continues because it’s salacious, it’s racist, fueled by social systems that benefit from certain portrayals,” he says. “If a white father’s not involved, he’s just not involved, but if a Black father’s not involved, it’s ‘Of course he left – that’s what Black fathers do, and he is representative of all Black fathers.’”
Measurement makes it worse. For decades, national measures of fatherhood relied on child support, custody and household-status records, depicting fathers in legal and residential terms rather than relational ones. And in some assistance programs, a father’s regular presence in the home can affect a family’s eligibility.
“They’re saying, ‘We’re going to give you this money as long as dad doesn’t spend too much time here,’” Thomas says. “Some moms and dads are saying they would prefer not to engage that system, so they’re continuing to co-parent. But the system does not measure that.”
Blind Spots
Men overlooked by the system was the subject of a multimedia art exhibition by Kareem Daniels called Invisible Man.
“The squeaky wheel gets oil,” Daniels says. “Everybody talks about the fathers that aren’t there. Nobody likes to talk about the men that are.”
It was hard to get these men to open up at first. They didn’t think they were “doing anything special,” Daniels says. Still, the idea of Black fathers not being around lurks in the public consciousness, showing up in unexpected places.
Daniels was doing stand-up comedy one night when a younger Black comic told a joke about absent Black fathers. After the show, Daniels pulled him aside.
“I asked him, ‘Why did you tell that joke?’ He said, ‘It was easy, it was funny.’ And I asked him where his dad was, and he said, ‘Oh, he’s at home. Now that I think about it, all my friends have dads at home too.’”
Daniels has seen how men show up at games, work multiple jobs and stay present and active in their children’s lives. He mentions a cousin/brother named Gary, whose three children have a rare disease. Every year, the family makes the trip to a hospital in Maryland. Gary and his wife take turns through every admission and every treatment.
“Nobody ever talks about that guy,” he says. “You see them, but you don’t count them.”
This calling is personal for Daniels. He spent his childhood moving from house to house. His biological mother left when he was two days old. His grandmother and uncle struggled with alcoholism. It was a network of kinship that raised him, men he acknowledges by name.
Buddy Dawson used to pick him up from school in North Carolina. Andrew Jones taught him responsibility, working in the tobacco fields. Roscoe Howard, who died Christmas Day in 2025, taught him how to release the corrosive things inside.
“He told me it was okay to be angry, just don’t be bitter,” Daniels says, “because bitterness eats away at you.”
Quotes like these helped Daniels forgive. He was inspired to write his father’s story from his father’s perspective, and in the process learned about a stillborn daughter he believes broke his grandmother.
Letting go has allowed Daniels to continue giving back, helping his younger brother and sister, coaching flag football and using audio and video tools to uplift the voices of men society chooses not to see.
But forgiveness doesn’t mean access, he says, and the work never stops.
“The one person I am still working on forgiving is myself for not being able to protect my younger self,” he says. “That is an ongoing project.”
Playing the Long Game
On Saturdays, he would take Aston to Washington Square Park to play, then around the corner to Chess Forum, an iconic chess store in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It was there in October 2015, when Aston was seven, that the student became the teacher.
“I saw my opportunity, but it was his move,” Roberts recalls. “He said: ‘Checkmate.’ I looked down, I looked at him, then he said in his little voice: ‘Back-rank checkmate.’”
Roberts’s king was trapped on its own row with nowhere to escape. His son beat him for the first time. Aston is now a national chess master. Together, they started Checkmate to a Better Future, teaching students and young men who are incarcerated how to play the game.
“To me, chess is a gift,” Roberts says. “When you share it, it creates a bond. You share the intellectual love of this thing, and it comes with these other benefits, such as patience, reward and consequences. You’re going to make mistakes, but it’s about how you recover.”
Creating a space for men to recover and relate is what led Lamarre Rouse to start Men Cry 2 in 2024, a nonprofit in Berkeley, where around 10-20 men gather every other Thursday to share what they’ve been carrying.
“The concept came from all of us being together,” Rouse says, “losing all of our parents and friends, really stressing out and going through depression and anxiety and having nobody to talk to.”
Most of them are fathers, and fatherhood comes up a lot in the group. Currently, the men do more physical types of therapy, such as art, gardening, kickboxing and fishing. Rouse says the ultimate goal is for the group to be a resource for job support, transitional housing, internet access, and connecting with actual counselors and therapists.
“Everyone helps each other. No one crosses each other,” Rouse says. “It’s a brotherhood beyond words.”
One Thursday night in December, they arrive one by one through the doors of a church. The men sit in a circle in the dining hall, reminiscing about days gone by and people now gone. Then one of the brothers opens the meeting with a question: “Who do they think you are?”
On the wall hangs a picture of the Last Supper.
***
Brotherly Love is a six-part digital series about the emotional and social lives of Black men through the science of love.
Funding for this series was provided by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, Acton Family Giving, and Unlikely Collaborators.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
