The Stoop · Hana Baba and Leila Day

Yes, we see you Dads

June 12, 2025·27 min·2 clips

A CDC study found black fathers are more likely to bathe, dress, and help with homework daily than white or Hispanic dads.

1. The Stoop revisits an episode celebrating Black fatherhood ahead of Father's Day, combining statistics that counter the absent-father stereotype with first-person stories from Black dads across the diaspora. 2. Co-host Leela opens by reflecting on her own late father and asking whether she held him to unfair expectations shaped by fictional TV dads, while co-host Hannah listens and reacts. 3. The episode's core thesis is that the absent Black father is primarily a media-constructed stereotype contradicted by CDC data, and that structural forces rather than individual failure explain gaps in Black family structure. 4. A Jamaican-born boxing coach recalls his father teaching all seven sons to box, a memory that shaped his own 20-year coaching career; he also shares being kicked out of the house at 15 and eventually making peace with that as tough love. 5. A father describes watching his own dad come alive at carnival in a way that revealed a joyfulness otherwise kept private, illustrating how context unlocks different sides of Black fathers. 6. Chris Stewart, CEO of the national education nonprofit Bright Beam and host of the Eight Black Hands podcast, describes spending years navigating courts, agencies, and schools as a Black father and receiving repeated messages that he did not matter. 7. Stewart names Maury, Jenny Jones, and Sally Jesse Raphael as daytime shows that ran DNA paternity segments almost exclusively featuring Black families for years, embedding the absent-father narrative in mainstream culture without any equivalent targeting of white or Latino families. 8. The 2013 CDC study found that among fathers living with their children, approximately 70 percent of Black fathers bathed, dressed, or diapered their children daily compared to 60 percent of white fathers and 45 percent of Hispanic fathers. 9. Stewart also notes that Black fathers were more likely than white fathers to take their children to daily activities and to help with homework every day. 10. He cites 2.5 million Black fathers living with their children, arguing that having both parents in the home is the norm for Black children, and that even of the 1.7 million not living with both parents, the majority are still co-parenting between two households. 11. Stewart points to the methodology of absence statistics as flawed — studies count legal address, which for joint custody arrangements is often the mother's home, undercounting fathers who are actively involved. 12. Rob Fields, a Brooklyn father of two adult children aged 21 and 16, describes his own father — born in 1917, 50 years older than Rob — as strong and silent, a product of a generation that believed in spare the rod, spoil the child. 13. Rob decided to parent differently, using a Native American tradition he had heard about: talking and then singing to his child during the last three months of pregnancy, and taking on all caregiving for the first three months of the baby's life. 14. He laughs about a playground moment where a stranger's toddler started pointing at ice cream flavors and the vendor assumed he was the father, and he ended up paying for four extra kids who swarmed the cart. 15. Rob describes having early conversations with his son about being one of two Black kids in a largely white classroom and the reality that teachers would notice and discipline him more harshly than white peers. 16. Sam Adewumi, a Nigerian father in New York, describes his own strict father as a community provider who built clinics in both his parents' hometowns and took in people who needed help, becoming a father figure to many beyond his own household. 17. Sam reflects that his father became a completely different, openly affectionate person once his children were grown and grandchildren arrived — the softening of a generation that expressed love through provision and discipline rather than emotional display. 18. The episode moves between brief audio portraits of individual fathers and in-depth conversation with Chris Stewart, mixing oral history snippets with data-backed analysis in The Stoop's signature narrative-plus-interview format. 19. Black parents, adult children reflecting on their fathers, and anyone interested in how media shapes racial stereotypes will find specific, personal accounts alongside CDC data. 20. Listeners expecting a celebratory feel-good Father's Day episode may be surprised by how much of the content focuses on stereotype deconstruction and structural racism.

As heard by us

A Father's Day episode that trades cliches for a fuller view of Black fatherhood.

Father's Day gives The Stoop a clear emotional frame. It begins with missing dads and the wish for a TV-style father, then broadens into the pressure Black fathers carry and the stereotypes that shape how they are seen.

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Why you'd press play

You want a Father’s Day listen that looks past the TV-dad script.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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