The values that I was taught by my parents, that life is about service–and that service is the rent you pay for living, not something you do in your spare time. It was also the values of being for something beyond yourself. They understood that parenting didn’t stop at their own front door. When I grew up there was an extended family commitment to all the children in our community. In my segregated town, we couldn’t sit in a public drugstore and have a Coca-Cola. So my daddy built a canteen behind our church so the black kids would have a place to go. It was living Christianity.
They taught us by precept and example. And they made children feel very much a part of their lives. I used to think my daddy stayed up all night just to make sure we wouldn’t have an idle moment. And we never lost hope despite the segregated world of this rural town because we had adults who gave us a sense of a future, who made it clear to us that what was valuable was inside our heads and hearts-and while the world had a lot of problems, and black folk had an extra lot of problems, we were taught that we could struggle and change them. So I resent deeply people who talk about blacks not engaging in self-help. Self-help was the only help we knew because we couldn’t rely on anybody to help us except ourselves. Family values and family rituals are an old tradition that we have to rediscover in the black community, and we have to rediscover in America.
I think we’ve had a breakdown in values in all of our society, and it’s not just in the inner city. Family values and family disintegration (are] reflected by all the millions of divorces, by the 2 million mothers of childbearing age who use cocaine, and they’re not mostly black and they’re not in inner cities.
Well, the degree to which Mr. Quayle has provoked a debate about the values in this society, which I think have gone awry, then it’s healthy. To the degree that it gets stuck in rhetoric and around fictional characters, it is not helpful.
I’m deeply concerned about the amount of violence that I see coming out of movies and television. We laud violence as the way to resolve disputes, and then we excoriate our children for being violent. I don’t believe in censorship, but I do believe that Hollywood needs to be more consciously thoughtful about the impact of the messages it is sending.
I want to stop the labels. I’m liberal on some things. I am a deeply conservative parent. The conservatives don’t have a corner on values, on morality. I have a very hard time with rhetoric about family values, and then not being for good prenatal care, not being for universal health insurance, not being for full funding for Head Start. There’s a heck of a lot of hypocrisy to mouth family values when you don’t support things families need to keep themselves together.
It was when my oldest son was about to celebrate his 21st birthday. I was trying to think about what I could give my children that would be meaningful as they crossed the threshold of adulthood. I realized that there’s this psychic tape that goes off in my head in every situation. I instinctively say, now what would Daddy do here, what would Mama say? I realized what clear internal anchors our parents had left us. I hoped that I had done that, but just in case, I decided to write what I valued most because [my children] are growing up in a more complicated time.
