In April 2004, music and fashion mogul
Sean "Diddy'' Combs was ordered to pay the mother of his first child, Misa Hylton-Brim, just under $35,000 per month in child support -- the largest amount awarded in New York state history.
Combs and his lawyers had the sum reduced to $21,782 and then again to about $19,000 a month. But even that cut rate made his royal Diddy-ness the poster papa for men who feel child support awards are becoming increasingly unfair to fathers.
"A court doesn't tell me what to do to support my child," a heated Combs said to the NY Daily News after the verdict. "This is not about child support, it's about adult support."
Though most men are nowhere in the financial stratosphere of Combs, child support today is as volatile an issue to brothers in barber shops as it is to
Bobby Brown. Many men feel as if they are being entrapped, stigmatized and even criminalized, when it comes to current child support laws. And many black women want their children supported. But because nearly 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock, there needs to be a happy medium if
the community is to thrive.
Whereas in the past, child support was seen as more a moral issue -- men who make children should always be responsible for them -- it is now more about economics, even if it's not politically correct to say so. After President Bill Clinton's welfare reform bill, the government (and tax payers) began aggressively shifting the burden of support to fathers, where many claim it should be.
Yet, in a recent New York Times article on the perilous state of black men (
'Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn,' March 20, 2006), Georgetown University economist Harry J. Holzer said that after incarceration, "the stricter enforcement of child support" policies is the largest factor in keeping young black men tethered to poverty. By keeping young black men overwhelmed by debt and therefore outside of legal employment, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings."
Christian Wilder, a writer from Philadelphia, PA, agrees. Wilder currently has custody of his 10-year-old son, and pays child support for his two daughters (ages 3 and 7), whom he says he rarely sees. An avid advocate of family court reform, Wilder believes that the ways the current laws are structured, that a man in essence can never have another family because he is already supporting one through child support.
"When you're married, you're committed to a family," says Wilder. "When you have sex with someone you've met in a club, you haven't committed to a thing."
"While a woman has all of those options of keeping the child and raising it, a man can only just follow the whim of the woman," he continues. "And when a woman has a child, the man becomes financially responsible."
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