Researcher Spotlights are Q&As that shine a light on School of Human Ecology faculty members’ unique scholarship and research interests.
David J. Pate Jr. is an associate professor of Consumer Science and Human Development & Family Studies, as well as the Dean’s Fathers and Fathering Faculty Fellow. His research focuses on race, class and gender, and especially on Black men who live in extreme poverty. He studies how social welfare policy affects the ability of these men to take care of themselves and their families. Specifically, he has examined how child support policy affects men and their economic security.
In this profile, Pate stresses the need to stop looking for simple answers to complex social problems. He explains that his scholarship is dedicated to studying behavior in the context of policies that often harm marginalized people.
How did you become interested in your area of study?
I was a practicing social worker for 16 years. Prior to graduating with my master’s degree from the University of Chicago, I completed an internship working with young Black boys. It was through that experience that I decided I wanted to dedicate my work life to uplifting Black males and working against stereotypes like them being “predatory” or “dangerous.” These young Black men I was working with were just innocent kids who were already targeted in ways I thought were damaging to their well-being.
As a social worker trained in Chicago, I felt that the majority of the literature I read focused on stereotypes of Black people, and I decided I was not going to be part of that discussion — I was going to be someone who would uplift and promote Black families. During my training, my primary focus was on the behavior of the person, not the policies that may affect their life. It was in my doctoral program that I decided to focus on policy as an area of specialization because I had learned while being a practicing social worker that federal, state and local policy were a major challenge for poor families.
What’s your motivation for doing this type of work, and how does it impact human well-being?
The motivation for me is that many Black men don’t ever have an opportunity to talk to someone about their story. Because I do qualitative work and I like to contextualize how policies affect their lives, the men I talk with always say things like, “Thank you, no one’s ever listened to me, no one’s ever talked to me about what my circumstances are or how a policy actually affects me.” And I’m always very excited to speak with them.
In a study I’m working on right now, I’m talking to men coming out of prison after long stints of time — sometimes 25, 30, 40 years. It’s been exhausting to hear some of these stories because they’re quite challenging to hear, but it has also been very rewarding. We have conversations about how particular reentry or reintegration practices have worked for them. It’s been interesting to learn from them, and I get excited about the possibility of there being some major policy change from the information I share.
What’s something you wish was more widely known by the average person?
I wish more people were critical thinkers and not looking for simple answers to very complex problems. There are no simple answers, particularly for people who were brought over to a country and enslaved and were subjected to unequal laws and unable to access equal opportunities because of fear.
When you look at poverty, homelessness, domestic violence — when you look at any of these societal ills, there’s no one single reason why they occur. There’s a lot of history behind them and they’re complicated. Also, I would hypothesize and believe that when a significant number of members of a community are not doing well, we all suffer.
As a poverty and race scholar, I think I’m helping bring light to those issues. I’ve had some success doing that and being involved in changing policy, but I’ve also had some challenges, because often people don’t see the individuals I study as being valuable or contributing citizens.
What has surprised you about working in your field?
I’m surprised people don’t really know how the government, purposely or not, hurts poor people. I’m surprised people don’t know that with child support, for example, the father or non-custodial parent is responsible for paying that money back to the government, not to the family; that if formerly incarcerated people are released to live in a halfway house, they can’t access certain benefits because a halfway house is considered an extension of prison, so your freedom is compromised; that people are not poor because they want to be, but because current and historical policies and practices mean they don’t have social networks that higher-income people benefit from; that race is a social construction and we decided a long time ago that people designated as Black weren’t equal to their peers who were designated as white; that people who have less financial means don’t always have the same ability to maintain what’s seen as the “correct” way to live — and what is “correct?” Again, many people don’t study policy, they only look at behavior, and that’s problematic for me. That’s why I study behavior in the context of policy.
Are there any common misconceptions about your work?
There are a lot of common misconceptions or stereotypes about Black families, such as that Black men are not involved with their children — of course, there are some men who are not involved with their children across all races, but a federal study came out in 2012 that said Black men are more involved with their children than any other father across any race. There’s a stereotype that Black women who are welfare recipients are having children to get more welfare dollars, while research has shown that’s not a motivating factor because it’s not very much money. There’s a misconception that people who are poor don’t know how to budget, when in fact poor people have to be some of the best budgeters because they have so little access to funds. I think many people are unfortunately ignorant of what it means to be poor, and they need to stop taking one or two examples as being true for an entire population.
The U.S. is a country built on individualism and meritocracy — we believe that if you have an issue you should be able to take care of it, it’s not anyone else’s responsibility. And it is not a simple answer.
What do you see as the most critical question currently facing your field?
“Can we recognize the agency of Black men as members of a family and as people who make contributions to that family?” I think people often don’t because we think of marriage as the golden key, that everyone should get married. In European countries, people sometimes don’t get married, they have children out of wedlock, and they have access to policies that help them take care of their children, they raise them and they’re fine. But in the U.S. we have made marriage the answer to all the ills of society and it just isn’t, particularly with divorce rates on the rise. Marriage works for some, but it doesn’t work for everybody.
Who are some individuals who have influenced your work? How do you think about “paying it forward” as you gain experience in your field?
Two of my favorite authors are W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. I have almost every book written by both of them and I use them as a guide for my work. With The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois really did the first comprehensive study on how race, gender, place and class affect well-being. I enjoy James Baldwin for his philosophical brilliance on race, sexuality, gender and class. Another book that’s been influential for me is Tally’s Corner by Elliot Liebow. I would like to do a follow-up to that book with my own data looking at how men play various roles in their families, but also how policy has affected their ability to be engaged in their families in productive ways. I also love all of August Wilson’s plays, which focus on Black men through various points in time and the challenges they have to overcome.
The work done by Elijah Anderson, a scholar at Yale University, has also been very helpful to me as an ethnographer. Jane Collins, who was on my doctoral committee, trained me and was really empathetic and understanding about issues of race, class and gender. She primarily studies women, but she influenced how I do my work with men.
I think mentorship is important. I’m not saying it should be a requirement of everybody, but I think it’s a requirement of me as a first-generation college graduate, and because there are so few Black male scholars, I want my mentees to think about what it means to be a scholar of color. I’m currently mentoring a McNair Scholar — I’ve mentored McNair Scholars who are first-generation college students in the past, and several of them have gotten PhDs. One just graduated two weeks ago and is now working at Harvard. It’s time consuming, but I do see mentorship as a major responsibility.
What else should the Human Ecology community know about you?
I’m a member of one of the original Black fraternities, Kappa Alpha Psi, part of the Divine Nine — the purpose of it was to get Black people through college and have a group that would protect you in your transition to adulthood and maintain a brotherhood. That’s been very important to me. I also love to bake. I do it as a therapeutic thing, but also because I like sweets.
And I really, really want my children to live in a better world — that’s why I do the work I do. If I have grandchildren, I want them to have a better world, but I also want them to be recognized for what they bring to the world. That’s why I interrogate current policies that particularly impact the lives of people of color. We’re in a very unique space in our country right now where there’s a little too much hate and anger and not enough love.