Save a Seat for Me: Notes on American Fatherhood

From the preeminent scholar on Black masculinity in America, Save a Seat for Me is Mark Anthony Neal’s attempt to bring his scholarship on fatherhood to a broader audience. Save a Seat for Me embraces the nuances of how contemporary frameworks of masculinity informed by unprecedented advances in women and LGBTQ communities have necessitated a reimagining of the societal expectations a father plays in the public and private sectors of their homes. The soul of this book centers on Neal’s confrontation of the various political, cultural, historical narratives and messages that inform the role of Black fatherhood, and fatherhood at large, which has put him at odds with the way he fathers his own children. Raised by a working class father, during a time when American society conceived of the role of father as protector, provider, and disciplinarian, Neal struggles with these expectations as his education (a doctorate's degree), profession (tenured professor at one of the best colleges in the country), and financial position (making more money than his father ever did) are drastically different than that of his father. Linking his father to his own fathering of his two daughters, Neal grounds his intellectual arguments about Black fatherhood in experience and emotion makes for a vulnerable read, as well as a transformative one. In our culture, the public performance of fatherhood keeps us from wondering what the practice of being a father looks like in private. Neal is opening a long overdue door to the interiority that Black men particularly—and men living in a patriarchal society generally—have only learned existed in the last twenty years.