The village failed them first

By now you have seen it. Chingy, yes, that Chingy, Right Thurr Chingy, sat down for an interview and casually revealed that one of his sons is Isaiah Russell-Bailey, the Disney star that many of our children and we have watched and loved for years. The internet, predictably, has lost its collective mind.

Within hours, the verdict was in. Deadbeat. Absent. Ashamed. The comment sections became courtrooms, and nobody cared about nuance.

Here is the thing I cannot stop thinking about. That man was stuck. If he had not named his son during that interview, the same internet would have accused him of hiding him, denying him, being ashamed of his own child. He named him, and they crucified him for that too. He was damned if he did and damned if he did not. The minute he was damned either way, I stopped being interested in the Chingy conversation and started being deeply interested in ours.

That is the conversation I want to have with this community right now.

We are so fast (devastatingly fast) to assess, diagnose, and publicly dissect family dynamics we have never once lived inside. We do not know what happened in that household. We do not know what was tried, refused, negotiated, or broken beyond repair. What we have is a fifteen-second clip, centuries of legitimate pain around Black fatherhood, and we are mixing the two together and calling it accountability. It is not. It is spectacle.

Isaiah’s mother raised an extraordinary young man. That deserves to be said loudly and without qualification. Every single mother reading this who has done the same, quietly, without applause, I see you. I am one of you, which is why I need to tell you something personal.

A couple of weeks ago, my firstborn lost his father. They had a complicated relationship. Almost nonexistent, honestly. His father was not present in his life, and here is what makes it heavier: we all lived in the same small town. Everybody knew. His family knew. My family knew. Mutual friends, non-mutual friends, everybody knew everybody. Nobody intervened. Nobody pulled that man aside or built a bridge between them. Now my son is grieving a relationship he never fully got to have, while the very people who watched it happen from the sidelines are offering condolences about what a wonderful man his father was.

Where was that village then?

I do not excuse absentee parenthood. I never will, but I refuse to let our community off the hook either, the community that watches these situations unfold in real time and does nothing until there is a funeral or a viral moment to react to.

I recently saw a post in a Black Toronto community group. A single father could not get an appointment to have his kids’ hair done before back to school. He asked for help. The response was overwhelming, people offering their time, their skill, their Saturday morning. Offering for free. That is what the village looks like. That is the exact energy I am asking us to carry earlier. Before the deadline. Before the crisis. Before the loss.

We know why the Black family was systematically targeted and dismantled. Colonialism is not a footnote; it is the whole story. We cannot live there permanently. We must rebuild with intention, with grace, with our eyes open to the struggling parent in front of us before it becomes a tragedy we eulogize.

Reserve judgment. Extend the help. Show up before the memorial. Whitney Houston told us children are our future. It is time we started acting like we believe that.

The village is not a saying. It is a responsibility, and we are long overdue.