When fathers aren’t present, many young men end up absorbing “guidance” from music, artists, and entertainers — people who often didn’t have solid guidance themselves. That creates a cycle of bad information being passed down as if it were wisdom.

As Dick Gregory once said, information is power — arguably more vital than education itself, because bad information sends people down the wrong path entirely. Without a real community to belong to, young men often search for one anywhere they can find it — sometimes in gangs, sometimes through the pressures of hazing in fraternities, mistaking harmful rites of passage for love and belonging.