Disclaimer: This article is by no means intended to promote or encourage single Black women as the “new Mom & Dad,” it is meant to delve into single parenting amongst African-American women and all women of color when it comes to the truth ABOUT the truth.
Single Black Mom: Is it really as bad as some try to portray it?
This is not meant to disparage the filmed documentary – “The 72-Percent,” because I am not going to review it. I don’t need to. I lived it.
The trailer and the written logline and synopsis says all it needs to and I’ve already heard the same thing over and over again for more than 30-nearly 40 years- of my life. At first glance, it doesn’t appear to present any “new” matters that have not been rehashed and dredged endlessly in the Black community since before I was born.
If it is the typical drone about “Black women on welfare raising the worst of society’s Black children” I will repeat what I’ve said before: (a) Most of the people on welfare are white and we are helping to pay for it-always have–there was a time when we could not get welfare BECAUSE we were Black. (b) Until reparations are paid to Black America, welfare is a moot point because all “entitlement funding” is less than 10-percent of the government’s budgets across the board. It doesn’t make a trifling dent in the more than $70 trillion that African-Americans are currently owed for nearly 400 years of forced labor and another 180 years of racial disparities in jobs and income and taxability since slavery ended. Had those reparations been paid as they should have been by now, we would have no need of welfare in the Black community. Period. (c) Many Black-centric megachurches get enough money on a weekly basis to have ended all of this economic disparity a long time ago.
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THE SEVENTY-TWO PERCENT DOCUMENTARY
First and foremost, I was (and still am, though my sons are full-grown adults) a single mother; so I have more than an outsider’s “baby mama histrionic drama” glance into the facts. I’m not all about the mainstream media’s histrionics that come out of the conservative/corporate mindset about single Black motherhood. I was/am a single mother who was, at one time–a couple of times really–married. I finally figured out that I could truly “do bad all by myself.”
While it is almost never a good (great?) idea to raise children alone, as it does provide many systemic problems that end up affecting children for the rest of their lives, I was raised in a household where my father was absent — and needed to be. I later found out, as an adult, why my mother left my dad; and frankly, God rest her soul, I’m glad she did.
That said, I repeat: A child should be raised by both parents, whenever and wherever possible.
However, I think I (and many of my Black single mother constituents) are about fed up with watching Black women being targeted and singled out for media abuse, as if single mothers of other races don’t have the same -nearly the ‘exact’ same- issues. In that sense alone, our “Black Leaders” have failed us all.
Though there are some noticeable exceptional hardships that are peculiar to being ‘Black and Trapped’ in America, we do live in a “throwaway” disposable society that invents homeless shelters and nursing homes because it likes to hide certain children and senior citizens and pretend like they don’t exist, or are unimportant if they do end up having to acknowledge their existence.
True enough, it doesn’t have the same impact on other races and ethnicities, mainly because they aren’t as easy to toss their “wayward baby mama’s” into the sociological [mental] trash, as many Black people seem to do far too often.
THE LONG STORY SHORTENED
1) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA demeaningly targets Black women.
2) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA does not take into account the Black women who are widows, divorcees, and victims of abuse/molestation/rape by the fathers of their children; nor the many single Black women who “take in” (often adopt or foster-care) the children of other Black parents who find themselves “tossed out” (abandoned) by both parents.
3) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA uses a stigmatized misnomer that marginalizes the children whose mothers are set apart in society through the use of a term meant to hurt them, by the very use of the words “baby mama.” There is no such thing, they are mothers just like anyone else’s mother. Period.
4) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA overlooks the single mothers who are BETTER parents than many married women.
5) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA circumstantially disenfranchises more than 8o-percent of those mothers whose children turn out fine, and with no more substantive faults or problems than anyone else’s children. The “gap” can never be resolved, but they move on anyway. [Note: Move on is not “get over it.”]
6) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA incorporates a “white conservative Greco-Roman ideology and evangelical judgmental mindset” of the 1980s RONALD REAGAN ERA that is hellbent on keeping up the lies about “Welfare Queens” that have been proven wrong on all counts.
7) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA assumes, wrongly, that all of these mothers came from “broken” homes themselves. Not.
8) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA assumes that all of these single Black mothers are doing bad jobs of parenting, which is untrue. It uses the “bad examples” to beat down all, and it is not a complete picture of the parenting styles of single Black women with children.
9) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA negates the Black women who choose single parenting as a lifestyle. I had a cousin who did so. Her biological “clock” was ticking, so since she couldn’t find a man she wanted to spend her life with, she “did the dang thang” on her own. Of course, she was working and had boatloads of money to spare, until AFTER the baby was born; but for a lot of single Black women, it is a lifestyle choice that situates them amongst the “baby mama’s.”
10) THE 72-PERCENT “BABY MAMA” DRAMA implies that all or nearly all single Black mothers are on welfare, which is not true. It also assumes that Black men must be KEPT OUT OF THE HOME in order for them to get assistance, but I beg to differ. Some of these Black men are so low-income and under-employed and poor themselves that THEY qualify for welfare assistance, even if they don’t apply for it; they should.
Conclusion:
The “baby mama phenomena” is by no means a phenomena. Life simply does not fit into everyone’s romantic ideas of what a family “should” look like in order for it to be considered emotionally and economically stable. It assumes that ALL fathers are good fathers when that is not always the case.
-The mother of our Lord & Savior, the Messiah, the Christ Himself, was 14-years old and impregnated before marriage.
Apparently, the God of the Hebrew people wasn’t having a problem with what the Roman church decided we should all have a problem. Truth: If it wasn’t for that momentarily single Black Mother, all us would be doomed to “hell.” BTW, if it wasn’t for single Black mothers who were good mothers, a LOT of us wouldn’t be here now. Myself included.
-Several presidents of the United States, as well as thousandths of other famous persons who did wonderfully well in life were raised by single mothers. They did well in life, in spite of the psychological trauma and emotional ‘gap’ that must have taunted them daily.
-For those who bother to read the Bible, Hagar, the mother of father Abraham’s oldest son, Ishmael, was disenfranchised and put out of her own home, from amongst her own kin, because of a mistake Sarah, Abraham’s wife, made. It wasn’t what SHE did, it was what THEY did to her. Ishmael’s children, subsequently, were fine; the Lord promised they would be and He lived up to that promise. Many other Biblical instances of Black women single-parenting have been a fact of life since nearly the beginning of time.
The single Black mother didn’t kill the Black community, the stigmatizing and emotional demeaning of the single mothers did. Not encouraging it is one thing, using those who do wrong to beat up on those who do right is another thing all together.
Being married, for women who have children or choose not to have children, is no guarantee of eternal lifelong bliss. Many women of all races absolutely DO need to make better choices with choosing their husbands and the fathers of their children, but men (nor women) come pre-packaged with magic crystal balls of what they will be like in the future.
As negative and extreme as this sounds, there are many Black women who have concluded that they are not the “highly desired ones” of this Greco-Roman whitenized Hollywood-fetish society.
They know that “Mr. Look-So-Good with the Big Degree and Phat-Paycheck” is not looking to marry up with them and make honest women of them, whatever that means. The pickings are slim in “the ‘hood,” so sometimes the best decision is made with regard to available choices. The maternal ‘survival instinct’ kicks in and overrides all else, and the Good Lord made it that way.
Conclusively, natural maternal instincts will be denied to many of these Black women (and a lot of white women, too) if they are waiting on a Fantasyland “romantic caricaturized Mr. Right Cinderella Prince Charming-like guy with a glass slipper that fits their feet” to show up and give them the life of nearly every little girl’s dreams.
REFERENCES
The Demonization of Single Black Working Moms
Open Library: Prince Charming Isn’t Coming: Women Get Smart with Money, Barbara Stanny
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