According to a recent article by the Associated Press, 72 percent of Black babies are born to un-married women. Such numbers, which have circulated for some time, have spurred responses such as calls for “Black Marriage Day” and “Marry Your Baby-Daddy Day” as part of what might be deemed the “No Wedding, No Womb” movement.
Such responses though, like the statistics that inspired them, fail to capture the full portrait of how families function in Black communities. Many studies have suggested that there is a direct correlation between single-mother hood and the likelihood that children born out-of-wedlock are more apt to struggle in school, be incarcerated at some point in their lives, become addicted to drugs and then reproduce that same cycle with their own out-of-wedlock children.
Such studies though, often neglect other powerful influences, such as the quality of schooling, biased criminal justice systems, institutional racism and poverty—conditions that lead to the same kind of outcomes.
Within this context, out-of-wedlock births takes on the feel of what University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen calls a “moral panic,” particularly among the Black Middle Class, which often feels that the lack of moral values among the Black poor, threatens to undermine the social and political gains of the post-Civil Rights era.
But the statistics only tell part of the story in that they don’t fully explore the nature of the relationship between single mothers, the fathers of their children and the children themselves.
"Now is not the time to veer away from those who supported you today—Blacks, young people, Latinos and Asian Americans.”
A November 3rd Message to the President by Cathy J. Cohen
“With the Republicans in control of the House and increased numbers in the Senate, the question now is what do the President and Democratic Party need to do to correct their course before the 2012 election?
First, they have to listen to the economic fear that voters expressed in exit polls and set their focus on the creation of jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Second, they have to deal with the fact that they lost white women and independents to the Republicans and find a way to explain to those constituencies why the adoption of health care reform, wall street reform, credit card reform, and other parts of the President’s agenda have impacted their lives in a positive way.
Third, we have to hope that the President does not pander to the center, making silly statements like Representative Boehner did in speaking of some homogenous “people’s agenda.” There is no people’s agenda, instead there are conflicting interests and preferences among the American populace. It would be easy for this administration to point to the losses among progressives such as the defeat of Russ Feingold as a lesson about the negative consequences of moving too far left from the center. President Obama and the Democratic Party must remember that they have to work to secure those parts of their base that supported them today, especially Blacks, young people, Latinos and Asian Americans.
This will mean taking on issues such as immigration reform and support for urban cities, while remembering that if individuals are provided a living-wage job they are more likely to support a progressive agenda.
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Cathy Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, co-principal Investigator on the Mobilization, Change and Political & Civic Engagement survey, and author of Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of the American Politics
Host Mark Anthony Neal discusses the mid-term elections and NPR's firing of Juan Williams with journalist Farai Chideya, founder and managing editor of Pop & Politics and former host of NPR's News & Notes.
Has Obama Earned the Youth Vote? by Bakari Kitwana
As the 2010 midterm election season winds down, electoral politics experts agree that 18-29 year-old voters have a pivotal role to play on November 2nd. Anxiety among Democrats and Republicans concerning the way the political winds will blow the youth vote is crystallizing around the idea that over the last two years President Barack Obama did not fulfill his campaign commitments to the 14 million plus young voters so crucial to his 2008 victory.
Last week, the Houston, Texas local Fox affiliate framed the question like this: "Youth Vote: Obama Boost or Backlash?" or as reporter Greg Googan put it, "Twenty-four recession-racked months later, the question now looms: Is it still 'change' young Americans can believe in?"
When it comes to young voters, has the Obama Administration gone far enough?
University of Chicago Political Science Professor Cathy Cohen suggests in her new book Democracy Remixed, which should be required reading for any politician serious about the future of our democracy, that this sentiment taps into the reality staring young voters in the face everyday: failing schools, a cost of living out of sync with limited job options, an unforgiving criminal justice system, and an escalating war in Afghanistan with 20 and 30-somethings disproportionately on the frontlines, to name a few.
Several weeks before the 2008 presidential election, a rapsessions.org survey asked 18-29 year-old young voters: "What are the most important issues that you want the next president to address?" Among the top three were ending the war in Iraq and creating living wage jobs. Making college education affordable and universal healthcare also topped the list. The survey had a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points, included young Americans equal parts white, black and Latino, male and female and cut across diverse income brackets and regions of the country.
Although Obama's handling of the race question, unemployment and the partisan divide have come to dominate the mid-term elections climate, the real challenge for young voters is to consider the distance between Obama's campaign promises and what he actually delivered since young voters sent him to Washington with a mandate for change.
The economic stimulus bill was signed by Obama into law last fall (and some economists argue it has helped keep the US economy out of a depression). After a year-long protracted struggle, healthcare reform passed in the spring. And as this past summer came to a close, Obama ended the war in Iraq with an August 30 deadline for withdrawal of combat troops. Additionally, during the Obama years, we've seen historic student loan and credit card reform, as well as the extension of unemployment insurance.
Even if young voters need him to go further, and even as the public perception of Obama as a do-nothing president persists, these are pretty solid results not far from young voter's top concerns going into the 2008 Election--not to mention Obama's appointment of two Supreme Court justices (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) who will inevitably counterbalance the previous conservative and male bent of the court.
Rather than getting drawn into misinformation-filled partisan bickering, such an assessment is going to take an honest eye on what voters asked for in 2008.
Without spin or hyperbole, scores of these voters began to do just that when they gathered in Atlanta a little more than a week ago for Ignite 2010: From the Blogs to the Blocks, a non-partisan half-day convention hosted by the League of Young Voters Education Fund. The outcome of the gathering may offer a more substantive glimpse of things to come.
There, scores of influential young activists, entertainers, and organizers came together from across the country to talk about ways of keeping their constituents engaged next month and beyond. These are the far too often nameless, faceless young leaders behind the incredible youth voter increases in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
Nearly the exact opposite of what mainstream media has been projecting about a youth vote in crisis, the dominant atmosphere at Ignite 2010 was of young voters still heavily committed to the change they voted for two years ago. Without a doubt, in most of the discussions, it was clear that young voters needed much more from Washington. But on the oft-repeated refrain of whether or not Obama has done enough, the sentiment seemed mixed.
At the end of the day, most can discern that the questions of overall youth satisfaction with their plight and Obama's productivity aren't exactly the same thing.
If this distinction, along with their track record since 2004, is any indication, then the take-away message is that young voters are not sitting out the mid-terms. Instead, they seem more interested in mastering the art of pushing the president and lawmakers even closer to their expectations. Ironically, they may be taking their cues from a small minority of voters who have shown resolve at pushing a liberal president and Democratic majority Congress further to the right.
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Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law based think tank The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2010).
Forget Hallmark: Why Mother's Day is a Queer Black Left Feminist Thing
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Anti-Social Family by Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh (1982)
Fear of a Queer Planet ed. Micheal Warner (1999)
Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique by Roderick Ferguson (2004)
"Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality" by Roderick Ferguson (2005)
"Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism" by Jose E. Munoz (2007)
"A 'New Freedom Movement of Negro Women': Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights during the Early Cold War" by Erik S. McDuffie (2008)
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (2008)
Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story by Asha Bandele (2009)*
My mother is black. So the means through which I was produced is a matter of national instability. My mother is black. So the trace of slavery waits every moment to ink my body with meaninglessness. My mother is black. So my living is a question of whether or not racism will be reproduced today. My mother is black. This same piece of information threatens my survival. But my mother is black, which is at the same time the only thing that makes my survival possible.
It's early morning. I am a little bit drunk on the sound of rain, but it occurs to me that I should get (you) ready for mother's day. It is very easy to notice that I am obsessed with mothering and mothers. Mother is the single most interesting and confusing word that I know. Next to black.
And here comes mother's day. For me, this year mother's day means a million things. Expectancy, fear, obligation, inspiration, joy, admiration, deep reflection. A few weeks ago my mother told me that she thinks I will be "such a great mother." It struck me that while I have always dreamed of becoming a mother, and intended to become a mother, it still comes as a surprise when anyone affirms that it is something that I can do, SHOULD do even. Because I live in a culture that criminalizes black mothers for creating and loving black children, a culture that criminalizes black kids for being born. And latino kids too. I have been taught that mothering is something that happens to you, and you deal with it, and fight for it, swallowing down shame and living with the threat that the state wants nothing more than to take your kids away from you in every way imaginable.
But it is not my mother who taught me that. My mother repeats again and again that mothering us is her greatest accomplishment, like asha, mothering is her enduring joy and triumph despite everything. And trust, she has other great accomplishments. My mother, not through perfection, not through ease, but through sincere struggle, intense and sometimes even overwhelming love taught us something in her very being. My sister (now an ambitious account exec in New York) once confessed to me that though it might seem unfeminist, the only thing she really cared about, the one thing that she knew she wanted to do for sure in life was to be a good mother. And I told her what I more recently wrote in a poem to one of my feminist theory students, who blessed us by bringing her daughter to class, "mothering is the most feminist act of all." My mother, like every black mother, has been slandered. But we know a lie when we see it. My brother wanted to punch every producer of CNN's disgusting "Black in America" series for daring to suggest that being raised by a black mother was the key liability destroying the life chances of black people. How dare they? How dare they? When our black mother is the only reason we know how to breathe and survive despite the toxic racism filling this world. How dare they?
It is no mystery why it is a cultural truth that talking about a black person's mother is a great way to unleash a universe of anger. Our mothers are slandered every single second of every single day. The media does it like it's its job. And indeed it is.
And here is the risk. All this talk of mothering, all this affirmation and priviliging of mothering puts me at risk, not only in a mainstream narrative working to reproduce a nation built on racial hate and genocide, but also on the academic queer left. It is not very queer of me to keep talking about my mother this way. In fact (as Micheal Warner suggests) the only queer way for a black person to talk about a mother is the "irony" of the house mother in black gay ball culture. CNN is dead to me. The deeper betrayal is that queer studies participates in the slander of the black mother, agreeing with the story that says she should not exist.
Has Warner not considered (as Cathy Cohen makes very clear in Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens) that black mothering is already a queer thing? Because we were never meant to survive. So the Queen Mother in the house movement is not just throwing shade, the queen is doing the necessary work of mothering. Of saying these bodies black and queer almost to redundancy, these spirits that every facet of our society would seek to destroy, MUST survive and WILL transform the meaning of life whether you like it or not. That is what a black mother does. Sincerely. No irony. It is no joke.
So this week I have been picking a bone with a queer theory narrative that sees mothering as the least radical thing one can do, in so much that it becomes irrelevant to the majority of the discourse on queerness. Clearly, like Moynihan, they don't know my mother. Asserting that the labor of mothering is always in collaboration with the a reproductive narrative, reproducing heteronormativity ignores the fact there has been a national consensus for centuries that black people should not be able to mother and every force, from coercive sterlization, to the dismantling of welfare has been mobilized to try to keep them from doing it. Where has dominant (read white) queer theory been while politicians have been ranting and raving about how welfare queens, (which despite the actual statistics becomes a code name for poor and racialized mothers) are going to destroy civilization as we know it by not only creating black surplus children, but by influencing these children with their deviant and risky and scary behavior? And isn't this the organizing desire of queer theory....to destroy civilization as we know it?
I just wish everyone would listen to Cathy Cohen (who by the way is a black co-mother to a beautiful fierce black girl-child) so I wouldn't have to stand here screaming (or more accurately sit here taking, deconstructing and rebuilding the premises of queer theory all week long). But here is the quick and dirty of it...mainstream queer theory as inaugurated by Warner's edited volume and influenced by a Marxist feminst tradition of critiquing the heteropatriarchal family as a complicit force in the reproduction of capitalist oppression throw the black babies out with the bathwater of their universalism. The "tyranny of motherhood" as described by Barrett and McIntosh does not leave room for those other deployments of "mother" and "hood" (excuse me "inner-city") in the American vernacular of culture of poverty discourse.
This is why Hortense Spillers should be required and repeated reading for queer theorists. Four words. Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe. Which means there is no reason that the act of mothering would reproduce patriarchy, or even take place within the confines of patriarchy along normative lines because the practice of American slavery has so fundamentally ripped the work of mothering from the bodies of black mothers (forcing them to do the labor of mothering for white and black children while fully denying them any of the authority of motherhood by killing and selling away and raping and mutilating their biological children and their chosen kin. (I have posted here before about my discovery, while reading slave code, that even a free black mother had no legal right to defend an enslaved daughter from abuse by a slave master.)
The complexity of the term mother (next to black) requires a queer theory that deuniversalizes race and highlights the function of racism in reproducing the heteropatriarcal status quo. Cathy Cohen, Roderick Ferguson and Jose Munoz do this work of reminding us that Third World Feminism and the Third World Gay Liberation movement are an alternative starting point (contemporary with the Marxist feminist arguments that Warner's version of queer theory inherits). Their work is crucial because it says something very obvious. We are people of color. The whole system wakes up every day trying to exterminate our bodies and our spirits. Our very survival is queer.
We were never meant to survive, and if mothers are part of why we are here (and they are), then they are the queerest of us all. But this is not even news. If we remember what black women have been up to in the United States we can just go ahead and let go of the assumption that mothering is conservative or that conserving and nurturing the lives of black children has ever had any validated place in the official American political spectrum.
Take the fierce black women writers, mothers, publishers, actresses, activists who would become the Sojourners for Truth and Justice and their work starting in the 1940's to protest the imprisonment of Rosa Lee Ingram, a black mother who was sentenced to death for standing up for herself, and defending herself against a white man who tried to rape her. It was black women activists who changed her sentence to life in prison and then eventually (after 12 years of incarceration) got her released from prison. And always, always the key word in their organizing strategy was "mother." Their understanding of Ingram who was willing to fight to keep this violent man away from her body and away from her children, epitomized the term "mother" for this set of black woman revolutionaries. They framed the state's violence against Ingram as a violence against black mothering itself. How dare this black woman take a stance against rape. Standing against rape is a mothering act. How dare she threaten the perceived truth about what happens to black people, that black bodies are infinitely rapeable. How dare she stand ferocious, daring and teaching. This is what will happen to you if you come at me. This is the act of mothering that mobilized a national movement, black women gathered twenty-five thousands signatures for a petition in 1949...way before the era of the text message e-blast petition. They made it an international human rights issue, contacting every single member nation of the UN. And I need you to know this, remember this if you remember nothing else:
On Mother's Day, exactly 60 years ago the black left internationalist feminists of the Ingram Committee sent TEN THOUSAND MOTHER'S DAY CARDS to the White House and scared Harry S. Truman so bad that he made up an excuse to miss their scheduled meeting the next day.
Ten thousand mother's day cards from black women to the white house. Stolen holiday. No justice, no peace in the form of ten thousand paper-cuts. A floral dare saying: celebrate this. This is what mothering means: organized support for radical self-defense. A complete refusal of rape by any means necessary. Ten thousand Mother's Day cards. A threat saying we are black mothers. We are survivors. Try us.
Forget hallmark.
Have a revolutionary Mother's Day people.
*(Outside of the above timeline, sit Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival," Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens" and Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe" which i did not reread this week...but have completely internalized such that I should be understood to be citing them no matter what I am saying about anything.-apg)
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Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black trouble-maker. She is the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press and a doctoral candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women's Studies at Duke University. Alexis represents SpiritHouse, Southerners on New Ground, Firewalkers, UBUNTU, Critical Resistance, Left Turn, Make/Shift and Durham, North Carolina Massive.
