“No wire hangers, ever!”
-Faye Dunaway/Joan Crawford, “Mommie Dearest”
The recent and untimely demise of 22-year old Bobbi Kristina Brown, sole daughter of pop music legend Whitney Houston and “teeny bopper” singer Bobby Brown, puts a cap on a month that has presented formidable evidence that contrary to the idea that what bedevils Black America along “family values” lines is the predominance of “deadbeat dads”, the truth is that Black America has in fact, a Crummy Mummy problem.
How so, you may ask?
Well, to revisit the above, the late Bobbi Kristina Brown died in a way erriely reminiscent of her mom – effectively drowning in her bathtub with her system full of drugs. Houston’s descent into a crack cocaine-fueled Hell is by now a matter of well documented record; but what isn’t as openly acknowledged is the role her addiction played in the life and ultimate death, of her daughter. Houston retained custody of her after her divorce from Bobby Brown, and while he too struggled with drug addiction, it proved to be nowhere near as severe as Houston’s and in any event, he didn’t have custody of his daughter. Bobbi was with her mother through her highs and lows, literally. It’s hard not to see how witnessing such things would not have a powerful impression on young Bobbi – the link between children and parents involving drug and alcohol addiction is well known. That Whitney possessed a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars, didn’t mitigate the damage; indeed, by all accounts, it only poured gasoline onto the flames – thus, discrediting the argument pushed by some on the Black Left, that all that is needed is for a (Black) single mom to be successful, is a high income, be that subsidized by the government or be it earnings made by said (Black) single mom herself. Houston’s life proves this not to be the case.
Only a few short weeks earlier in the same month of July, very sad news surfaced out of “Chiraq” (the Black sections of Chicago), that a 22 year old rapper named “Capo”, who was an associate of Chief Keef, was gunned down by assailants; Capo literally died on cameraphone video, uploaded to YouTube for the world to see his bleeding out from bullet wounds to his chest and hip. As the killers made their getaway, they mowed over a year old baby boy in a stroller; like Capo, he too was pronounced dead a short time later at a nearby hospital. Sadly, this was not an abberation; young kids, Black boys in particular, often meet grisly ends in the poorest and Blackest sections of the American landscape; sections where the one common denominator, is the sheer prevelance of Baby Mama-led homes. As Janet Bloomfield powerfully notes in a recent article she wrote about new research showing that White women raise Black boys better than Black women do, the one consistent “product” Black women as a group, seem to crank out, are gangbangers, criminals, murderers and rapists:
“Black boys raised by white women do just as well as white children raised by white women, controlling for variables like socioeconomic status, education, income, etc. And of course the big question is why? There are a couple of theories the researchers measuring this phenomenon posit: some are simple, and some are much more complex. Black boys raised by white mothers tend to have distinctively white, rather than Black speech patterns. Barack Obama anybody? He sure is articulate for a Black guy /snark/. Those speech patterns allow Black boys to avoid a wage penalty as men. White mothers have an entirely different approach to education, teachers and the school system, and are treated differently by the school system, no matter what race their children are. This clearly has an impact on the outcomes for children. White mothers are more likely to be married and raising children with a father present, which has all kinds of benefits for children.”
Ms. Bloomfield of course, is referring to the fact that most kids in Black America are born out of wedlock – exceeding 70% and rising (with the current Black marital rate at around 27%). She continues:
“Is it any wonder Black women resent and hate their sons? Is it any wonder they raise thugs and gangsters? Give those exact same boys to white women, who have been taught to a much, much lesser extent that they don’t need no man, and those boys become accountants and neurosurgeons and teachers and HVAC technicians and entrepreneurs. Feminists try hard to make all women hate men and blame men for their own personal choices, but this message hasn’t stuck as well with white women in general, because it wasn’t backed up with widespread, institutional racism and discrimination that prevented white men from supporting their white wives and children.”
Here Ms. Bloomfield asserts that a big reason as to how and why Black America has such a Crummy Mummy problem in our time, is directly due to the impact Feminism has had on Black women writ large – and the argument is hard to deny in light of the simple fact that abortion – a centerpiece of feminists for nearly the past half-century – has seen its greatest impact on Black women themselves. According to the website BlackGenocide.org, Black women have aborted more than 16 million(!) Black babies since the passage of Roe v. Wade. That’s an estimated 35% population loss to Black Americans, folks. This, despite the fact that Planned Parenthood was founded by a noted eugenicist who had less than flattering views of Blacks in Ms. Margaret Sanger, that they were recently caught cold-busted on videotape discussing in coldly candid terms as to how to harvest body parts from aborted babies. And this is despite the fact that, a few years ago, right here in Philly, Black women were involved on both the patient and “caregiver” ends of the murderous Dr. Kermit Gosnell “house of horrors” scandal – where babies were brutally and heartlessly killed in ways I can’t even recount here. Black women get abortions at a rate of five times that of other women in American life.
As YouTube personality and mens’/fathers’ rights advocate Tommy Sotomayor tirelessly documents day in and day out on his numerous social media channels and his personal website, the worst stewards of children in American life, are Black women. The life outcomes on a plethora of measures – from infant mortality and birth weight (highest among Black boys under the care of Black moms), cognitive development and educational attainment (it is a fact that Black mothers speak fewer words to their children than White ones; this results in Black boys having the lowest highschool graduation rates of anyone in the nation), later success as adults (some 80% or more of prison inmates hail from Baby Mama-led homes), you name it, ranks very low anywhere Black women are in the lead of family formation. This, despite their own advancement in terms of education and income earnings. When we breakout the life outcomes for Black children along gender lines, we find that under Black baby mamas, Black boys fare markedly worse, as again Ms. Bloomfield makes clear in her excellent piece:
“Black mothers raise girls who go on to educational, economic and employment achievements far more frequently than they raise boys who do the same. If it were a matter ‘these women are just dumb’, there shouldn’t be any demonstrable difference between the outcomes of boys and girls, but there is. Black women hate men, and by extension, hate their sons. They resent them. And in all likelihood, they visit far more abuse, both physical and emotional, upon them, for reasons that have to do with structural, policy driven, government decisions that Black men sure as hell didn’t vote for, approve of, or ask for.”
Tru dat.
Given all of these facts, one has to wonder aloud as to how and why the powers that be are so oddly silent; why they seem so hellbent on going in after so-called “deadbeat dads”, i.e., poor Black men who are dads. Draconian child support laws have proven not just onerous for so many lower income Black men to meet their obligations, they have also proven deadly, as we saw in the case of Walter Scott earlier this year, and which yours truly has written about. Yet, official government policy at the highest levels, has continued to focus solely on the role supposed “deadbeat dads” play in the fracture and failure of Black familial life – this, despite the fact that Black women enjoy a total monopoly on the reproductive and child-rearing process, aided and abetted by the American political and legal systems. Black men are given no say whatsoever in the former and are utterly undermined in the latter – yet, they continue to be hounded as if they are full participants in the life trajectories of their babies. Clearly, the evidence shows, that they are not.
Nor is this any great shock or surprise, at least not to serious students of history. Fifty years ago, all of this was observed and predicted, by the late academic, presidential staffer and later US Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (in)famous report:
“Whereas the majority of white families are equalitarian, the largest percentage of Negro families are dominated by the wife.”
“The Negro wife…can easily become disgusted with her financially dependent husband, and her rejection of him further alienates the male from family life. Embittered by their experiences with men, many Negro mothers often act to perpetuate the mother-centered pattern by taking a greater interest in their daughters than their sons.”
“Historically, in the matriarchal Negro society, mothers made sure that if one of their children had a chance for higher education, the daughter was the one to pursue it.”
This was precisely what Ms. Bloomfield observes in her recent article I’ve quoted from above and indeed this is the case. While there are cases where things go horrbily awry for Black girls in baby mama-led homes – the stats bear this out easily enough – when compared to Black boys, it is undeniable that they don’t do anywhere near as terribly as the latter. Indeed, one can speculate as to the ultimate outcome a Bobby Brown, Jr. would have had in Whitney Houston’s home-cum-drug den; would he have even made it to the ripe old age of 22?
Given all that we know about the daily bloodletting on the part of the products of Black single moms in America’s Chiraqs and Little Mogadishus, to ask the question, is to answer it…
Recommended Further Reading: Toya Graham: Queen of the Baltimore riot baby mamas
Don’t forget to checkout “Obsidian Radio”, my daily podcast! Here’s more on today’s article: White Women Raise Black Boys Better Than Black Women, Part One
