by Joan Morgan
Instead we’ll reassure the mother to be that she can “do it” becuz the absence of a committed black father (let alone husband) is as common as a fish in the sea.
Repeated often enough, Miss Chocolate reminds me, even the most aberrant acts can seem strikingly, dangerously normal.
Succumbing to the dynamics of peer pressure and protocol, I refrain from telling the sista a few things. Among them that strong, black women of the past did not parent solo because they wanted to—the conditions that ruled their lives do not, thank God, rule mine. I am not a slave, and there is no caseworker breaking up my family, abortion is no longer illegal, and I have more options for birth control than I even know what to do with. That as a daughter still healing from the wounds inflicted by my own father’s absenteeism—injuries which once made me doubt my suitability for lifetime commitment at all—I’ll be damned if I’d willingly subject my daughter to the same. Besides, I’ve seen the bravado of that “My baby, my body, I don’t need him” attitude dissipate quickly with the realities of “babymotherhood.” Seen it more times than I care to remember.
Suffice it to say that raising a family is perhaps the only area of my life where I’m not afraid to admit I need a man. Still, despite the preponderance of sistas allegedly waiting to exhale, I often feel like I’m in the minority.
The black family—historically one of our most critical support systems—is perilously close to becoming an endangered species. As of 1994, 70 percent of black children were born to unmarried women (versus 25 percent of white children) and only 33 percent of black children lived with both parents (versus 76 percent of white ones).2
All praises given to black single mothers who’ve consistently managed to do the best with what little they have. But denying that single parenting takes a toll on our community is an exercise in futility. The correlation between single-parent homes, teenage pregnancy, crime, and poverty have been demonstrated ad nauseam.
“Children of single mothers are significantly more likely to live in poverty than children living with both parents,” states a special edition of Newsweek magazine darkly entitled “A World Without Fathers: The Struggle to Save the Black Family.” According to 1990 census figures, the article states, “65% of black single mothers were poor, compared with only 18% of children of black married couples.” And “educationally, children of one-parent families are at greater risk across the board for learning problems, for being left back, for dropping out. . . . By every measure—economic, social, educational,” the article concludes, the statistics strongly indicate that “two parents living together are better than one.”3
Perhaps one of the most revolutionary acts the hiphop generation can accomplish is to establish healthy, loving, functional families. On certain levels we are aware of this. We watched a million marching men get the message in Washington. Our griots’ rhymes— Tupac’s “Keep Your Head Up,” Naughty by Nature’s “Ghetto Bastard,” and the intro of Ready to Die by the Notorious B.I.G. to name a few—repeatedly demonstrate painful awareness of the impact fractured family structures have on our lives. The epidemic levels of single parenting, however, indicate a reluctance to move past lip service to action. Overall, our response has been frightfully anemic—fluctuating between defeatist denial and apathetic acceptance.
For far too many of us, the absence of a committed black father is “just the way things are.”
We are not entirely to blame. Coming of age in the eighties and nineties, the hip-hop generation is caught in the quagmire of conflicting social, moral, and political values that typify American society at the close of this millennium. Our elders left us a lot of mixed messages. Older heads spent the sixties and seventies enjoying “Free Love,” but we reaped the repercussions of the Sexual Revolution—among them the devastating advent of AIDS, a one-out-of-two divorce rate, and waning value for the cornerstones of a stable society: monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family.
The few road maps bequeathed to us are often too confusing to be useful. In the name of free speech, freedom of expression, and ultimately, the Almighty Dollar, sexually explicit images bombard us daily. Yet we’re instructed to cope with AIDS’s senseless destruction by practicing the sexual conservatism of our grandparents. Abstinence (if you can stand it), safe sex (at the very least), and monogamy (whenever you can). Most of us, however, haven’t got a clue as to how to achieve the latter. We can count the number of healthy marriages or lasting relationships we’ve seen on one hand.
Is it any wonder Naughty by Nature’s “O.P.P.” (Other People’s Property) became the sexual anthem for the nineties? With our fear of intimacy and our disbelief in monogamy pushing it steadily along, the record transcended vinyl and became culture.
The situation for young brothers and sistas is even more hectic. Our skepticism when it comes to “forevers” and “ ’til death do we part” is not at all unfounded. “The institution of marriage [for blacks],” cites Newsweek, “has been devastated in the last generation. . . . As of 1992, only 38% of black women were married—a significant decline from the ’60s, when more than 60% of young black women between the ages of 20–24 were married.”4 For black women who live with these odds daily, the growing tendency to view brothers as optional parts of the parenting equation is less about a lack of desire than about refusing to be stuck with a proverbial case of sour grapes. Why waste time wishing on what you know you’ll never have?
According to hip-hop tour de force Bill Stephney, one of the visionary powers behind the seminal rap group Public Enemy, president of Step-Sun Records, and the activist behind the formation of F.O.L.A. (Families Organized for Liberty and Action), society’s shifting attitudes about not only marriage but about sex, birth control, abortion, welfare, and ultimately child support and paternity laws add tremendously to the confusion many single black men experience when facing fatherhood.
“It’s hard for a man today to figure out what his role is supposed to be,” explains Stephney, who was a single father until getting married a few years ago. “There was a time in African-American history when marriage was an important value in the community. As a man, you felt you had a moral responsibility to a child born out of wedlock—partially because there was enough societal pressure on a man who got a woman pregnant to marry her. That was ‘being responsible.’
“Culturally we’ve moved away from that. There’s a lot of confusion regarding what being responsible actually means. Does ‘being responsible’ to a pregnant woman mean rubbing her stomach and bringing her ice cream when she has cravings, or does it mean marrying her? Or does it mean paying her $10,000 a year in child support?
“Even when a man says he wants to be as morally, ethically, spiritually, and loving as he can, there seems to be so much of a preponderance on finance that it pretty much bursts your bubble right there.”
Sistas feeling that “black men are irrelevant when it comes to raising our children,” cautions Stephney, “only serves to widen the chasm between us.
“Take a brother who’s struggling. Of course he goes berserk when he hears homegirl’s pregnant. He feels marginalized because everything around him is saying he has no role in that creation we consider so precious other than being informed that the baby’s coming and how much money he’s expected to pay.”
Truth be told, society on a whole is suffering the effects of both feminism’s and the government’s failure to tackle the lack of men’s choices when it comes to reproductive and parental rights. Any pro-choice feminist worth her salt (self included) could not conceive of endorsing legislation that would allow a man’s desire to be a father take precedence over the mother’s unwillingness to carry the child to term. We recognize her exclusive right to control her body and consequently her destiny. In fact, we’re ballistic about it.
When it comes to admitting, however, that the struggle for female independence and reproductive choice also grants women the power to control the lives and destinies of unwilling fathers via their bodies, feminism convenie
ntly tosses the goal of a gender-equal society out the window. It plunges instead head-first into a cesspool of hypocrisy—embracing the very same sexist stereotypes it should be fighting against.
• • •
Take the case of LaylaI and Glenn.II Layla, a twenty-nine-year-old trial attorney, met Glenn, a thirty-year-old graphic artist, through a mutual friend. They’d seen each other at a few parties following their initial meeting and immediately developed the hotties. They slept together once, on their first date, and things were left open-ended.
A few weeks later, Layla discovered she was pregnant. Engaged to someone else, Glenn begged Layla not to have the baby. Furthermore, he warned her in no uncertain terms he’d have nothing to do with her or the child. But at twenty-nine, with a decent job and guaranteed support from friends and family, Layla felt abortion and adoption were not options she could entertain in good conscience—even if it meant no emotional or financial support from the child’s father.
So following the script written for her by decades of feminist struggle, Layla ignored Glenn’s pleas, exercised her right to choice, and demanded nothing from him—except child support—once the child was born. Both Glenn and his fiancée adamantly refused. Already stretched financially, they were expecting their first child in six months, and felt they simply could not afford it.
Furthermore, Glenn felt Layla’s decision to bring a child into the world with a man she barely knew was not only ludicrous but selfish. “It was all about her body, her choice, and what was best for her life. She didn’t give a damn that she was turning my life upside down. Layla’s last words to me were that she and the baby didn’t need me. And now I’m expected to pay child support?”
Okay. So we all agree Glenn is less than a mensch, but you gotta admit his contentions pose a sticky challenge to those of us who are supposedly down for equality. How can a feminism that vehemently supports women’s right to reproductive choice support indiscriminate child-support laws which force men to be financially responsible for children they may not have wanted?
A woman’s right to reproductive choice is about more than controlling her body—it constitutionally imbues her with the right not to parent. It encourages her to honestly evaluate her feelings about parenting and her abilities to do so. If for any reason she doesn’t feel up to the task, she has the legal right to terminate her pregnancy or give her child up for adoption.
Men’s anxieties and doubts about parenting are dismissed, however, as illegitimate and irresponsible behavior. An expectant father expressing any reluctance about becoming a parent is pretty much branded a dog. Furthermore, he’s legally denied all of the options granted to an expectant mother. He can’t force a woman to have an abortion, he can’t abdicate his parental rights (via adoption) without the mother’s consent, and he must pay child support.
The inconsistencies are glaring. If feminists honestly believe that forcing unwilling mothers into parenthood isn’t in the best interests of mothers or children, why aren’t fathers given the same consideration? Both genders are equally necessary for reproduction and they should be entitled to similar rights. One of the greatest mistakes of the Feminist Movement is its misrepresentation of reproductive rights. Reproductive rights, including the right not to parent is not a woman’s right. It’s a human one.
Denying that men should have the same option not to parent is hypocritical and it threatens the goal of gender equality.
“It’s quite literally the idea of the ‘baby’s mama’ and whatever support daddy can lend,” maintains Stephney. “As a society we’ve moved from the notion of wives and children as property as experienced during common law, to the notion of children as mother’s property. Instead of making mothers second-class citizens, we make fathers second-class citizens by arguing that they’re optional.
“Even the court systems seemed to have determined that the obligatory roles fathers have is financial (something we would never say about mothers), which is really wrong. Do you mean all the things I could be for my child’s entire lifetime can be made irrelevant based on how much money I’m making?
“As a black man it insults me from a human standpoint and a historical one. Certainly our sharecropping grandfathers’ value to their families was not based on money.”
Whether you agree with Stephney’s assessment or not, it’s clear that feminism’s unwillingness to confront the highly complex issues that accompany the movement’s most significant advances—specifically birth control, legalized abortion, and child support and paternity laws—has left its daughters to sort out the mess.
Ultimately, the issue of male reproductive rights is one that forces women to face some of the yuckier by-products of our quest for power. If the goal is a balanced distribution of power between men and women, then both genders have to relinquish their vise-grip on their respective domains. For men that means workplace and the wallet. For women, however, it means being less territorial when it comes to the domain of the family. Refusing to see fathers’ participation as optional puts us one step closer to eradicating those nasty patriarchal stereotypes of family (men as providers and women as child rearers and nurturers)—and all their sexist implications. Elevating the role fathers play so that it’s as intrinsically valuable as the role of mothers would be infinitely more productive than sitting around, trying to convince each other that “we don’t need no man.”
Next on the agenda should be a re-evaluation of mandatory child-support and paternity laws. Both feminism and government need to understand that child-support checks can’t take the place of a father’s active participation in his child’s life.
One option that seems to be gaining increased support is enforced joint custody. Sonny Burmeister, president of the Children’s Rights Council of Georgia, and Mary Frances Berry, author of The Politics of Parenthood, are both advocates of enforced joint physical custody between unmarried parents. “A court decree,” states Berry, “should require not just child-support payments, but burden sharing or shifting to take care of the children in order to impress upon both parties the seriousness of their obligation. Neither fathers nor mothers should be able to walk away without some pressure being brought to bear.” Ideally, she suggests, parents should have “shared custody.” In cases where this is not possible, the non-custodial parent “should also be required to help the other with chores that drain custodial parents of time and energy, such as baby-sitting, transportation to doctor’s appointments and other child-care services or to school.”5
Burmeister, however, believes that under a system of joint custody, no one should pay child support: “Why would you need a transfer of money,” he asks, “if you each have the child for fifteen days?”6 And Stephney agrees. “It shouldn’t even be a question of finance. There should be immediate joint custody. And the state should have no input unless there is total disagreement between two parties.”
Before sistas dismiss these ideas as the mere foolishness of men too cheap to do right by their children, we might want to face the bleak statistical realities of “mandatory” child support. Unless your baby’s father is paid as hell, your chances of collecting any money worth talking about are very slim. “The Child Support Enforcement program is a very expensive way to collect money and is notoriously ineffective when dealing with unmarried fathers,” states Ellis Cose in his book A Man’s World: How Real Is Male Privilege—and How High Is Its Price? “A Congressional Research Service calculated that in 1991 states netted $384 million from the program, while the federal government lost $588 million. The program, in short, cost $204 million more to run than it managed to bring in.”7
And “while three-fourths of divorced women are granted child-support payments, only one-fourth of never-married mothers are awarded payments, and only three-fourths of those see any portion of the money.” The average amount collected annually, according to this study, is barely Pamper money. It’s in “the neighborhood of $2,000.”8
Add to this fiasco that babymothers who apply fo
r welfare automatically “assign their support rights to the state which only gives them up to fifty dollars a month of anything collected from the fathers of their children.”9
“It doesn’t take a Wharton grad,” says Tom Henry of the Philadelphia Children’s Network, “to figure out that a woman gets significantly more money if the father provides it directly (albeit covertly) to the mother than to the state.”
Henry’s colleague Ralph Smith feels that “the system has its priorities scrambled.” The emphasis on money instead of participation may actually be driving these fathers away. “If society endeavored to get them attached to their kids as opposed to trying to confiscate their money, many of these young fathers would do the same things that the rest of us do,” says Smith. “They [would] begin to find ways to provide the support their children need. And not all of the support their children need is financial support.”
Despite the obvious merits to enforced joint custody, it’s still problematic. It would be difficult to enforce— especially between parents whose relationships are funky or non-existent. It also skirts the very complicated issue of male reproductive rights. A woman who proceeds with a pregnancy against her partner’s wishes has every right to do so. But should she have the right to force another human being into something as life altering as parenting? If we don’t allow a father’s desire for parenthood to impinge on an unwilling mother’s desire for an abortion, how then, both legally and morally, can we ignore an unwilling father’s objections to parenthood?
