Stop Lying About Black Women and Families
Claims of an out-of-wedlock birth crisis and “babies having babies” are racist myths. It’s time to tell the truth.
Surely you’ve heard it before.
The problem facing Black people isn’t racism; it’s girls and women having babies out of wedlock.
Whenever someone mentions the issue of ongoing racial discrimination in America, the answer from conservatives always sounds like this.
Bill O’Reilly said it in the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement. Black people, he insisted, should remove T-shirts with slogans like “I Can’t Breathe” (a reference to the chokehold killing of Eric Garner at the hands of a New York cop) and replace them with shirts imploring 14-year-olds to stop having babies.
Because that, not racist mistreatment in the justice system, is what’s hurting the community.
Bashing Black folks for their unmarried fecundity is the default response for conservatives whenever confronted with evidence of racism. If they would just stop making all these “illegitimate” children, the problems of the Black community would disappear, or so the story goes.
But none of this is accurate. Not even close.
