Actual Headline

"Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate."
Dunno if it was Yahoo News or the AP that slapped that garbage headline onto the accompanying article. 10,000 demerits to each of them, just for good measure.

There's a lot of fail in this piece: The gender essentialism. The disappearing of partnered-but-not-married parents, as well as traditional but not "traditional" (where "traditional" is a dog-whistle for a privileged white conservative fantasy world) family structures, e.g. intergenerational child-raising. The backwards framing of institutional racism, endemic poverty, an inequitably prosecuted "War on Drugs," a broken educational system, the outsourcing of industrial labor jobs, and a corrupt welfare system that tacitly encourages broken families as the "simple arguments for why so many black women have children without marriage," while heterocentrist slut-shaming is somehow the cutting edge of sophisticated debate.

But that headline. Ugh. That headline.

There are, of course, women who do struggle as single parents, but it's not the "unwed mothers rate" with which they're struggling. It's poverty. It's healthcare. It's childcare. It's paying the goddamn electric bill.

Which means that for women who are struggling, the solution is A FULLY FUNDED AND COMPREHENSIVE SOCIAL SAFETY NET, not encouraging marriages between people who don't want to get married.

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The woman pictured with her family alongside the article is Christelyn Karazin, founder of the "No Wedding No Womb" movement, about which Tami writes today here.