Senseless Scribbling of an Idiot #49: That’s Just My Baby Daddies

News flash:  a recent study has discovered that at approximately 1 in 5 American mothers has children by two or more baby daddies.

*enter shockingly dramatic music*  Dun..dun…dun…dun..dun…dun…!!!!

The average American already knew this, especially those of us living in inner cities where most of the population has a standard eighth grade education.  The study’s author from University of Michigan says, “This area of study is very new to us.”  I don’t know who “us” is but they need to get it together.  How come they are always doing studies on things that regular folk have already figured out?  We may not have the fancy advanced degrees but we do not need to spend hours in a lab to discover what is already in our faces.

Don’t we already know that women with multiple baby daddies is likely to be disadvantaged?  D’uh.  They are probably under-employed with lower incomes and less education.  No shit, Sherlock.  That is why they have multiple baby daddies in the first place.  Because they don’t really know any better.  According to the study,

We know that women with higher education are delaying both marriage and childbearing for their careers.  Women with lower expectations for education and career don’t see that they will be in a significantly different place in 10 years.  So there’s no reason to wait to have kids.

In other words, when you know that your life sucks and that you probably will never have a high-paying job or an advanced degree there is nothing else for you to do but have a bunch of kids.  In fact, you probably didn’t even have that eye-opening moment of clarity.  Having multiple children by multiple fathers is second nature to you because everyone else around is doing it.  It never occurred to you to do anything else.

The study adds that this type of family structure can be stressful.  No, really?  Thanks for pointing out how difficult it is to figure even the most minute details:  where do each of the kids live?  Which baby daddy pays for what?  Do all the daddies pay for child support?

In a shocking revelation, study discovered that 59 per cent of black mothers, 35 per cent of Hispanic mothers and 22 per cent of white mothers reported having multiple baby daddies.  In some cases, two different baby daddies comes from divorce.  According to the study, 43 per cent of the mothers were married when the first kid was born, but later got divorced and had another kid by someone else.

The study claims that young women do not know how difficult it is to be a single mother and that it is even more difficult to have multiple children by multiple fathers, and that too many young women are deciding to have kids before marriage.

I hope that they did not waste precious government money trying to figure out this “mystery.”  It’s not a news flash that more young women are increasingly having children while not in a stable relationship.  I won’t use the term marriage for many reasons I won’t get into, but the point is that a lot of women are having kids with fathers that really have no interest in family life.  More and more young women are having multiple children with multiple fathers, and that’s just bizarre to me but not a great shock.  I know many people with children, almost none of them are married.  Most of them never were married.

It’s a thing.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s just something that people do.  Conducting a survey to figure this out seems lame.  How about conduct a survey to figure out how to lessen this problem?  We know why this happens.  Can we figure out how to not make it happen.  The author of this survey made a valid point when she said “women with higher education delay marriage and kids….”  Key words:  women with higher education.  “Women with lower expectations” are the ones who are having a bunch of kids.

Why don’t we help them raise their expectations?  We spend so much time and money trying to figure out the “why fors” when we could just attempt to combat the problem.  More money to more education, especially in lower income, disadvantaged areas and you will see this “phenomenon” start to back trend.

The Afronista Rants #14: Sorry, Niggers

Not that I listen to the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Show, or that I’ve even heard of her in the first place, but I just happened to be trolling CNN when I came across an article about her giving a public apology for using the word “nigger” in her show several times.  Now the black community is about to crucify this white woman over her poor selection of words.  Al Sharpton, King of the Black Folk, described the incident as “despicable.”  The Guilty White are embarrassed and apologetic.  The Black Masses are up in arms.

Me?  I’m just shaking my head.  I’m not really upset with Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whoever the hell she is.  She’s just imitating what she hears in the streets everyday, more than likely.  Or maybe she really does feel all black people are just a bunch of niggers.  Who knows?  Since many of us refer to each other as “nigger” how is she able to determine which of us is a nigger and which one of us isn’t?  Everyday black people, not all but many, call each other nigger like it’s nothing.  You hear it in rap music all day long.  Black people come up to each other and greet each other, “What’s up, my nigger,” all the time.  So what is the problem if Dr. Laura Schlessinger tosses it about a few times in her radio talk show?  She is just another confused white woman, trying to figure out what to call us:  black, African-American or nigger?

Is it because black people feel like they somehow have ownership of this word?  Is it that mentality where it was once so offensive and so demeaning, that we’ll just now take the word over and give it a whole new twist?  I was once told that there was a fundamental difference between the word “nigger” and “nigga.”  When I hear rap music and black people greeting each other with this word, they are saying “nigga” not “nigger,” according to this guy who felt the need to enlighten me.  Nigger is that bad word you aren’t supposed to use.  Nigga is something else entirely.  That doesn’t make much sense to me, but if black people want to go on that, then who am I to say anything against it?  *eyeroll*  What the hell do I know?

All of this began when Dr. Schlessinger received a phone call from a black woman who was married to a white man.  The black woman said she loved her husband but she was tired of his family saying what she considered to be racist things about her.  The woman gave a few examples and Dr. Schlessinger said she didn’t find anything particularly racist about what the family was supposedly saying.  Then the black woman asked about the usage of the word “nigger,” to which Dr. Schlessinger replied,

“black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger.”

The caller (the black woman) became upset that Dr. Schlessinger continued to use the word several more times and the two ended up in an argument.  Dr. Schlessinger then told the woman that if she was so hypersensitive she should not have married outside her race.

Had this been me I would have been more annoyed that she castigated me on marrying outside my race.  I would not have been upset by the constant use of the word nigger, because she is correct in some aspects.  Many black rappers, black comedians, and black people in general use the word like it’s nothing.  I’m sure, as I outlined above, that their reasons are different, but it’s still a usage of a word that many people find derogatory.  I’m not just talking about the Educated Black or the Guilty White, most people just don’t want to hear the word because they are reminded of a time that we’d all just rather forget.  It’s a senseless word, no matter how you use it.  Dr. Schlessinger shouldn’t use it and neither should Jay-Z or Chris Rock or the kid up on the block.

If you don’t want anybody to call you a nigger, don’t let anybody call you a nigger.  Don’t promote the usage of the word.  I know it would be a stretch to get people to stop buying rap music that contains the word “nigger,” but if you want to get upset by it, get upset by all usage of the word.  Don’t just jump on white people when they use the word.  I would feel foolish if I told a white person not to call me nigger when I let my friends call me nigger or ride around in the car with music shouting, “nigger, nigger, nigger,” all day long.  The first thing this white person is going to say is, “Well, you let your friends call you nigger.”  What am I supposed to say in response, “They are my friends, so it’s okay?”  No, it’s not okay.  I’m not a nigger, so you can’t call me one and neither can my friends.  You can’t punch me in the face and neither can any of my friends.

If you want to try to play the argument that there is a difference between nigga and nigger then you are just stupid and there’s no coming back from that.  I am not a nigga or nigger or any other deviation of the word.  Snoop Dogg can’t call me one.  My sister can’t call me one.  My best friend can’t call me one.  And neither can Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

We don’t have ownership of the word like we think we do.  We sound ignorant and foolish as we stand up on the corner with the “nigger” this, “nigger” that.  I know this does not apply to most of the black population, just a few suckers who got rope-a-doped into thinking they are owed something.  Every time you use the word or condone usage of the word in any shape or form you are just knocking yourself back a decade or two.

I tell my little cousin all the time that he needs to treat himself like he wants other people to treat him.  If you treat yourself like an asshole other people are going to treat you like an asshole.  If you treat yourself like a nigger then other people will treat you like a nigger.

The Afronista Rants #5: What Precisely is Kwanzaa Anyway?

The holiday season, which usually runs from Thanksgiving until New Year’s, is usually bombarded with the pagan-derived antics of the Christians and the more solemn rituals of the Jews.  Of course, you also have your heathen commerical presence with the devil-worshipping Santa Claus and Black Friday ad posters beckoning God-fearing people to their doom.

In these trying times where religion is fighting an endless, pointless war with evil’s henchman, otherwise known as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, one struggles how to best converse with someone without offending them or *gasp* being politically incorrect.  Should I say Merry Christmas?  Or is it Happy Holidays?  You never know what to say and it winds up being awkward and senseless.

Depending on where you are in the country, things will be different.  In the South, it’s Merry Christmas, no questions asked.  They’re all God-fearing Christians down there; likewise in the Midwest.  It’s only in the heathen big cities do you have a problem, and of course, the hairy-legged, bra-burning, hippies out west are more of the Happy Holidays sort.  What I don’t notice is the Happy Kwanzaa crowd.  Where are these people?

Every year I see a vague semblance of this holiday, like a spectre in the night.  I do not precisely know what it is.  Being black, perhaps this is shameful, but then as I give this matter further thought I realise that none of my black friends, as black as they are, seem to celebrate the mysterious holiday of Kwanzaa.  What is this Kwanzaa, anyway?  One year my aunt sent me a Christmas card in the mail with a Kwanzaa stamp on it.  I was 22 and I thought, “What the hell is this?”

According to my internet search, Kwanzaa is a weeklong celebration honouring universal African heritage and culture.  You light some candles, you have a party and give some gifts from Boxing Day to New Year’s Day.  Sounds an awful lot like Chanukah, but what do I know?  As I read further, I see that this holiday was invented in the sixties, so it is not a long standing tradition, barely 40 years old.  This guy, this Ron Karenga, created it to be a specifically African American holiday, to “give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practise of the dominant society.”

Well, that’s just the most moronic thing I’ve ever heard.  Given that it was created in the sixties during the Civil Rights movement speaks volumes.  This, in my view, is another one of those things that black people invent to further segregate and alienate themselves from the white society they view as the oppressor, which is, as I’ve always said, one of the worst things we can possibly do as a race.  I promise I won’t beat that dead horse any further.

Let’s give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practise of the dominant society.  Sorry to say that most blacks don’t know their own history.  Will Kwanzaa give them an opportunity to do so?  I sincerely doubt it.  Let’s have a holiday to celebrate being black, but if white people had a holiday to celebrate being white, black people would shit themselves at the injustice of it all.  (And don’t say Saint Patrick’s Day because it is not a celebration of being white, morons.)  Let’s have a holiday to celebrate being black and put it directly during the Judeo-Christian-Pagan holidays so black people don’t have to imitate the practise of the dominant society.

Does anybody else notice what a ridiculous statement this is?  Hello… most black people have very strong Christian roots.  You go south and all the black people are Southern Baptists.  In fact, while it is conceivable, how many black people do you know that aren’t Christian.  You will find your Black Muslims in the big cities, but for the most part, they’re all Christian. So you’re basically telling people to forgo their faith in favour of some secular garbage that celebrates the furtherance of segregation and racism.

So there’s something called the seven principles of blackness:  Unity, Self-Determination, Collective Work and Responsibility, Cooperative Economics, Purpose, Creativity, and Faith.  These are not bad principles at all, but why do they have to be the seven principles of blackness?  Why can they not be seven principles that all people should have?  This sounds just like the movement from which this “holiday” sprang:  black power and a seclusionary society.

To me, Kwanzaa sounds like some made up crap that black people invented to make themselves feel like they have something special, something of their own.  The sad part is, this “holiday” is so self-centered that it purposely excludes other groups of people, large groups of other people, making it impossible to celebrate in this day and age without looking like a racist jackass.  If I invited my white friends over a Kwanzaa celebration and then went on about the seven principles of blackness, I wouldn’t make them feel very much at home.  Thirty years after Ron Karenga made that outrageous statement, he now says that Kwanzaa can be celebrated by all races and it is not a celebration to divert people from their religion and religious holidays.  “Kwanzaa is not a substitute for anything.  In fact, it offers a clear and self-conscious option, and chance to make a proactive choice, a self-affirming and positive choice as distinct from a reactive one.”

What does that even mean?  I doubt even he knows.

There are varying statistics on precisely how many black people celebrate this nonsense.  Some say that 28 million people celebrate it.  Others say 12 million or 30 million.  Based solely on observation of what is around me and absolutely no scientific evidence at all, I find these numbers to be an exaggeration.  I do not know anybody who celebrates Kwanzaa.  I do not know anybody who knows anybody that celebrates Kwanzaa.  Where are these 12-30 million people?  Let me know because I want to see a Kwanzaa celebration.  I want to see what these people do, how they live, who they are.  I would like to see more so that I can make more than just basic generalisations on what I think I know.

At any rate, as I do not celebrate anything that purposely sets black people off from society, I abhor the very idea of Kwanzaa.  If I were Christian I would be offended at the dates chosen for this celebration.  It really seems like they were trying to get black people to not celebrate Christmas.  I’m also perturbed by the fact that many of the rituals in Kwanzaa look like Jewish traditions, but yet this was supposed to celebrate Africanism as a whole.

This is not a good look.