As if black women needed more wretched news to strengthen the stereotype of them as oversexed animals with low character and self-esteem.
In a study that could be classified as “How does this help America,” University of Michigan demographer Cassandra Dorius, the study’s author, states that 28 percent of American women with two or more children have them with more than one father. Tragically, the percentage for black women is more than twice the national average.
The study concludes that more than 59 percent of black women who have more than one child also have multiple babies’ daddies. Hispanics are a distant second at 35 percent, with white women holding steady at 22 percent.
Some believe the survey could become another way to conveniently categorize sisters as amoral baby-making machines.
“There has been a lot of ink spilled on the love lives of black women, a lot of over-sensationalizing,” said Avis Jones-DeWeever, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women. “What I am concerned about is how it’s going to be sensationalized in the media. I am concerned that this will be another way that this country will put a negative label on black women which, in this country, we have a long history of doing.”
Tami Winfrey Harris is an editorial member of Love Isn’t Enough, a blog that focuses on reproduction and race. She said the University of Michigan study merely reflects a paradigm shift in the country’s view of normal parenting.
“If I was a betting woman, I would guess that many people will point to this fact as an example of the decline in American morality and the cause of a great number of societal ills,” said Winfrey Harris, who is based in Indianapolis. “And because our society likes to police the sexuality of women — especially women of color — these troubles will be laid at our feet.”
Dorius says that the data is reflective of a trend that transcends the myth that this is consigned only to women of low means and limited education.
“We tend to think of women with multiple partner fertility as being only poor single women with little education and money, but in fact at some point, most were married, and working, and going to school, and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to live the American dream,” she said in a university news release. –terry shropshire
