Aight, I can't resist this anymore.

Two points.

#1. On Feminism.

Expertise is right. Single-female-headed householdness has much more to do with feminism and women's rights movement than slavery, which is why you see a boom in SFH households all over the world after the Sixties. The prime reason that it's less so among white Americans than black Americans is that the wage differential among black people is narrower than among white people. Narrower the gap, the more likely women are to be married.

As an aside, it's also true that there were a huge number of lesbians in second wave feminism, see Betty Friedan on the Lavendar Menace or any history book. It's for the same reason lesbians have been grossly overrepresented in American progressive social movements of all kinds (see Faderman): no babies=more time. It's also true that the movement women were largely white, but we shouldn't whitewash history, from Alice Walker to Barbara Smith to Audre Lorde, many black women were involved. See Sisterhood is Global. And as for actual support for women's liberation:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V11/9/mansbridge-j.html


#2.

>The people who says this are
>predominantly lower income/blue collar Black
>people who grew up in
>and around the inner cities.


I took a look at some state by state comparisons and teen pregnancies rates were much much higher in the South (missippi, missouri etc) than in the North, so I don't know about the inner city. But I'm glad you brought class into it, because...


I've got two step-cousins
>with 5 kids between them
>(Neither one is old enough
>to drink) because the guy
>wouldn't use condoms and they
>didn't protest.


How in God's name can you say this out of one side of your mouth and then say "as a Black man I'm not going to kid myself and say that society isn't more friendly to Black women then it is to Black men, because that's not true" out of the other. These girls didn't tell the guy to go fuck themselves because they based their self-esteem/hopes/etc on his approval. Their souls were crushed, as a black person, as a girl, as someone who is poor, as someone whose worth is defined by having a man, as someone who doesn't have that many other ways to get approval. Society made her want his attention more than she wanted to protect herself. And the poorer she is, the more isolated she is, the less hope she has, the more she is likely to give in. And then after she has a kid or two, she has a locus of female worth, and can assert herself. This is what the patriarchy *does*.





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The odds still favor croupiers,
But give the wheel another spin.
Things break down in different ways:
We can't, for that, omit their praise.
--Tom Disch, Entropic Villanelle