Great sites for being Black and Married!

http://blackandmarriedwithkids.com/

http://www.happilyeverafterthemovie.com/

http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-op_malonecolon_0830aug30,0,3101162.story

Why the black community can't talk about marriage
by Malone-Colon

Ask yourself: When is the last time you heard a public leader talk about the crisis in marriage and family and why it is urgent that as a country we give our attention to this crisis and its consequences? The answer is probably never or rarely.
What is being proposed by these leaders to address the dramatic increases in children born out of wedlock (72 percent for African-Americans), divorce, cohabitation, those who never marry and the decline in marital quality?

The Racist Origins of U.S. Family-Planning Policy

by Daniel Patrick Moloney
May 05, 2009
The senators who originally designed our family planning policies believed that the mostly black welfare population was incurably lazy, promiscuous, intellectually substandard, and a burden on public schools, and, moreover, that they probably would remain so indefinitely. Birth control, therefore, was in their eyes a way to reduce the number of these undesirable people. This article is the second installment in a three-part series.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.05.05.001.pdart

Forcing the Poor to Stop Having Children

by Daniel Patrick Moloney

“Family planning services reduce costs.” That’s what Speaker Nancy Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. She was defending a provision in the original stimulus bill that would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars for birth control. Republicans had criticized this provision, and so the Speaker responded that promoting contraception among poor people would both stimulate the economy and save the government money on welfare payments.

As the video clip shot around the web, public reaction was intense, and overwhelmingly negative—how could anybody think that preventing poor people from being born was the moral way to help poor people out of poverty? It had the air of eugenics about it, as if she were saying that one generation of poor people is enough. Even the liberal partisan Chris Matthews thought Pelosi’s position resembled China’s one-child policy. In response to the backlash, the President told Pelosi to remove the contraception funding from the stimulus bill.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.05.01.002.pdart

Good news, Bad News on the black family

According to the NYT, The good news is that more black children are living with two parents.

The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data....
According to the bureau’s estimates, the number of black children living with two parents was 59 percent in 1970, falling to 42 percent in 1980, 38 percent in 1990 and 35 percent in 2004. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, it was 40 percent.

The bad news is that it may be just a statistical artifact of having changed the definitions:

The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents....
“The unmarried parent was invisible,” Professor Cherlin said. Given a new category, “living with both parents, not married to each other,” he added, “I think the news is that the Census Bureau estimates that about 3 percent of American children are living with two unmarried parents. Because of the increases in living-together relationships, this is probably a higher figure than a generation ago.”

Now, if we just increase the actual marriage rate, the kids would really benefit.