Ohhh my Lawd...Lawd...Lawd...Lawd!
Mmmmm-hmmm....
Mmmm-hmmm...
'Round these parts, we call this the Coon Roll Call (or CRC). Whenever I see something that's outrageous, so ghetto, so ni--...do I need to repeat the rest? I just remember this scene from Glory.
Oh my Lawd....Lawd...Lawd....Lawd!!!
Today I'm doing the CRC because of this story sent to me by a friend. It's about a 15-year-old who just had a baby. Not desirable, but it happens. But here's the anomaly: the 15-year-old's momma is 29.
A grandma at 29?
Oh my Lawd....Lawd...Lawd....Lawd!!!!
Remember when Bernie Mac said one of the biggest problems in the black community is that Big Momma got wiped out. Y'all know Big Momma, don't you? Big Momma was often the matriarch of the black family. The strong one. The wise one. The storyteller. The one with a strong sense of right and wrong, forgiveness and sadness. Basically, she was the Mama from Soul Food. Or, Maya Angelou.
Lots of things strengthen families, but one thing that's time-honored is a sense of oral history within a family. You need to have that figure, man or woman, that's lived through several decades, who can attest to world and family changes. If grandmothers are great-grandmotheres are suddenly drastically younger, the family itself faces stunted growth. What wisdom could a 29-year-old pass down to a 15-year-old? Maybe they can Soulja Boy together, but that's about it.
Yes, I realize there are some very bright 29 year olds. I'd like to think I was one of them. But even my scope of the world was limited at that age, and I had gone to college and traveled to a variety of different countries. Here we have a 29 year old who become a mother at 13, trying to pass down something to a girl who became a mother at 15. Obviously, the one thing she didn't pass down was an adequate talk about reproduction because the cycle still continued. Trifling begats trifling. And think about the odds of the 29-year-old grandmother being a great-grandmother. I'm betting she'll be one by the time she's 50. Easily.
All that being said, journalistically, there's a ton of things wrong with this story. It's lazy journalism. In the first couple of paragraphs, the journalist admits that teen pregnancies have dropped nationally and locally. So, the journalists finds a perfect mainstream stereotype -- a young, black woman who had a baby by another baby. As Morris Chestnut said in Best Man, the consummate-mother-whore. Nice.
Oh my Lawd...Lawd...lawd....Lawd!!
Mmmm-hmmmmm....
