Our Bonds Are Broken: Why Communities of Color Keep Suffering
6. The Breaking Apart of Families
PROBLEM: Where do we begin with this “baby daddy” and “baby mama” language we’ve been pushing for the past two decades? Our language around family is becoming so toxic that we don’t even have the guts to admit that the terms, “baby mama” and “baby dada” are RI-DIC-U-LOUS, or that the n-word doesn’t mean “brother,” it means the n-word!
SOLUTION: Family is so sacred: our families have bestowed us with long-fought African-American, Latino, Asian-American, legacies in this country for years. We shouldn’t mar those legacies with the low standards and structures we’ve been accepting for ourselves? We need to increase our standards and change our language! If you had three and four baby mamas and daddies and you actually married them, and every time you had to refer to them as your ex-wife or ex-husband, you would be forced to reflect on what it means to have three ex-wives and ex-husbands, rather than three “baby mamas” and “baby daddies!” You would be forced to dig into yourself and own up to your failed relationships, rather than trying to camouflage them through your kids and saying “baby”-mama/daddy as if the baby had anything to do with why you can’t keep a home. It’s almost like, we’re the babies here—and it’s time to grow up.
