Sampling Again: Shawn Carter and the Moynihan Report Remix

Sampling Again: Shawn Carter and the Moynihan Report Remix

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

I have resisted the temptation to write about the media spectacle surrounding the recent birth of Blue Ivy Carter.  The obsession has been striking on so many levels: (1) it seems to reflect a desire to represent Shawn Carter and Beyoncé as royalty.  Their cultural visibility and power reaffirms a narrative about the American Dream and post racialness. Blue Ivey Carter becomes evidence of multi-generational wealth; her arrival in the world affirms the American Dream as Beyoncé and Shawn Carter now have millions of dollars AND the prescribed family structure (not sure about dog and picket fence).   (2) There also seems an investment in constructing hip-hop as growing up as evident by a politics of respectability and through a patriarchal nuclear family. The media discourse has imagined a family (or children) as the necessary step toward becoming an adult. 

Mark Anthony Neal brilliantly reflects on this particular aspect, noting how the media has constructed Carter as ushering in a new era for hip-hop.  “There are of course other examples of rapperswho do take parenting seriously.”  More importantly, Neal works to disentangle lyrical flow from parenting: 

To be sure, writing a song about your daughter is the easy part. Fathers are often lauded for the more celebrated aspects of parenting: playing on the floor, piggyback rides, the warm embraces after a long day at the job. Mothers, on the other hand, are often faced with the drudgery of parenting, like changing soiled diapers, nursing, giving up their careers to be stay-at-home moms, and the criticism that comes if they don’t live up to societal notions of what “good” mothering is. 

The celebration of Shawn Carter’s fatherhood and the lack of commentaries regarding Beyoncé as a mother are telling on so many levels.  At one level, it reflects the erasure of mother’s labor, as noted by Neal.  Yet, at another level it reflects the desire to stage yet another referendum on black fathers and mothers within the public discourse.  For example, Joanna Mallory recently penned: “Jay-Z anthem to fatherhood is music to the ears of black leaders and family advocates.”  Arguing that, “72% of African-American kids are raised without a dad,” Mallory celebrates the birth of Blue Ivey Carter because she inspired her dad to write “Glory:

“But she is also rich in love, as Jay-Z exults in his song “Glory.” The best part? A lot of other babies are going to benefit. Because Jay-Z’s ecstatic reaction to being a dad will be the strongest boost yet to a growing movement in the black community encouraging responsible fatherhood.

Concluding that the song is a necessary remedy for absent black fathers is emblematic of the media discourse here: sensationalistic, simplistic, and wrapped up in a narrative of distortions, misinformation, and stereotypes.  It is yet another reminder those critics should not wax sociological. 

Having already written about this in regards to Colin Cowherd and Touré, I thought I might just recycle part of the “Blaming Black Families” piece, albeit with a little remix (I swapped out Cowherd’s name for Mallory).  The fact that critics, politicians, and the public discourse continually recycles the same fallacious and troubling argument mandates that I merely recycle my work as well.

The efforts to recycle the Moynihan report, to define father as natural disciplinarian and mother’s nurturing, to link cultural values to family structures, and to otherwise play upon longstanding racial stereotypes, is striking.

First and foremost, the idea that 71% of black children grow up without fathers is at one level the result of a misunderstanding of facts and at another level the mere erasure of facts.  It would seem that Ms. Mallory is invoking the often-cited statistics that 72% of African American children were born to unwed mothers, which is significantly higher than the national average of 40 %.  Yet, this statistic is misleading and misused as part of a historically defined white racial project.  

First and foremost, children born into an unmarried family is not the same is growing up without a father.  In fact, only half of African American children live in single-family homes.  Yet, this again, only tells part of the story.   The selective invoking of these statistics, while emblematic of the hegemony of heterosexist patriarchy, says very little about whether or not a child grows up with two parents involved in their lives.  According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a sizable portion of those children born to single mothers are born into families that can be defined as “marriage like.”  32% of unmarried parents are engaged in ‘visiting unions” (in a romantic relationship although living apart), with 50% of parents living together without being married.  In other words, the 72% says little about the presence of black fathers (or mothers for that matter).

Likewise, this 72% number says very little about the levels of involvement of fathers (and mothers), but rather how because of the media, popular culture and political discourses, black fatherhood is constructed “as an oxymoron” all while black motherhood is defined as “inadequate” and “insufficient.”  According to the introduction for The Myth of the Missing Black Father, edited by Roberta L. Coles and Charles Green,

It would be remiss to argue that there are not many absent black fathers, absence is only one slice of the fatherhood pie and a smaller slice than is normally thought. The problem with "absence," as is fairly well established now, is that it’s an ill defined pejorative concept usually denoting nonresidence with the child, and it is sometimes assumed in cases where there is no legal marriage to the mother. More importantly, absence connotes invisibility and noninvolvement, which further investigation has proven to be exaggerated (as will be discussed below). Furthermore, statistics on children’s living arrangements also indicate that nearly 41 percent of black children live with their fathers, either in a married or cohabiting couple household or with a single dad.

Countless studies substantiate the fallacies that guide claims about absentee black fathers.  For example, while black fathers are the least likely to be living with or married to the mother, they are much more likely to be involved and engaged with their children. 

For instance, Carlson and McLanahan’s (2002) figures indicated that only 37 percent of black nonmarital fathers were cohabiting with the child (compared to 66 percent of white fathers and 59 percent of Hispanic), but of those who weren’t cohabiting, 44 percent of unmarried black fathers were visiting the child, compared to only 17 percent of white and 26 percent of Hispanic fathers (in Coles and Green).

In total, Mallory misrepresents reality, once again recycling a narrative about absentee black fathers and ineffective black mothers. In other words, “non-residence” is not the same as being absentee; it says nothing about involvement and the quality of parenting. 

Mallory’s focus on “bad parents,” her efforts to blame parents, her desire to reimagine black families as places where fathers are not invested in raising children, a fact that could change if they listen to “Glory,” is both a fallacy based in racial assumptions and one that lets society off-the-hook.  It puts the onus on black fathers rather than a criminal justice system that has systemically broken up black families.  As I noted previously:

According to a report entitled “Children of Incarcerated Parents,” in 2007 America was home to 1.7 million children (under 18) whose parent was being held in state or federal prison – that is 2.3 percent of American children will likely be celebrating father’s day away from dad.  Despite hegemonic clamoring about family values, the prison industrial complex continues to ravage American families.  Since 1991, the number of children with a father in prison has increased from 881,500 to 1.5 million in 2007.  Over this same time period, children of incarcerated mothers increased from 63,900 to 147,400.  Roughly half of these children are younger than 9, with 32 percent being between the ages of 10 and 14. 

The problem is even more pronounced when looking at Black and Latino fathers.  The numbers are startling: 1 in 15 black children lives away from their parent because of incarceration.  For Latinos that number is 1 in 41, compared to 1 in 110 for white children. . .

The systematic efforts to break-apart families, destroy communities, and separate fathers and mothers from their children is a direct result of the incarceration of drug users.  According to Alexander, as of 2005, 4 in 5 drug arrests were for possession by individuals with no history of violence; in the 1990s alone, a period that saw a massive expansion of America’s war on drug users, 80 percent of those sent to prison were done so for marijuana possession.  Yet, again we see how this is not a war on drugs or even illicit drug use, but use within the black community even though whites are far more likely to use illegal drugs.  In a number of states, between 80 and 90 percent of all drug convictions have been of African Americans.

In his “99 problems,” Jay gives voice to this new Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander’s work),

In my rear view mirror is the mother fuckin' law
I got two choices y'all pull over the car or (hmmm)
Bounce on the devil put the pedal to the floor
Now i ain't tryin' to see no highway chase for Jay
Plus i got a few dollars i can fight the case
So i...pull over to the side of the road
i heard "Son do you know what i'm stoppin' you for?"
Cause i'm young and i'm black and my hats real low
But do i look like a mind reader sir, i don't know
Am i under arrest or should i guess some mo'?
"Well you was doin fifty-five in a fifty-four"
"License and registration and step out of the car"

Of course he is not alone, part of hip-hops efforts to give voice and challenge the racism of America’s war on drugs—aka  the war on black America, black families, mothers, fathers, and children.  It isn’t simply about symbolic gestures or “role models,” but challenging both the lies and the systems that produce the new Jim Crow.

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.