DCentric

On September 22, some bloggers participated in a “virtual protest” called “No Wedding, No Womb”– an attempt to force a conversation about out-of-wedlock births in the black community. NPR’s Michel Martin spoke with Christelyn Karazin, the founder of NWNW on “Tell Me More”; Karazin told Martin that she felt like “we need to do something.” The ever thoughtful G.D. over at PostBourgie wasn’t impressed:

There are reasons besides the push’s barely masked antifeminism to be ambivalent about this whole endeavor. The movement has the stunty feel of holding funerals for (the “n-word”) or stomping on hip-hop CDs (‘member those?) with explicit lyrics; it’s taken a tricky issue and reduced it to a bunch of folks being showily indignant…You can’t really change broad social trends by appealing to people’s feelings; you have to actually change the conditions that inform the calculus by which people make the decisions they make. It’s annoying to have to even say this, but keeping black men out of jail or bringing up high school graduation rates or whatever might actually require more complex solutions than getting enough people to wag their fingers really, really hard.

One last point before I return to blogging silence. We should lament that these conversations are always framed as conversations about “black issues.” Every trend that disproportionately affects black folks in the aggregate does not affect all black folks everywhere, nor does it play out in the lives of all the affected black folks in the same ways. I’m not interested in being the arbiter of who gets to weigh in on which conversations, but it’s worth remembering that growing up in a two-parent, middle class Seattle home doesn’t mean that a person’s Negritude grants some special insight about the forces that shape the lives of folks who live in the projects of East New York.

And if you were in the mood for more, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reaction to NWNW is a good, quick read, too.