I thought it was joke when someone sent me the song “No Wedding, No Womb.” The catchy lyrics go something like this.
“I know you want it, but no wedding no womb” and “tragedy for the children of our community” and “my little girl wants her father but he’s not here” thrown in. Then it ends with the reading of statistics—about runaways and suicides and behavioral problems caused by “fatherless homes.” The statistics are meant to incite the sort of moral panic upon which such campaigns are built.
If this isn’t enough inspiration for you, you can watch a YouTube clip with various Black women insisting that they are worthwhile and therefore “No wedding, no womb!”
The song is part of a larger campaign led by Christelyn Denise Karazin to encourage Black women to stop having children out of wedlock. The campaign started September 22nd and is described as a national conversation of “scores of authors, attorneys, entertainers, skilled workers, media professionals and single and married mothers and fathers supporting this movement.”
This sort of campaign is of course built on “facts” like 72 percent of black children in the U.S. are born “out of wedlock” and marriage will free African Americans from “economic enslavement.” The campaign uses the high correlation between children being raised “out of wedlock” and a host of social ills, from poverty to behavioral problems, to claim that the answer to these ills is marriage.
There are also a lot of commonsensical claims, like on the No Wedding No Womb Web site, you can find out that “mothers can not physically be both mother and father, otherwise God would have created us in the likeness of hermaphroditic amoebas.”
Needless to say, the line between facts and lies is a thin one and the line between lies and statistics thinner still. And the sort of statistical hocus pocus of this campaign works very well to shore up the ideological claim that social ills are the result of individual “choices” rather than structural inequities that create these problems. Indeed, this campaign perfectly mimics the Bush administration’s “Healthy Marriage Initiative” rhetoric. The federal Healthy Marriage Initiative now receives about $300-million a year with the mission to teach people that getting married will increase their wealth.
Forget the fact that science has proven again and again that poverty is caused by lack of money and lack of opportunity, ideology argues that poor people are poor because of their individual actions and if they’d just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps or wedding rings then they too wouldn’t be poor because they’d magically have access to good education and steady employment.
And forget the fact that Americans who get married get divorced at least half of the time and divorce is correlated with loss of wealth. The assumption is that you get married, magic happens, and then you stay married. Racism solved. Unemployment solved. Bad schools and bad life trajectories and even bad parenting solved. All with a few fetish items like a diamond ring and a white dress, a few magic words spoken like “forever and ever,” and a bit of highly ritualized dancing, like the Macarena.
Like any primitive people, we Americans want to believe in magic and what could be more magical than the belief that individuals can solve structural problems with individual choices? But what makes the magical thinking of No Wedding No Womb scary, rather than funny, is just how it plays into a larger ideological war between Neoliberalism, on the one hand, an ideology that imagines social life as rugged individuals making choices in a free market, and a more sociological imagination, on the other.
A sociological account would place the issues of poverty and its effects on children in an economy where most Americans have been getting poorer, not because they are unmarried, but because of a myriad of structural shifts—from deindustrialization to the War on Drugs to the defunding of public schools to the whole scale transfer of wealth to the richest Americans aided by the deregulation of banking and tax breaks brought to us by none other than Neoliberal ideologues.
And once the structural elements that create poverty among children, especially Black children, are considered, the No Wedding No Womb campaign is no joke.
7 Responses to ‘No Wedding, No Womb’ No Joke
trendisnotdestiny - October 1, 2010 at 10:25 am
Laurie,Thanks for identifying this! This is the worst type of social darwinisism and narrative inflation that exists. Stories like these are multi-systemic in that they infect people through racialized stereotypes, false narratives and appealing to the worst of our natures: projected blame onto others who may not fully see the purpose is, but can form a ready-made explanation based on ignorant myths that fills gaps of why……This is exactly the type of reactions we can expect after nixing the Bush tax cuts for the top %2…. How ironic that the elite neoliberals cannot admit that they are responsible for the mass poverty, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, fraudulent financial practices, pay-to-play business model and whole host of scandalous processes leading to private wealth and public poverty…… I suppose if you owned a media company and wanted to change the growing anti-elite/wealth narrative, blaming poverty on black family structure provides a convenient change of topic from:1) Goldman Sachs & Banking Sector 2) Bernie Madoff & Ponzi Schemes3) Enron Leadership4) Birmingham Municipal Governance5) Massey Mines Worker Protection Plan6) Millions of Outsourced Jobs Overseas7) TARP Bank Bailouts8) CDO’s, SIV’s, CDS’s, Derivatives, Flash Trading9) 58,000 Offshore US Citizen Bank Accounts paying no tax10) Steroids, BP Oil Spills, Carcinogens in our drinking H2011) 45 Million people at or below the poverty line12) Health Insurance, College Tuition costs exploding13) Dilapidated Housing Market14) Millions of people on anti-depressants15) Millions of children/families on food stampsYeah right, whether couples are married or not has SO much to do with the erosion of society…. Laurie is quite correct, in that, these events are a function of larger economic forces (neoliberal) that also spew out through their megaphone of power:YOU ARE ON YOU’RE OWN, BUYER BEWARE, OWNERSHIP SOCIETY etc…. We have moved from an age of production to one of information; where profits are made through exploited differentials of large amounts of informations (using markets as the best way to capture this wealth). However, there is little if any other planning being done for the sustainability of this method in concert with dwindling or peaked natural resources, global climate change and our propensity to harm ourselves and others carelessly….Right now, the absolute last thing I account our problems for is whether an impoverished family decides to be unite or dissolve their marital relationship….
mavprof - October 1, 2010 at 11:54 am
Thanks, Ms Essig, for information on this worthy initiative to attempt to establish better families and futures among the poor.And for inadvertently making a good case for it by your unconvincing mockeries of it as “magical thinking” as well as your equally unconvincing assertions that its proponents are laboring under the groundless delusion (I believe Marxists refer to it as “ideology” in a pejorative sense, or “false consciousness”) that individuals are at least capable of effecting positive changes in their domestic, social, and economic standing possibly through the commitment of marriage. Specious also is your familiar Marxist attempt to seize the high ground of argument by claiming its “science” trumps all others’ mere “ideology.” On the other hand, this IS the sort of science that produces such wondrous apercus as “the fact that science has proven again and again that poverty is caused by a lack of money,” etc. Surely only those blind to “science,” or who are, as you so generously put it, “primitive,” might take this stunning revelation for some stale and worthless tautology. We can only hope that, flush with such enlightened social science revelations, we now might overthrow the altars of the Neoliberal idolaters and lay their idols of individualism as tribute before the omnipotent god of Structure, Who ruleth all.
unusedusername - October 1, 2010 at 12:54 pm
The political left has truly jumped off the deep end. If a conservative were trying to write a parody of liberal thinking, he would not be able to do a better job than this article. An article against marriage. Wow, just wow.
jffoster - October 1, 2010 at 1:59 pm
“A sociological account would place the issues of poverty and its effects on children in an economy where most Americans have been getting poorer…..”Be that as it may or may not, it wasn’t intended to be a “sociologic analysis”, or even an anthropological one. It was intended rather as good advice for the relevant individuals for the next week, month, and next few or more years. Their lives can’t wait for your “sociological analyses” to trickle down from the College on the Hill into some kind of practicable implementation.
arthist030 - October 2, 2010 at 12:00 am
Thanks for confirming that liberals can’t refrain from clothing their emotional responses and political preferences in the garb of “science.” This is why people don’t trust academia, and why professors don’t deserve the intellectual deference to which they desperately insist they are entitled.
arthist030 - October 2, 2010 at 12:03 am
By the way, anyone interested in a discussion of this topic that, unlike this one, cites actual facts and data, should consult the work of Kay Hymowitz.http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_marriage_gap.htmlhttp://www.manhattan-institute.org/marriage_and_caste/
ledzep - October 4, 2010 at 4:58 pm
“A sociological account would place the issues of poverty and its effects on children in an economy where most Americans have been getting poorer, not because they are unmarried, but because of a myriad of structural shifts”The question is not what the overall cause of poverty is, but whether women would do better to reserve childbearing for marriage or not. Presumably that would have to involve studies comparing groups from similar economic strata who did or did not have a mother and father growing up. But at the point in your piece in which you come to that, you simply appeal to some easy and lazy lines about the thin line between facts, lies and statistics. How convenient it is to appeal to what science has proven when it agrees with you, and to have enough post-modern cred to glide over inconvenient statistics without even addressing their quality, provenance, accuracy, or the like! If the statistics they use are bunk, make the case that they are bunk.The whole conceit of this piece is of the following structure: imagine a public health campaign for people to wash their hands to avoid the flu. Clearly that’s just an ideological attempt to get people to avoid the structural problems of poverty, that expose people to disease at higher rates based on their class status! And any figures about rates of disease transmission and hand-washing practices are just near-lies intended to paper over the distinction between structural problems and individual actions. Down with neoliberalism!