In the generation where having a two parent household is as rare as seeing a unicorn, let's shine some light on the hardest working group of people: single mothers. Coming from a household where my mother was the only provider, I have personally gotten to see how much work it takes to raise children on your own. As of 2014 roughly 66 percent of African-American children are raised in a single-parent household. The statistics are the harsh realities for most African American children. The underlying question is why?
The only answer I have been able to fathom, about the outrageous odds of actually having a two parent household in the black community, is that there is no self love within our community. In a society where the odds are put against African Americans already, there needs to be a change to the black family and roles. There are entirely too many single, black mothers forced to raise children on their own.
Most crimes in the black communities are stemmed from the environment. Like anyone, if you are forced into an environment, you will do what needs to be done to adapt and survive. In areas where most of the community is living below poverty, crimes are more likely to occur.
Children are a reflection of their parents and how they were raised, and sometimes being a single mother can make it difficult to positively raise your children. In cases where single moms are forced to work 40+ hours per week in order to give their children the best they can, children may not have the proper guidance. This situation happens entirely too much, and can cause children to veer into harsh environments, like gang banging and selling drugs. Leading to another black male on the streets, in jail, or dead.
For black mothers it is a struggle to raise boys into men without an actual man in their presence. Every child deserves the love of their father, especially boys. Without the needed guidance in their life, the cycle of the black community will never change. It takes a village to raise a child, and in order to continue to raise children who may become the next Barack or Michelle Obama, we need to rebuild our village.
So what exactly needs to be done? Changes.
Us as a community need to know the meaning of love.
Self love, love for each other, and love of our culture.
1. We first need to instill self love into our children. Parents needs to make sure they enforce the positive energy of loving yourself into children as young as possible. Teaching a child to love themselves and to love being black will help the future, and will bring them closer to loving others.
2. As a community, black people have been told they were too less to do many things. For 200+ years black people were brainwashed into not loving themselves, and each other. Now in this generation, black people are doing exactly what was done to us years ago: bashing each other to further separate the community. If black people stood together as a community and loved each other as much as we should, a change could actually happen. Black men need to learn how to love their black women. The black man could be the most powerful group if they learned how to make family the number one priority again.
3. With the many incidents happening in the United States, it is clear to quote Michael Jackson, "They don't really care about us." That's the truth! In order for changes to be done within the community, we need to be the change. We need to learn how to love being black again. As a community, we need to help other black people and stand behind black excellence.
The black community has a long way to go to be considered equal, but in order to see changes we have to change ourselves. With these changes there's not doubt in my mind that our community can change. In order to do so, we need to put differences and hate aside and love.
A big shout out to all the single mothers who bust their *sses off to make sure their family is stable. And an even bigger shout out to the fathers present in their children's lives. Family is everything, make it a priority again.
