Maury is NOT my Baby-Daddy!

An angry ex once referred to me as a "highly sexualized mammy" in a 3 page Facebook message... Yeah. Really. As I sat staring at the screen, mouth agape, eyes narrowed, my mind flashed back to those many Afro-Am classes I've taken over the years that have described America's conceptualization of Black women as that very phrase. Alas, Black women are always being called out of their names, especially when perceived as a threat to the following: 1- The Black man's ego 2- The White man's ego 3- The White woman's social status (not in that particular order). Not surprisingly, Black women are reduced to a homogenized mass of eye rollin', neck poppin', bust-it-baby, highly sexualized baby's mammies.

What's most terrifying about all of this is that even our future First Lady, Princeton Undergraduate and Harvard Law Degree wielding, Michelle Obama isn't immune to these conceptions of the Black woman. If even she isn't upheld in high esteem by mainstream America, how will WE be percieved after graduating from our top-tiered universities? In the year 2008, with an increasing amount of Black women graduating from college, where are these perceptions still coming from? We should all blame Maury...and VH1.





No disrespect to actual Baby Mama's, but the damned-near fetishization of the Baby Mama by the media has become destructive to the point where I hear 11- year- old girls referring to their 11 -year- old crushes as their "baby daddies." Will someone please inform these children that bein' a baby mama/daddy is not something one should aspire to be? Sure, things happen. The sky-high incarceration rate of our Black men is alarming, and many successful Black women are opting to have children out of wedlock due to a so-called lack in successful Black men, etc, but let's not get out of hand here in allowing our daughters and sons to think that baby-mamadom is the ONLY way.

Of course, it is entertaining watching Maury's guest scream and run off stage when sex buddy number 12 is NOT the father. Somehow, though, I can't imagine that a mother explaining to her child that she doesn't know who (or where) Daddy is, is as entertaining. I also can't imagine that hearing New York's orgasmic moans for an hour or watching that nasty looking Flava Flav have sex with 14 beautiful...ahem...young ladies helps our younger generation figure out where they fit in amongst doctors, lawyers, pimps, and "highly sexualized mammies."



I don't place all of the blame on The Maury Show and VH1, though, because somewhere between the Million Man March and this November's upcoming elections, Black identity became jumbled up with Uncle Luke videos and the Cosby Show. No wonder I sometimes hear my college- educated friends referring to their significant others as baby-daddies and mama's- we get confused between what's real and false illusion when it comes to who we are as a generation. I'm also not implying that there's a simple solution, but instead of banning the N-word, I'm going to ban the phrase "baby-daddy" from my vocabulary. I am NOT anyone's baby-mama.