Two radical left-wing organizations are trying to “remove bias from black family narratives in the media,” according to Variety, and they've put together a handy guide to help you keep track of which words and phrases have been officially cancelled.
The 49 page document, which dropped on October 13, is called “Changing the Narrative About Black Families” and is intended “to aid in avoiding inaccurate and/or biased language that might turn society, or an audience, against Black people and Black families.”
It was put together by the Soros-funded Color of Change, which describes itself as “the nation’s largest online racial justice organization,” and Family Story, which says it “works to address and dismantle family privilege in America.” Yes, seriously.
They want to ban certain words and it’s straight out of the Black Lives Matter anti-nuclear family playbook. Among their list of “harmful terms” are “Broken Family” / “Broken Home,” “Absentee Fathers,” “Out of Wedlock,” and “Baby Mama” / “Baby Daddy,” all of which they claim are not used to refer to white families in similar situations.
Leonydus Johnson, a black father and husband and host of the “Informed Dissent” podcast, decried the “policing of language” and told Newsbusters the groups are “attempting to either deflect away from the truth of issues or to assert control over others by arbitrarily altering language in a way that serves their agenda.”
Indeed, “Changing the Narrative" veers away from the truth and makes some astounding claims in attacking the use of the word "broken" to describe a family:
Black families are not “broken” and do not need to be fixed... In reality, family structure (i.e., a family’s “brokenness” or “intactness”) has nothing to do with whether or not a family is healthy or harmful. There is no correlation between family structure and crime, but rather between poverty and crime.
Calling this argument “absurd,” Johnson explained:
Far too much research has been done to dismiss the impacts broken families have on children. When a child without a father is 5 times more likely to be in poverty, 9 times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up prison, there is clearly something going on in the family dynamic that cannot be ignored. You cannot ignore that, in 2018, 24.9% of single-mothers, of all races, were in poverty compared to 4.7% of married couples according to the US Census Bureau. And when 66% of black households with children are single-mother households, what do we expect the outcomes to be?
Additionally, the claim that family structure doesn’t correlate with crime but poverty does is complete nonsense because family structure correlates with poverty. … And, as I stated, fatherlessness specifically heavily correlates with criminality. That isn’t to say there aren’t great single mothers who do heroic work. But the numbers don’t lie. Kids have an exponentially higher likelihood of succeeding when growing up in households with both parents.
The guide goes on to blame absentee fatherism on how “systemic racism has taken many Black fathers away from their families and communities through mass incarceration and early death,” making the same debunked arguments we’ve heard from BLM a million times.
The report described “out of wedlock” as “an antiquated, sexist term… often used to cast judgment on single mothers and is a dog-whistle that elicits racist ‘welfare queen’ stereotypes.” They blame “right-wing Christian ministries and conservative think tanks” and “their larger agenda of so-called ‘family values:’”
It is rooted in their mission to defend patriarchy (male dominance and privilege) and their fears about the changing roles of women in society. It is also part of a clear political strategy to gain power by controlling all aspects of family life: choices about marriage, work life, having children, education, child care and more.
“What’s the difference between having a ‘blended family’ and having ‘baby daddies’ or ‘baby mamas’?” asks the report. Apparently, when white people use the latter term, it’s a “dangerous stereotype that suggests Black people make casual and irresponsible family planning decisions.”
But no matter what it’s called or who says it, Johnson opposes the culture that gave birth to it. “I would say that Baby Daddy/Mama culture is destroying black lives more than anything else,” he said. “The reality is that there is a very real culture in these communities that promotes promiscuity, shirking responsibility, defying authority, and victimhood. And that culture is the single greatest barrier to success to those within it.
The vast majority of people’s outcomes, regardless of race, are self-determined. That means that the situation you find yourself in is almost entirely due to your own behaviors and the choices that you made. If you end up in prison, it isn’t because the cops or judge or the lawyers are racist. It’s almost certainly because you made poor choices. That message doesn’t sit well because people want to be told that it isn’t their fault. They want to be told that racism is holding them back, that white people are keeping them down, that somehow words, themselves, are oppressing them. That’s foolishness. Grab the reigns and take responsibility for yourself. It is individual behavior that is the problem, not the description of it.
It's not about the narrative, Johnson concluded, “We don’t need to change the words. We need to change the culture.”
