Problem: Rampant black illegitimacy is a major embarrassment to racial egalitarians. Solution: Redefine “parent.”

Kay Hymowitz writing at the Corner reveals a remarkable statistical legerdemain by the Census Bureau, facilitated by the evil, conscienceless New York Times. In order to make it appear that “two parent black families are making gains,” they redefined “parents” as “any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents.”

Thus the ubiquitous black boyfriend, a.k.a. the m*****f****r, the scourge of black society, has been redefined as a parent!

- end of initial entry -

Anthony Damato writes:

I did not know black boyfriends were called “m*****Fers. This must be an old reference.

The last I heard, mainly minorities, though ghettoized whites as well, call each other “baby daddy” or “baby momma”, i.e., the father or mother of the baby born out of wedlock.

These phrases have wide usage by blacks and have the effect of trivializing the seriousness of broken homes.

LA replies:

I always thought mother*****r was just a low-level put-down, meaning someone who ***** his own mother. Then some years ago I read that it had a different origin: it meant the boyfriend of one’s mother. Maybe further research will reveal that that’s incorrect, but it makes sense, and has a real meaning and applicability to black life, unlike its use as a moronic put-down.

John B. writes:

I am like Mr. Damato in having never heard mother*****r used the way you used it; but the moment I read it in your sentence, I was struck by the sense of it.

I’m reminded of a scene in River’s Edge, a film that, as I recently learned at VFR, falsifies the race of the murderer whose crime inspired it. Keanu Reeves plays a youth who gets into an argument with his mother’s live-in boyfriend. Responding to the man’s suggestions that he (Reeves) knows something about the murder, Reeves says, “Why should you care? You just stay around here to f*** my mother and eat her food.” This triggers an angry response from the man, whom Reeves then addresses scornfully: “Mother*****r! Food eater!”

December 19

Philip M. writes from England:

On a tangent, the spread of this ugly word, as well as the awful “babymother” are graphic ilustrations of the influence of black culture on white society. I was interested to discover reading Malcolm X’s autobiography that “Hippie/Hippy” had been used in the 1940s to describe a white man who had immersed himself in black culture (like a “wigger” today) and who acted black. Today, the term is synonymous with white, middle-class youth. It is interesting to speculate on how this adoption of black cultural norms by a small subset of whites in the 1940s jazz clubs may have become the free-love, drug-taking anti-authoritarian movement of the ’60s.

The importation of non-white cultural norms happens without much thought or acknowledgement, and so the greatest sociological changes happen without our really considering the change. It occured to me only a little while ago that everyone who has grown up from the 1950s/60s onwards in America, and then the West will be used to dancing by jumping around to a drum beat. When was the last time—before the advent of pop music—that whites did this? I find it hard (and disconcerting) to imagine my mediaeval forbears comporting themselves in such a manner (LOL now I’ve started talking like my dad).

PS the wearing of trousers halfway down your arse is something I will forever reserve the right mercilessly to mock white people for. Same goes for dreadlocks.

PPS—I have heard the trouser thing stems from blacks getting out of prison and having had their belts confiscated, not being able to hold their trousers up. With one in 20 black men being in prison in the USA, this demonstrates the central role of prison as an environment in which blacks come together and create a lot of the language and “culture” under discussion. In what other institution in America would blacks come together in such large numbers?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 18, 2008 10:47 AM | Send