Recently there’s been another bout of conversation on Black Twitter regarding parents “showing up” for their single, childless friends. People calling themselves DINKs (dual income, no kids) are once again discussing how their alleged friends don't show up for them in tangible ways. Tangibility seems to amount to gift giving or physically showing up to events that are decidedly child unfriendly. People seem to forget that childcare costs money. The luxury brigade tends to focus on the transactional aspects of this issue, while others reference the unpredictability of children’s behavior and how they just want their event to be “nice.” This has been discussed in regard to public places ranging from Disney World to airplanes, and weddings. There has even been discourse that implied that black people having children is limiting our ability to achieve generational wealth. All of this discourse implicitly works toward a conception of lower class and impoverished children, parents, elders, and disabled people as potentially or inherently dysgenic—causing a detrimental effect on the race. In this, those who poor are viewed as “breeding with impunity,” constructed as surplus (laborers) or dependents. By “surplus” I mean disposable.
I think of Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s 2011 essay “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game” when discussing “the colonized as pest” in particular. Mavhunga asks: “[W]hat are the material consequences of relegation from human being to vermin being (a past or nuisance that must be eliminated)? […] Vermin (the nonhuman) are not only pests to be controlled but also actors that coproduce and impact their would be controllers.” As “blacks” we are always already thought of “in relation to” (the white), conceived of as “surplus” and without use unless we should achieve some measure of economic success and wealth to pass on to our progeny. It is surmised in some anthropological writings that Western cultures have tended to place more value on “wealth-in-things.” This, of course, is an oversimplification since we know that “white” people also tend to derive wealth from their connections and networks from which we are often excluded as “nonwhite.” Wealth-in-people is a concept developed by anthropologists to describe systems wherein power, influence, and status are achieved via mediation through the number of one’s dependents, followers, relatives, and affiliations. It is usually used to describe certain regions in West and Central Africa. Societies like this are not inherently anticapitalist. When a population becomes marked as surplus (or slave), broken, or untouchable—whether nigger, black, dalit, or ohu/osu—the “right” to have children is suspended, constantly in question or peril. Our children, as an extension of us, are viewed as pests. Only once they are able to contribute to society through their labor will they be seen as useful.
We cannot fully approach the issue of the exclusion of children from what were originally communal events and public spaces without also probing the racialization of the notion of privacy in the American corpus. We also cannot begin to get to the root of the problem without discussing elitism and ableism in regard to beings whose existence is viewed as burdensome or inconvenient due to their alleged uselessness. Hostility towards children often indicates a larger problem in society having to do with accommodation, accessibility, value, and care. We must also question the fetishization of unencumbered youth and the negative construction of impoverished, disabled, and blackened populations as dependents. Extended periods of youth have always been afforded to the middle and upper classes. Following the 20th century’s bourgeois conceptualization of the American teenager alongside the advent of the affordable car, compulsory education, and leisure culture, extended childhood and youth became something for the lower (and more often disabled) classes to yearn for—youth as a socioeconomic achievement. Following the Reagan-inspired act of charging for public universities and colleges in the 1960s, black youth and older adults, though slightly more educated, are saddled with educational debt. However, education only seems to have only increased the desire for an unencumbered youth, even as the gap between the black elite and the freed poor grows wider. Children are decidedly an impediment to the goal of solvency.
All animals seek to reproduce or generate offspring. Many limit their offspring in times of famine or other environmental stress. Perhaps we should look upon this discourse as an extension of that, the natural order of things. However, this would require us to ignore manufactured (racialized) poverty and to assume nonhuman animals to be unthinking, to be acting on instinct. It also requires us to ignore the manufacturers of said disparities. Those of us who are things, who are still striving against being marked as moveable property, as laborers or useless beings, or as marked for disposal, are also thought of as “acting on instinct,” as not having the luxury of considering whether or not we can “afford” children. Thus we return to the idea of the child is/as a dependent, the child as a construction used to filter our hatred of other things. When we desire to promote an ethics of protection we liken women and other positively constructed groups to the child. When we want to denigrate blacks and poors we refer to the child-as-dependent, the child as parasite, the child as in need of strict control and surveillance. In (black) parenting discourse the child is described as in need of “positive” and “gentle” parenting that can only be given if one has resources and “plans” a child that they can then mold to be a proper citizen.
In this, the implicit idea is that negatively constructed groups could not possibly raise a “well-adjusted” child. For what would you be rearing them to adjust to? Thus we are continuously bombarded with discourse about the cruelty of black and poor parents, of disabled, dysgenic peoples who have the gall to reproduce. What future are we condemning them to as a futureless people? And finally, we witness the child, not as the fulfillment of our hopes, desires, and future prospects, but as inherently indebted, or as a detriment to our way of life. We lament our existence. We ignore genocide. We decide that these dysgenic peoples are simply in need of correction, of discipline, some of us relegating our parents to the pile: “Black parents be like…” Unable to conform to the standards of proper heteronormative being, the construction of the “typical” American family places freed people outside of white (hetero)normativity. In simpler terms, blackness is, in effect, negatively sexed or (dys)gendered. Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report on “The Negro Family” haunts Black Twitter discourse. Still we are in need of “gentle” correction and direction from the black elite, those DuBoisian race managers, the middlemen who negotiate our right to existence and mitigate our disposal.