Friday, April 24, 2009

Suppressing Black Fertility

My Idiot Brother in Law loves "the black family". Black people? Not so much. He wants to see "intact" black families and an end to the high rate of bastardy among black people. He uses the term "illegitimacy", but I prefer bastardy because it has a nice ring to it. What he really wants to see is an end to the births of bastards. He wants poor black women to wait until they are married and are established financially to reproduce and then to reproduce at less than replacement rates like white people. It's for their own good, you see. Those bastards would be better off if they had never been born. How does he propose to suppress black fertility? Cut off all public asistance of any kind. That's it. That's the solution to the "problem" of too many black births.Ultimately, underlying all of IBIL's talk of helping blacks by not helping them and freeing them from the cycle of dependency is his conviction that black people are the problem.

IBIL doesn't propose to do anything about the particular constraints under which black folks live or to make marriage any more of an option than it already is. He reckons that their community and families will grow stronger through suffering and that, best of all, fewer black children will end up being born than under the current system. This is not likely to be the case if impoverished populations in other parts of the world are illustrative, but it would nonetheless satisfy IBIL because it takes away benefits from black folks whom he hates.

I reckon that a more humane means of suppressing fertility among young black women would be to increase their opportunity costs of reproduction by taking steps to ensure that they actually have opportunities to sacrifice. This assumes that suppression of black fertility is your goal.

1 comment:

b-psycho said...

Of course he automatically assumes that most black women are on welfare, and further that they see welfare as lucrative enough worth having kids for extra benefits. Nice...