By Elaine Bell Kaplan
Probably the most worrisome photos in the USA this day is that of the teenage mom. For the African-American group, that picture is principally troubling: the entire difficulties of the welfare procedure appear to highlight the black teenage mother. Elaine Bell Kaplan's affecting and insightful publication dispels universal perceptions of those younger ladies. Her interviews with the ladies themselves, and with their moms and grandmothers, offer a bright photograph of lives stuck within the intersection of race, category, and gender.Kaplan demanding situations the belief conveyed within the well known media that the African-American group condones teenager being pregnant, unmarried parenting, and reliance on welfare. specifically telling are the emotions of frustration, anger, and sadness expressed by means of the moms and grandmothers Kaplan interviewed. And in hearing teenage moms speak about their difficulties, Kaplan hears first-hand in their misunderstandings relating to intercourse, their fraught relationships with males, and their problems with the tutorial system--all components that endure seriously on their prestige as younger parents.Kaplan's personal adventure as an African-American teenage mom provides a private measurement to this publication, and she or he bargains sizeable proposals for rethinking and reassessing the category components, gender kinfolk, and racism that effect black children to turn into moms.
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Extra resources for Not Our Kind of Girl: Unravelling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood
Sample text
Suddenly, the loud whirring noise of a police helicopter's rotors overhead interrupted our conversation. "Surely it will go away," I said. She seemed to take the ― 64 ― noise in stride as she informed me that the police may have been keeping us under surveillance as possible drug dealers. I laughed at the vision of me being handcuffed and hauled into the police station as a suspect. De Vonya, alert and healthy, did not seem to be involved in drugs; nor did little La Shetta, who lay contentedly in her stroller, show signs of malnutrition or other problems associated with a mother's drug abuse.
Why do you think she called the worker? 'Cause my mother wanted me to come home and she was trippin' off that. I guess she didn't want me to stay with my auntie. But I knew that's where I wanted to be. Roleta believed her mother's need to reassert her role as a mother was often satisfied at the expense of Roleta's feelings. One afternoon I arrived at sixteen-year-old Carmilla Hopkins's home to find the house crowded with relatives. We decided to do the interview at a local restaurant. She assumed that she could take her ― 58 ― baby, and she began to dress him.
In other words, Janet viewed herself, not Susan, as the real victim. She was obviously under great stress, both financial and emotional. Her shoulder slumped a little as she headed for the door to go to work. As she closed the door, it was clear my reassurances to her were vapid and Pollyannaish. As the interviews illustrate, Susan's mother was not the only one to react with frustration and anger at the news of her daughter's pregnancy. The small sample of ten adult mothers in this study certainly illuminated the feminists' view of the way mothers are held ― 71 ― accountable for their daughters' sexual behavior.