Octuplet Mom Reinforced Single Mother Stigma

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


In her NBC interview Octuplet mom Nadya Suleman was irked at getting pounded for being a single mother with fourteen kids. Or in her words, "it's not as controversial because they're couples so its more acceptable." She had good reason to be irked, but she should be irked at herself too for doing much to reinforce that stigma. For the past half century single mothers have been ritually dumped on by everyone from liberal sociologists to Christian fundamentalists and even self-promoting gabber Ann Coulter. They are the fall women for every real and perceived malady in society; poverty, crime, drug use, personal profligacy, welfare dependency, bad acting, and even worse performing students, and of course, family breakdown.

As for Coulter, she got hammered for beating up on single mothers in her new book while letting the guys who shove the women into single motherhood skip away scot free. This was more a hit against Coulter than a real defense of single mothers. The perception is just too deeply ingrained that single mothers create babies and problems for a momentary attack on Coulter to change that perception.

Suleman is naive, in denial, or blind to the power of the negative single mom image to think that her pleading for the bashers to knock it off will fall on anything but the tinnest of tin ears. If anything, having eight babies, on top of six, and then hinting that her over the top baby making is a good thing without a prospective father sighting anywhere, fuels public wrath over the folly of babies and single mothers even more. But leaving aside questions of moral right, ethical propriety or even Suleman’s legal responsibility, all have been hotly debated, the truth is that single mothers do not cause a terrible society, but do fare terribly in society.
And there are a lot of single mothers. At last count nearly 40 percent of children are born out of marriage. In the majority of those cases the mothers will stay that way. The figures for lower income black and Hispanic women almost all Suleman’s age or a decade or even decades younger than her are far greater than for unmarried white mothers. The number of single mothers are inching up after a decade long drop from the mid 1990s to 2005.

The demographic of who gets pregnant and is single is predictable They’re young, have multiple births, are non college educated, or even high school educated, and invariably poor. In their, Child Wellbeing Study, Princeton University researchers tracked 5,000 single mothers in who are charitably called Fragile Families. The women gave birth between 1998 and 2000 and all claimed that they wanted to get married.

The wish didn’t get any further than a wish. In a follow-up survey, most did not get married and a fair share of them had more babies by multiple partners. They had done little to improve themselves educationally or boosted their income. The Princteon findings are not unique. This reinforces the belief that single mothers are inherently doomed to wallow in poverty and want, and that their children are doomed to be congenital gang bangers, drive by shooters, and drug peddlers and jail and early cemetery fodder.

Many single mothers swear as Suleman has that they will be good, devoted and loving mothers and that they will be able to foot the bill for their children’s care and upbringing. That’s not a small point in the furor over single mothers. The prospect that Suleman who’s not only a single mother but an unemployed single mother who filed workers compensation claims, bankruptcy, and had a mountain of debt, might put the state (taxpayers) in hock for the medical care and treatment of the octuplets drew loud howls of protest.

This is not a totally unfair concern. Kaiser Hospital shelled out a reported cool million for delivery, treatment, and care costs for the octuplets. Few single mothers, and that certainly includes Suleman, have a prayer of paying this cost out of pocket. Suleman gave no indication that she had a clue that someone else will have to pay the staggering cost of their ongoing care.

This is not to pass moral judgment on Suleman’s act, legions have already done plenty of that. Suleman may well prove her scoffers, bashers, and revilers all wrong. She may find a way to pay the freight for all 14 children, provide them with a warm, stable and loving home, and even stroll down the aisle with a mate. This would transform her from the poster single mom for irresponsible induced baby making to a true American motherhood success story. She would hardly be the first single mother to become a productive, paragon of achievement. Anything is posssible.
Whatever happens, Suleman was right that single mother’s do unfairly get beat up on for creating societal’s ills. Unfortunately Suleman insured that the beating will continue.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

Obama’s Win Didn’t End Racial Stereotyping

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


There is still much talk about how Barack Obama’s White House win demolished negative stereotypes about blacks. That’s wishful thinking. A new study by a team of researchers from several top universities shows that stereotypes about poverty and crime remain just as frozen in time. The study found that much of the public still perceives that those most likely to commit crimes are poor, jobless, and black. The surprise was that the negative racial stereotypes also applied to anyone, no matter their color, who was poor and jobless. If for instance a white commits a crime the odds are that the respondents will reclassify that person as black.
The jumbled mental contortions that many go through to dub a white person black solely on the basis of their income and whether they have been jailed didn’t end there. If a person who was perceived as white was jailed that person was still perceived to be black even after their release. The study did more than affirm that race and poverty and crime are firmly rammed together in the public mind. It also showed that once the stereotype is planted it’s virtually impossible to root out. That’s hardly new either.
In 2003 Penn State University researchers conducted a landmark study on the tie between crime and public perceptions of who is most likely to commit crime. The study found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crime. This was no surprise given the relentless media depictions of young blacks as dysfunctional, dope peddling, gang bangers and drive by shooters. The bulging numbers of blacks in America’s jails and prisons seem to reinforce the perception that crime and violence in America invariably comes with a young black male face. And it doesn’t much matter how prominent, wealthy, or celebrated a black is. The overkill frenzy feeding on the criminal hijinks of New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, O.J. Simpson, and the legions of black NFL, NBA stars, Hollywood peronalities, and entertainers who run afoul of the law or are bad behaving further reinforce the negative image of blacks.
There was, however, a mild surprise in the Penn State study. It found that even when blacks didn’t commit a specific crime whites still misidentified the perpetrator as an African-American. University researchers were plainly fascinated by this result. Five years later they wanted to see if that stereotype still held sway. By then Obama’s political ascent was in full trajectory upward. Polls showed that a crushing majority of whites not only said that they would vote for an African-American for president, but that color was not a consideration in how they viewed and voted for a candidate. This appeared to signal a benign sea change in public attitudes on race.
It didn’t. Researchers found that public attitudes on crime and race were unchanged. The majority of whites still overwhelmingly fingered blacks as the most likely to commit crimes, even when they didn’t commit them.
There are two troubling implications in these studies. One is that Obama’s victory was more a personal triumph for him. It did not radically remap racial perceptions, let alone an end to racial stereotyping. A significant percent of whites voted for him and were passionate about him because they were fed up with Bush’s policies, and believed that he would reverse those policies. The vote for him was race neutral. His victory was a tribute to his personal political organization and savvy as well as public fear and frustration about Bush. The second implication is even more troubling. If much of the public still view crime and poverty through narrow racial lens then that will continue to stir public clamor for lawmakers, police and prosecutors to clean the streets of violent criminals, who are almost always seen as African-Americans. This could mean even more gang sweeps, court injunctions, stiff adult prison terms, three strikes laws, and incarceration for teens, the holding of accused teens indefinitely in juvenile jail detention.
Ironically, Obama inadvertently fed the negative perceptions of blacks. In several much publicized talks on the black family, he blasted black men for being missing in action from the home and shirking their family responsibility. It was a well-meaning effort to call attention to the chronic problems of black males and families, but it also gave the impression that black males are dysfunctional. It was a short step from that to conclude that these same men are more likely to be involved in crime than whites.
Obama’s win was a two edged sword. It was as billed a profound historic win, but it also fanned the illusion that racial stereotypes are dead. Now we know better.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).