Since Silverside and I have been having an ongoing and most interesting discussion regarding historical motherhood and the issue of child support has cropped up into it, I thought it would be appropriate to re-post this interesting post from January 2007.
Also it's a good way to put up a 'new' post w/o having to do a lot of work, since I have lunch plans later...LOL...
Seriously though I have been sick and I'm just recently getting back into the blogging game, so I want to start gradually building up to my prior weekly posting pattern.
I also think it's important for us NOT to get confused about the 'original intent' of child support, and make no mistake about it, high child support is what is driving the current custody wars raging throughout our society, nothing else.
Anyway, the intention behind child support was never meant to be some benign action taken on the part of our government to help families raise children, as it is ofttimes painted.
Nor was it some idea pushed by any feminists in order to help mothers and children.
Again, complete misreading of the 'original intent' here. Just like a rooster crowing at dawn is not the cause of the sun rising, so too feminists' support of child support was NEVER the reason it was instituted.
Thus, it was never a 'good' idea gone bad.
Instead it was begun as a tool to punish the African-American population for the rioting and other so-called deviant behaviors that took place during the 60s; as well as cut down on the use of public benefits by instituting a pay-as-you-go (or pay-as-you-grow) system for having children.
I know the accusation of racism has been done to death today, as everything is not racism and when you cry wolf too much with accusation of racism underlying everything, it belittles the term.
Yet we cannot escape the historical fact that the initial intent behind the beginnings of our current child support system was, in fact, due to racism. That taint continues today with many poor mothers being denied access to their children due to inability to pay enough child support. Not to mention the ones who are jailed due to it, which are many in spite of the lies that continue about this issue...
Last point: I don't want to hear any stories about more men then women being jailed due to inability to pay child support as I am not in a contest here with men vs. women. This is a blog about mothers: so my ONLY concern is MOTHERS being unjustly imprisoned due to not being able to pay child support and not being able to see their children. Advocates for men have plenty of other places to vent about their issues. This blog is not one of them.
I also posted the comments section for 'comic relief'...so people can have a few laughs about how this nutty commenter (who claimed to be a custodial father) used to try to derail every discussion...
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Sunday, January 07, 2007
Blowback from Attempt to Destroy Other Peoples
Child support enforcement in the US has morphed into a weapon to be used against poor mothers in the US today in order to terminate their parental rights and to discourage them from having children in the future. Studies have now demonstrated that the states with stricter child support enforcement also show drops of 20% or more in the number of single mothers. I believe this will eventually translate into a far larger drop in minority population figures eventually, as single mother are the engines of population growth for those communities. This was the original racist intent behind these programs to begin with, so they need to be reviewed for the disparate population impact on certain communities and then reformed accordingly.
Looking at the history of child support we can trace its origins from that the so-called War on Poverty instituted by President Lyndon Johnson. It should have really been called the War on Population as that was its target: getting the African-American population under control. America woke up shocked one morning when it discovered that what was originally a small population of slightly over 3 million African-Americans residing in the US after the Civil War ended in 1865 had suddenly morphed into a substantial force to be reckoned with by 1965. The sheer weight of the numbers involved in the marches and demonstrations throughout many US cities broadcast night after night into the living rooms of America frightened many of them and convinced US politicians that something had to be done. What they decided on was the War on Poverty and a Research Institute was established in 1966 right in the heartland of the US, Wisconsin, to research the causes of povery in African-American communities, even though there were far more prestigious and better known research universities in the US. Of course they immediately tagged as the “cause” of poverty single mothers. Not the institutional and legal discrimination that had been allowed to go on for almost 100 years, but single motherhood was identified as the root cause of most of the problems in the African-American community and the campaign to demonize single mothers, especially those in the minority community, began in earnest and has continued unabated to this day.
Pretending to be concerned for children, a parallel campaign was also begun glorifying fatherhood. Many of these supposedly concerned fathers were incited to fight for custody through government financed fatherhood program or be faced with draconion child support bills which they presumably owed to the state and had to be paid under threat of imprisonment.
Thus began the ongoing custody wars that have been slowly eating away at the fabric of our justice system with parental abduction the newest and fastest growing crime in the FBI’s lexicon. I guess they thought that mothers were just going to go quietly along with these attempts to steal their children from them for the greater good of society or something. Bad miscalculation on the part of greedy men.
Another unintended consequence, along with the mess it is making of our entire legal system, that has come about from these attempts to destroy the African-American community through unconventional warfare has been the decimation of all birth rates in every community throughout the west as these ongoing child support and custody wars unleashed against mothers has caused women to not wish to take a chance having children and be faced with losing them to some greedy and unprincipled monster.
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posted by NYMOM | Sunday, January 07, 2007
7 Comments:
Anonymous said...
you idiot. women use the child support money 99 fuckin % more tahn men even though it is an illegal tax and breaks the constitution to put anybody in jail over a debt. That why so many men go postal. injustice brings violence and I hope many more die because of it!!!
11:20 PM
NYMOM said...
I'm talking about its original intent here not what it's morphed into. The premises underpinning child support first reared their head as LBJ was beginning his war on poverty. It was supposedly seen as a way to force Afr. Americans to be more fiscally responsible when having children so the US wouldn't go too deeply into debt providing benefits for them.
The rest as they say is history.
BTW, this is supposed to be a discussion about how to reform child support policy...
9:17 AM
silverside said...
What an asshole. I'm a mom and I PAY child support to a deadbeat dad who hasn't held a real job since 1991. But you know what? Like all other non-custodial moms I know, I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE CS MONEY UNLIKE ALL THE NON-CUSTODIAL DADS. I just want to have a normal life and raise my daughter free of an abuser's constant interference and harrassment.
8:47 AM
BloggerNoggin said...
NYMOM said, "Studies have now demonstrated that the states with stricter child support enforcement also show drops of 20% or more in the number of single mothers."
What study are you referring to? Do you have a link?
Personally, I think child support is too high in some states and too low in others. The basis of child support is not only to funnel money to the mother to help support the child, but where it crosses a line that upsets allot of obligator's is that support is designed to keep the mothers standard of living the same as if she were with the father when they were together.
10:06 AM
NYMOM said...
As anybody who has been paying attention would have known bloggernoggin I posted a study from Columbia University months ago on this site. But as usual you weren't paying attention to anything that's really significant, just the bullcrap.
1:57 PM
Anonymous said...
"I just want to have a normal life and raise my daughter free of an abuser's constant interference and harrassment."
Amen to that silverside! Another great post, NYMom...
I have been having a hell of a time posting comments since I SUPPOSEDLY "upgraded" to beta Blogger, but it's me, Val!
3:09 PM
NYMOM said...
I know it just took me almost 30 minutes to login and update my blog. What a pain in the neck this new blogger has become. You have to log in first into your own blog by the way before you can post on other people's sites. I had the same problem before
2 comments:
This isn't entirely on-topic, but it is related to historical takes on mothers and their children. Recently, I was looking through Frederick Douglass's autobiography and learned that Aaron Anthony, Douglass’s first master/owner (and very possibly his biological father) wrenched him from his mother, Harriet Baily, when Douglass was still a baby. She later died when Douglass was only seven.
Douglass’s few words about his mother, as recorded in his Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1849), speak poignantly to the injustice and pain of his situation.
"My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age, Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child's toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.
I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master to the contrary--a permission which they seldom get, and one that gives to him that gives it the proud name of being a kind master. I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master's farms, near Lee’s Mill. I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger."
Such is the historic treatment of mothers and their children, especially African-Americans in slavery. And don't forget this was the reality for nearly 1/5 or more of Americans.
Silverside: Again, this was the way slave children were treated...
Clearly most children were not treated this way.
It's a distortion of history to not put this into proper context and to try to act like this is common procedure for how children in the west or anywhere really were raised.
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