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Feel that? Those are hydrogen ions.

Baby when we gon start on this documentary? We past over due mama.

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“Negative views of blackness have surely not disappeared in the 21st century. And the black community still uses respectability politics as a form of resistance. But perhaps now more than ever—when there are so many different ways to be black and to be a woman—respectability politics have the potential to harm as much as uplift. As often happens, black women carry a double burden, as they are asked to uphold a respectability built on both racist and sexist foundations. And the burden isn’t just about professional decisions—say, which roles an actress should choose—but personal ones as well.

When neo-soul singer Erykah Badu announced her third pregnancy in 2008, some fans attacked her for having children outside of marriage with more than one father. One online commenter labeled the singer, known for rocking a mega ’fro, “trash with great hair.” A Zimbio.com article that referred to Badu’s “growing list of baby daddies” featured a “Knocked Up Again” headline. A blog article wondered baldly if the singer was “a ho.” She was derided as a poor example of black womanhood. The storm got so heavy that Badu bit back in a lengthy and poetically unapologetic online post about her family that ended with an entreaty to “Kiss my placenta.”

Three years later, when Beyoncé announced she was expecting, she was publicly applauded for doing pregnancy “the right way,” and celebrated for being a model of black womanhood. Even Diddy’s 18-year-old son, Justin Combs, weighed in on Bey’s proper use of her uterus. Combs tweeted: “Beyoncé dated, married, THEN got pregnant…young ladies take notes.” (No word on whether Combs’s dad, who has never married but has five children, is also taking notes.)

Jackson calls the differing reactions to Badu’s and Beyoncé’s pregnancies “a sexist, puritanical, moral panic. The idea that a woman who doesn’t have her children in wedlock is discrediting an entire race of people is ridiculous. It only serves to further demonize single women, who are working hard at motherhood, and are sexually independent. And it reinforces the historical idea of sexual deviance and unfit motherhood that has been used to marginalize black women.”

Badu’s personal choices raised the specter of the Jezebel. And rather than reject that problematic stereotype, critics pilloried Badu as a poor example to the black and broader communities—as not respectable. But the hand-wringing over the singer’s familial status is less about the welfare of her children and more about a black woman publicly violating sexist morality by having children (read: sex) outside of marriage.

“The traditionalist [respectability] narrative has come dangerously close to being exclusionary to the very community we are trying to uplift,” says Jackson. In rightfully pushing back at negative and untrue caricatures of modern black motherhood centered around “welfare queens,” we can unwittingly demonize any black mother whose family falls outside of traditional, heterosexual, and patriarchal paradigms—no matter how thoughtful her decisions, how involved her partners, or how well cared for her children. If we buy that the only ‘right’ way for a woman to build a family is through a state-sanctioned marriage to a man, then we have made a large percentage of black women ‘wrong’.” — no disrespect by tamara winfrey harris

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