Mothers Day reality check

As my own baby's mother Tara Henley mentioned in her typically earth-shattering post today, there's no shortage of songs in hip-hop where some jig raps about how his mother was the only one who would take care of him. If there's one sacred cow left in hip-hop, other than the Jews that run it, it's the black single mother. I wonder why this is the case.

First of all, a distinction should be drawn between women who are true single mothers and women who would be better categorized as unwed mothers. There probably aren't as many real, according to Hoyle single mothers in hip-hop as you'd think. P. Diddy's mother was a true single mother. 2Pac's mother? Not so much.

A woman who somehow lost her husband and hence is left to raise a child by herself is the true salt of the earth. But a woman who had a baby by a man who just so happened to be in and out of jail for the weekend is nothing but a worthless whore. Lumping these tramps in with widows and the like is a disservice to true single mothers everywhere.

The distinction is key because only the true single mother came to find herself in that situation through no fault of her own. In an age of relatively easy and inexpensive access to family planning services, I don't know that a man has any real moral obligation to take care of a child he didn't want in the first place. He may be compelled to legally, but even this is a matter up for debate.

In the recent series of New York Times articles about the crisis currently facing black men in this country, it was mentioned that one of the reasons so many black men shy away from legal forms of employment is that as soon as they start pulling a legit paycheck, the government takes damn near all of it for child support. In one famous case, a guy was left with $.50 after the baby's mother took her share.

While unwed mothers deserve credit for taking care of their children, often with assistance from taxpayer's dollars, they also deserve a certain degree of scorn for being one of the main reasons so many of these jigs don't have fathers in the first place. It's no wonder so many of them are growing up to be crack dealers and AK-toting PCP addicts.

If I was a rapper, I'd make a song about that.