Baby Blues (Part II): Doing more than "the do"

By Charisse N. Montgomery

Starting a family seems to be a normal course of events for most people. We find someone we love, we settle down and get married, and then we want to extend our love by adding to our family. Sometimes, though, this process is not as easy as we would like it to be. Despite the media impressions of black women having eight kids by the age of 25, fertility doesn’t necessarily work this way for all of us. Because we have the idea that having children will be easy, it can be hard to deal with when it doesn’t play out that way, and it can be embarrassing and disheartening when others expect it to. For that reason, I’m sharing my own fertility story; when I looked for resources on how to deal with this issue, I found none that were written from the perspective of black women or that even showed the faces of black women dealing with infertility.

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Black Baby Genius: Cultivating the minds of our next generation

anissatBy Richard Montgomery

I recently attended a Black male empowerment conference, and one of the speakers was a 13-year-old African American sophomore majoring in Computer Science at Morehouse College. While a thirteen year-old genius is impressive, his mother’s reasoning behind how he became a child genius who could perform complex algebra equations by age five was more interesting. Put simply, she kept him engaged in whatever he seemed interested in. Stephen has an older sister, and the two of them played school for hours on end mostly because Stephen liked it.

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No more monkeys: Refusing racism for the next generation

By Charisse N. Montgomery

Gorillas, apes, porch monkeys – all these terms have a history of being used as slurs against African Americans and Africans. Just recently, an Orange County republican sent an email depicting Obama as a baby chimpanzee (see image to the right). The history of this characterization of black people as animals, savages, and subhuman beings is as old as racism itself. To me, these characterizations are biting; they undermine our very humanity. Therefore, as I await the birth of my first child, a boy, I wonder if I’m taking this whole monkey thing overboard in my refusal to purchase or dress my child in clothing with monkey themes.

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Home training: A lesson lost?

anissat

By Charisse N. Montgomery

Remember the phrase “home training”? It signified all the things we were supposed to know before and beyond school. Home training included social skills and guidelines for appropriate behavior, including basic manners and how not to embarrass our parents in public. Home training was essential to being raised properly. As a teacher, I experienced problems with students who didn’t have home training: they didn't understand that arguing with me was inappropriate, primarily because they talked to their parents disrespectfully at home and thought it was normal. I even had a parent tell me it was my job to teach her child proper behavior (I had to clarify that my job was to teach her child English; it was her job to teach proper behavior). My concern is that home training seems to have gone by the wayside.

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The Tangled Deception

By Charisse N. Montgomery

The past couple of years have been good to black women. Black women are earning degrees at higher rates than ever. We are occupying boardrooms and creating our own businesses. For the first time ever, we have a black first lady, not to mention the fact that she’s a trendsetter, a successful professional and a hardworking mother. Just a few months ago, BET - long criticized for its perpetuation of negative images of black women - helped us celebrate how much Black Girls Rock.

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