Jamilah Lemieux on the complicated beauty of being a ‘Black. Single. Mother.’

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Baby mama is a phrase that can diminish a woman, reduce her to a relationship that didn't work out. And in the United States, no one has carried that label more than black single mothers. In 1965, the U.S.

Department of Labor commissioned a report from future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that looked at the rising number of black households led by single mothers, and called it the root of a tangle of poverty and dysfunction, a finding that shaped decades of public policy and cemented a cultural stigma. President Ronald Reagan gave that stigma a face, the so called welfare queen, and by the time welfare reform passed in the nineties, it had hardened into policy. Black single mothers weren't just stereotyped, they were punished and blamed. I grew up with a single mother during those years.

Our home was full of love and care, but I know how that shame impacts both single mothers and their children. My guest today, Jamila Lemieux, a writer and cultural critic, has lived that story too. She said she once thought single motherhood was a fate just slightly worse than death. and worried that writing about it could mean wearing that label forever. Eventually, over the last decade, she has given a first hand account of single motherhood in columns, essays, and on social media.

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