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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
A Brooklyn author is sponsoring a contest that offers 10 lucky black couples with children free weddings. But is this really going to strengthen the black family?
Feb 24, 2005 | "I always imagined having a big wedding," says Kenny Edwards, 34, of Brooklyn, N.Y. He and his fiancie, Tanya Engram, 30, have been engaged for two years. Supporting their 5-year-old son on her school-secretary salary while he looks for work in computers, they haven't been able to pull together the cash for anything fancier than a trip to City Hall. But if Kenny and Tanya are lucky, their wedding will be lavish -- and free.
Engram and Edwards are one of 300 African-American couples hoping to be among the 10 who'll be chosen for an all-expenses-paid weddingpalooza on Sept. 29 -- an occasion that the competition's inventor, Brooklyn author and journalist Maryann Reid, has dubbed Marry Your Baby Daddy Day.
Reid, 29, says she conceived of the event -- to be sponsored by several local black-run wedding businesses -- as a community service of sorts. "I kept meeting women who said, 'I live with my baby daddy and we're not married but we've been engaged for five or 10 years ,'" she says. "There are so many couples who live together and love each other but for some reason just are not motivated to tie the knot, but when given an opportunity, they jump right at it." She sees the campaign as a way to draw attention to -- and perhaps decrease -- the number of black couples who call each other "baby daddy" and "baby mama" instead of "husband" and "wife."
According to figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, 68 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers (compared with 28 percent of white children and 33 percent of children overall). Also, according to the U.S. Census, 45 percent of black families have single female heads of household (compared with 14 percent overall, and more than any other group). The slang term "baby daddy" was popularized in rap songs, and can be pejorative, denoting the guy who fathered your kid but isn't putting in for Pampers (possibly leading, as Reid notes, to a "baby mama drama"). She says, however, that lots of couples she's spoken to for this project use it as a term of endearment.
But is Reid, who is single herself, really promoting marriage, or weddings? Or, for that matter, her forthcoming novel, which just happens to be called "Marry Your Baby Daddy," and is conveniently due out in September?
Reid readily admits that "any publicity is good publicity," and that she's in "that age range" where she'd like to get married "sooner rather than later." "I can't, like, go get married tomorrow. But I do have control over myself and what I want to do. So I just said, let me take it upon myself in the meantime to bring attention to the high out-of-wedlock rate for black children and give other women what I want for myself," she says. "I'm just a regular person who's concerned with the direction that our community is going in and I want to do something about it besides talking."
