Thread by @chris_mungai

To add onto what @tugengirl is saying on her TL right now.
I hear people saying that 'children are expensive' and extending that argument to say you shouldn't have children if you don't want to dance with poverty, or the risk of falling into poverty. This seems like good advice

But this implies that:
1) Don't have children 'if you can't afford to'
2) Rich people should have children because they can afford to
3) Poor people should avoid having children

This is actually a huge indictment on a capitalist system, and has little to do with children per se. Children should never, ever, be a luxury. The fact that we are making economic calculations on our right to exist (through the next generation) is so distasteful to me

And the next step is to make eugenicist arguments, like @BillGates is openly doing now. Gates believes that the problem of the world today is poor people keep on reproducing.

“To put it bluntly, decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling. This is because the poorest parts of the world are growing faster than everywhere else

more babies are being born in the places where it’s hardest to lead a healthy and productive life. The Gateses are talking specifically here about Africa."

Y'all are stalling the world's progress. vox.com/future-perfect…

It enrages me that eugenics has become mainstream conversation again!
nytimes.com/2018/10/20/opi…

But why am I not surprised. Foucault's ideas of biopower, of race as a 'body', makes blackness a disease. Not just carriers of disease, but an actual disease that 'infects' the broader 'healthy' racial body (i.e. whiteness).
africasacountry.com/2017/08/algeri…

(Which is why the whole conversation in the West about 'diversity/ inclusion' is also so problematic. Using the metaphor of blackness being a virus, diversity is thus a form of vaccination - introduction of a small, controlled group that prevents a broader infection)

(But that's a story for another day)

Anyway, Article 16 of the UN Declaration of human rights states everyone has the right to have a family. Children are a right, if we are using rights discourses.

And the fact that our capitalistic system is strangling people to the point where we are making these economic calculations on our existence is wrong. It angers and disappoints me.

Finally, someone (was it Ta-Nehisi Coates?) described racism as the threat of premature death. Emilie Townes calls it living under the "fine rain of death."

And in that situation, with dangers, toils and snares on every side, sometimes the only way to fight back, existentially, against this bleakness is through LIFE -- i.e. children. And so, perhaps for poor/ black people, children are not just an extension of their ego

but a way to grasp at life and break the fine rain of death.

FIN.

Postscript: big shout out to @Jeremy_MDiv with whom I have thought through these ideas over many conversations. One day our correspondence will be world famous!

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