The politics of black motherhood

>>

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Bigots may grumble, but the high number of unmarried black mothers in Montreal is directly linked to immigration policies implemented by an overwhelmingly white civil service, says a McGill study released last week. "Immigration policies in the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s encouraged black women from the Caribbean to work in domestic jobs and didn't facilitate their husbands to come with them," says the study's co-author, McGill professor James Torczyner. The high level of single-parent families, headed mostly by women over 40, is the result. Between the '50s and the early '90s, the report says, women regularly made up well over half the percentage of total black immigrants, skewing the gender balance among the black population.

The report also notes that the ratio of young unwed mothers is slightly higher among the black than the non-black population, but not alarmingly so. Appearances, Torczyner says, can be deceiving. "There is a very strong concern about [teenage pregnancies] in the black community. But what the data shows us is that the difference between blacks and non-blacks is not that significant because 50 per cent of the population is under 25 years old. It just appears that there are more."

There are other depressing realities in the report: blacks are poorer, are underemployed, under-represented and under-counted in census data. "The good news is that among younger blacks, bilingualism is up, university education is up, high-school dropouts are down," Torczyner says. "But they're up for everybody. The gaps still remain."