The Media vs. Black Women 2: The Welfare Queen

Coke Francis
ILLUMINATION
Published in
6 min readMar 6, 2022

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Photo by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash

Iwas digging through some old files from my college days and encountered a relic that documented the day the entire world changed for me in a very negative way.

And it was all thanks to the carelessness of television and their desire to always throw their shit on black women.

It was a short diary entry I wrote, I'm guessing, sometime between 2006–2008. At the time, I was in college and living in a homeless shelter with my young son:

I was sitting in the tiny studio apartment (my hotel room in the shelter), watching 20/20 on TV, still reeling from a segment about televangelist's spending habits when the next piece came up. This was about the "Marry Your Baby Daddy Day," created by one woman who was fed up with African-Americans making children and not getting married.

I watched with interest, wanting to know her story and how this idea came about. I should have been better prepared for a heavy shot of black woman bashing, but I wasn't. This was an ambush

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