The Two Americas of Single Motherhood

While white women represent the largest raw number of single mothers in America — a reflection of overall population size — Black women become single mothers at more than three times the rate of white women. Nearly half of all Black mothers are raising children alone, compared to 14% of white mothers. Despite single mother homes existing across racial groups, it is Black women’s family structures, that have been pathologized in political discourse for decades.

According to scholars, the disparity has been weaponized as evidence of a cultural failing rather than examined as a consequence of structural racism, including mass incarceration, wage inequality, and discriminatory housing policy that has systematically dismantled Black family units since before emancipation. Research published in the American Journal of Sociology found that even when Black women have the same family backgrounds, similar rates of marriage, and comparable rates of unwed childbearing as white women, they still face poverty at double the rate. In other words, the data points not to individual behavior, but to systemic disadvantage.

Yet the dominant narrative in politics and popular culture continues to locate the problem in Black women’s choices including their sexuality, their family structures, and their willingness to do better. The language reflects this. The term "baby mama,” which has been weaponized to degrade and belittle Black women, and research has found is rarely applied to white single mothers.

A History Written on Black Women's Bodies

To understand why Ratajkowski’s story gets framed as liberation while a comparable Black woman’s story may get framed as pathology, one must go back further than celebrity culture – to slavery. American culture has historically confined Black women to a set of dehumanizing archetypes that psychologists and sociologists have studied extensively. The Mammy who is the selfless, desexualized caregiver who exists to serve; the Sapphire who is the angry, emasculating Black woman; and the Jezebel -- the hypersexual, morally deviant seductress whose sexuality is both irresistible and dangerous.

Research published in the Journal of Student Research found that the Jezebel stereotype is the most prevalent of these archetypes in contemporary media, appearing in 50% of documented instances of bias against Black women in healthcare settings alone. Studies in the Journal of Media Psychology confirm that these stereotypes remain pervasive in television and popular culture, negatively shaping how both white and Black audiences perceive Black women.

Scholars at the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University document that the Jezebel stereotype dates to the early 1600s in American history, functioning originally to justify the sexual exploitation of enslaved Black women by framing them as inherently, insatiably sexual, and therefore incapable of being victimized. As one body of research in the 2022 Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research notes, the Jezebel stereotype has contributed to the belief that Black women cannot be raped — a perversion with consequences that echo into the present. This is not ancient history. It is the cultural operating system running beneath our contemporary judgments.

When Sexuality Gets Racially Coded

When Emily Ratajkowski writes that she moved through a season of compulsive hookups, sleeping with men the same day she met them, channeling what she called a "supervillain" persona, she was celebrated as a woman reclaiming agency over her own body. The framing is psychological, even clinical: she was processing trauma, dismantling the "Madonna" archetype, liberating herself from performative purity.

Now imagine a Black woman writing that same essay. We don’t have to imagine hard. We have Cardi B. We have Megan Thee Stallion. We have singer Fantasia, who in 2010 attempted suicide following a public shaming campaign after her relationship with a married man was exposed — a relationship that, notably, the man's estranged wife later admitted was not an affair at all. The public did not call Fantasia brave. They called her a homewrecker. They mocked her literacy. They flooded her social media with death threats.

When Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released "WAP", a song explicitly about female sexual pleasure and autonomy, a sitting congressman read the lyrics aloud on the House floor as evidence of cultural decay. Conservative commentators called it a threat to American society. Even some self-identified progressive voices questioned whether it was truly liberating or merely reinforcing the very stereotypes Black women have spent centuries trying to survive. This is not to say that a Black woman would definitely not be praised. However, historically, that has not been the case for most Black women.

Research from Boston University’s analysis of misogynoir in media notes the stark disparity. Male artists have been celebrated for music about sexuality and overpowering women; however, when Black female artists make music about the same topic, they are berated. The academic term for what Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion navigate is misogynoir, a concept coined by scholar Moya Bailey to describe the specific intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny directed at Black women.

Ratajkowski faced no equivalent reckoning. Her essay was published and subsequently went viral. She was profiled sympathetically, and perhaps, rightfully so. But the difference is not the content of the story, it is the body telling it.

The Psychological Weight of the Double Standard

The consequences of this disparity are not merely social, they are measurable in mental health outcomes. Research published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders and more recently documented in a similar 2025 study through the PMC/National Institutes of Health database found that Black women experience generalized anxiety disorder at higher rates than the general population. Anticipatory race-related stress , or the chronic psychological load of navigating environments where your actions may be interpreted through a racist lens — is a documented contributor.

Psychologists describe this as a form of hypervigilance. Research suggests that Black women learn early to self-police their sexuality, their emotional expression, their relationship choices, knowing that any deviation from respectability politics can result not in sympathy, but in condemnation. For instance, a 2021 qualitative study in Sex Roles found that Black college women consciously modified their clothing and sexual behavior out of awareness of the Jezebel stereotype, not from shame about their own desires, but from fear of how those desires would be weaponized against them.

Ratajkowski, by her own account, also navigated shame around her divorce. But she did so without the additional burden of 400 years of racialized mythology attached to her body. She could process her shame and come out the other side celebrated. That journey, for many Black women, has been documented as far more perilous.

What "Brave" Actually Costs

The celebration of Ratajkowski's essay is not inherently wrong. Women of all backgrounds deserve the right to unpack their messy, complicated post-marriage selves without judgment.

But the asymmetry of who gets to be "brave", who gets to write the vulnerable essay and be called a feminist, and who gets dragged, shamed, and labeled reflects a racial hierarchy of worthiness that has concrete material consequences. It shapes which women are believed when they report abuse. It shapes which mothers are viewed as fit parents in custody proceedings. It shapes which women's mental health struggles are treated with empathy and which are met with suspicion.

The essay Ratajkowski wrote is not remarkable because it was honest. It is remarkable because she had the opportunity to be honest without a centuries-old stereotype waiting to swallow her story whole. While it might be brave, it also highlights her privilege in having the freedom to share her truth so freely without persecution.