By Janice 
My heart turned a flip when I found your site, and read that you consider yourself a black family and black marriage crusader. I immediately knew that I was not alone.
My husband Joe and I have been married for 24 yrs and have raised our 24 yr old daughter Tiffany, and are still raising our 18 yr old daughter Kayla. My heartache and inability to write the article stems from the 24 yr old. She has decided that her dad and I are not black enough, that the things we do and have done do not fit in with the way “true” black people live. The trips we have taken as a family, the way we speak, the fact that we pay our bills on time, she can’t stand that we like to be on time, if not early everywhere we go. When we don’t “cut up” at a store, but instead tell them we will take our business elsewhere. The list goes on and on. We have told her how hurtful this is coming from her, our own daughter, when we know that our own families view us this way, and treat us like outcast. When we have met other black couples and tried to bond with them, they end up trying to compete with us even though this is not a competition, then they just start putting us down to make us feel bad about the things my husband has worked hard to provide for us. I have been a stay at home mom most of my childrens life. Not because I thought is was the “white” thing to do, because it was the “right” thing to do for my child (Tiffany) after the babysitter she was going to felt that is was ok to leave her in a soiled diaper all day, because she had the cramps and didn’t feel like changing my child, that I was paying her to take care of. Joe and I have such similiar background that it’s sometimes scary.
We both grew up in a two parent home with fathers that were cheating on our mothers and thought it would be beneficial to their children if they sometimes took us over the other womans house, and have us keep it a secret. Needless to say, when Joe and I met in high school and found this out about eachother, we vowed that if we stayed together and had kids, we would show them what the black family should or could (we didn’t really know ourselves) really look like. My mother and Joes mother were so bitter about their own situation, that neither of them could ever be happy for us, and constantly tried to undermine everything we worked towards. Neither of us went to college, but we made sure Tiffany had ever college choice available to her, she is now a 6th grade teacher. So once again, it is really disheartening knowing that she is college educated, and was given opportunities that we were not, and yet is looking down on us for not catering to a part of “black stereotypes” that we should all be trying to get away from.
I don’t know if Walmart, Macys, Saks, or Target sells the Ghetto Card along side of their gift cards, but we are trying to figure out where to get one, so that Tiffany will be proud of us, the way we are proud of her, just for being “our” daughter!
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