“So you’re having my baby ...”

These are the first five words of the iconic song “Forever My Lady” by the R&B group Jodeci. The song was released in 1991 on the group’s debut album of the same name. It is sung from the perspective of a man who is fully committed to one woman and the children who are the fruit of their union. Lyrics like “there’s nothing more precious than to raise a family” stand in stark contrast to the pop artists today who push sex in their lyrics and promote abortion with their activism. I’ve sung the song to my wife at some point in each of her three pregnancies.

But to Marc Lamont Hill, professor and media personality, that song is outdated and insufficiently inclusive.

Why?

Because Marc Lamont Hill believes men can get pregnant. Yes, you read that correctly. Hill confirmed this belief when an old clip of him in dialogue with Candace Owens circulated on social media this week. His response to the barrage of ridicule was unsurprising: “I see that the heavily edited clip from my 2020 conversation with Candace Owens is making its rounds again. My position is the same: Yes, some men can get pregnant. Trans men. For some reason, some of you are deeply outraged by this. I’m not sure why this rattles y’all so much.”

Hill is a card-carrying member of the “Afristocracy” – the progressive leadership structure in black America composed of politicians, pundits, performers, professors, and preachers. These people police the borders of acceptable thought within black culture and marshal their influence and resources to praise people they like and punish those they don’t.

The NAACP’s decision to give Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union-Wade an award for their promotion of gender ideology – to the applause of the audience – is a perfect snapshot of the Afristrocracy in action. The Wades are among the performers who use their professional accomplishments, wealth, and good looks to influence and shape the values of their fans. Athletes and artists are the most visible members of the Afristoracy, but public intellectuals like Hill are by far the most dangerous.

The reason why is simple: Black leaders at the turn of the 20th century were committed to uplifting the race. Their intellectual descendants are devoted to promoting theories that lead to degradation and destruction.

Michael Eric Dyson, professor at Georgetown University, diminished the importance of fathers on MSNBC, then went on Fox to encourage white people to create individual reparations accounts to atone for their privilege and cure racial inequality.

Brittney Cooper, professor at Rutgers University, is the person who said the black community does not need nuclear families to thrive. This was not a hot take said in the heat of debate. She said the same thing in a 2015 column in Salon: “American families are changing, and we should celebrate the fact that the two-parent, nuclear family ideal has gone the way of the floppy disk.”

Carl Hart, professor at Columbia University, is the man who writes approvingly of his own heroin use – at a time when drug overdose deaths are at record highs – and said he would rather his children interact with drugs than with the police.

Greg Carr, professor at Howard University, is the person who said that women leaving Texas to seek abortions in “civilized states” were channeling the spirit of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.

None of these people are “fringe” academics. In fact, all of them have been featured prominently on MSNBC, CNN, and other media platforms targeted to black viewers. They are dangerous because their degrees and academic institutions give them an air of authority and legitimacy that makes listeners without a solid worldview vulnerable to being deceived.

It is a lot easier to believe a boy can “transition” to a girl if you hear it from an Ivy League professor than if it comes from a mechanic at Jiffy Lube.

Thankfully, they are not all this way. Tera Jordan, a professor at Iowa State, studies issues related to the health of families. One of her past research projects explored the factors that influenced black men to get married.

Linda-Malone Colon of Hampton University is another academic who uses her formal training for the greater good. She launched the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting in 2009 in order to strengthen black families and bring awareness to the connection between family structure and positive social outcomes for parents and children.

Now she is using a $1 million grant from a nonprofit called Communio to support the work of Hampton’s new National Center on Black Family Life. This collaboration will aim to equip churches with the tools they need to strengthen marriages and support families.

There undoubtedly are others who are continuing the rich tradition of using their intellectual gifts for the benefit of the broader community. They just don’t have the platform to reach the masses.

This is an important point. Black intellectuals used to be a force for good. Even those one generation removed from slavery had a firm grasp on theology, economics, philosophy, and political theory. One of the most important things about the people W.E.B. Du Bois called the “Talented Tenth” was that they understood morality was a prerequisite to any hopes of racial uplift. This is why they spoke often of their Christian faith and virtues like temperance, modesty, diligence, and thrift.

Professor Charles Henry Turner, a black biologist born in 1867, wrote the following in an essay entitled, “Will the Education of the Negro Solve the Race Problem?”

In order to transform the majority of white trash and vagrant Negroes into new Southerners and new Negroes it will be necessary to instill into them the following regenerating virtues:

1. The manners of a gentleman. Not the swagger of the dude nor the cringing of a scapegoat, but the manners of a being permeated with the Golden Rule.

2. Cultured homes. Not necessarily extravagant mansions, but comfortable dwellings, wherein impoliteness, intemperance, slander and indecent tales have given place to politeness, temperance, intelligent conversation and refined pleasantries.

3. Business honesty. Not only punctual in the payment of debts, but also truthful in making sales.

4. Thrift. Not the ability to hoard as a miser does, but the ability to spend one's earnings economically, to purchase property and to lay by a little for a rainy day.

5. Christian morality. Not the ability to shout well, and pray well and testify well, but the ability to live the Christ life.

6. The ability to do something well that the world desires bad enough to be willing to pay a good price for it. This includes not only mechanical but also commercial and scholastic achievements.

7. Ability to lead in the light of modern civilization.

8. Love for justice and contempt for lawlessness.

The current crop of race-obsessed progressive professors lacks this type of wisdom and understanding. They connect skin color to sin nature and are too afraid to say anything critical about any black people publicly. They have become agents of intellectual destruction and moral compromise. What they fail to grasp is that people committed to obliterating the foundations of biological sex, dismantling the nuclear family, abolishing the police, destroying their offspring, and numbing the pain of the resulting chaos with narcotics will never truly be “free.”

For all their talk about slavery and subjugation, they prove that physical chains are not the only way to keep people in bondage.