People are getting upset after learning rapper T.I. admits to going to the gynecologist with his 18-year-old daughter, Deyjah Harris. Apparently, the “dope boyz in the trap” rapper hangs around for results just to make sure Deyjah is still a virgin. He makes the doctor check Deyjah’s hymen. T.I. made these revelations during a discussion with Nazanin and Nadia, hosts of the popular podcast, Ladies Like Us – you can find it on PodcastOne.
He told the hosts he’s been setting the appointments for his daughter for years and justified the practice by saying…
“I think that most kids in hindsight, looking back, they always thank their parents for not allowing them to damage themselves as much as they could have.”
It seems T.I. is not a dad to be played with or lied to when it comes to his daughter’s chastity. However some are asking, is he as vigilant a parent when it comes to his boys as he is with his girls? T.I. notwithstanding, there seems to be a huge blind spot with parents when it comes to their boys, especially in the black community. As the saying goes, “we love our boys, but raise our girls.”
Is T.I. falling into the same trap? The parental disjunction does exist in the community, but the question really is, how does it play out? The graduation gap rates for African American girls far out-parce that for African American boys. Conversely, or should I say, perversely, the rate of black and brown young men joining violent street gangs is on the rise. However, there’s been no reliable data for over a decade concerning street gang membership by ethnicity, most likely because no one really wants to know how bad it is. Our young men are out there jumping in gangs, not enrolling in colleges.
Have we become a society so hypocritical and short sighted that we allow our 15-year-old boys to run the streets in the middle of the night with guns, but at the same time, be so tough on our girls that we’re literally checking between their legs?
