I have wondered about this myself, but I've never considered young single moms with babies to be an exclusively black problem the way the Journal Sentinel did. The cartoon accompanying the letter showed a black pregnant mom ignoring a toddler clutching her leg and a black man, looking away, his body tense as if they had just had a fight. Far better, I would think, to show a young girl holding a baby who might be her child or her brother or sister, and a couple of ragged and obviously neglected children standing beside her. And much better to make the group racially mixed, because kids born out of wedlock and into poverty are a problem for any race. A good point could have been made here, but wasn't.
Stereotypes are so much easier.
My blood was boiling, partly because I thought the stereotype was degrading, but more because I thought the journalism that allowed such a blatant piece of discrimination to seep into the paper went beyond shoddy to downright irresponsible. We see this sort of editorializing all the time. We ignore it, but it doesn't ignore us. Instead, it becomes part of our unconscious image of race and culture, one more tiny neural connection that our brain will one day have to erase if the human race is ever going to get along. These stereotypes are all around us.