Why Do We Believe that Marriage is the Panacea for What Ails Black America(s)?

Stats fail to capture the full portrait of how families function in Black communities

Un-married Mothers Yes, but Not Always Single Parents
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

According to a recent article by the Associated Press, 72 percent of Black babies are born to un-married women. Such numbers, which have circulated for some time, have spurred responses such as calls for “Black Marriage Day” and “Marry Your Baby-Daddy Day” as part of what might be deemed the “No Wedding, No Womb” movement.

Such responses though, like the statistics that inspired them, fail to capture the full portrait of how families function in Black communities. Many studies have suggested that there is a direct correlation between single-mother hood and the likelihood that children born out-of-wedlock are more apt to struggle in school, be incarcerated at some point in their lives, become addicted to drugs and then reproduce that same cycle with their own out-of-wedlock children.

Such studies though, often neglect other powerful influences, such as the quality of schooling, biased criminal justice systems, institutional racism and poverty—conditions that lead to the same kind of outcomes.

Within this context, out-of-wedlock births takes on the feel of what University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen calls a “moral panic,” particularly among the Black Middle Class, which often feels that the lack of moral values among the Black poor, threatens to undermine the social and political gains of the post-Civil Rights era.

But the statistics only tell part of the story in that they don’t fully explore the nature of the relationship between single mothers, the fathers of their children and the children themselves.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

The Media’s Obsession with Unmarried Black Women

The Media v. Black Women:
The Peculiar Case of the Media’s Obsession with Unmarried Black Women
by Diane Lucas

By now, everyone in the country with access to a television, the internet or a book store has gotten the memo that black women marry at a dismally low rate compared to women of other races. We’ve seen and read it in the Economist, The Washington Post, U.S. News, Essence Magazine, Ebony and on The View, Oprah, and Nightline, among others. We know that of the hetero-black male population, there are significant numbers of black men incarcerated, lower rates of higher education, and disproportionate numbers of black men marrying outside of their race, as compared to black women. We heard that even setting aside those factors, there are fewer black men than woman in the U.S. population. No one is denying that there is an issue. It’s been an issue for a while now. So why the New York Times recently published what seems like the millionth and one article on why black women can’t find a man is absolutely baffling.

I have been thinking a lot about this issue and discussing it with friends — black and white, male and female — to pinpoint precisely why these articles bother me so much. I, like many other black feminists/womanists, constantly call for more discussion of issues affecting black women and other women of color in the mainstream media. Black relationships and the black family are important mainstream topics. But the media is obsessed with unmarried black women. One black woman commenting on the ABC Nightline post put it best — she said she is waiting for the article about black women tripping down altars riddled with reporters and social scientists. The inundation of these articles, T.V. specials, and books is an attack on black women. The overall message conveyed is unproductive and harmful.

Specifically, here’s my beef (and bear with me, because I have a lot of it):

Blame Game

The media often places the blame on black women for their perceived inability to find successful black men, especially when black women become more educated and achieve greater success in their careers. Although some articles and T.V. specials acknowledge the disparate number of available black men vís a vís black women due to the racialization of the criminal justice system, the discussion rarely turns to how black men can improve their romantic interactions with black women. Rather, the media often focuses on black women and their “issues.” Many of these articles, T.V. specials and books are purposed to instruct black women on how to be more desirable to black men or how to lower their standards. A prime example is the book The Denzel Principle: Why a Black Woman Can’t Find a Good Black Man, which blames black women for setting their standards too high — they apparently only want Denzel Washington, not the mail man.

The Nightline multi-part special entitled “Why Can’t a Successful Black Woman Find a Man?” sent the message that, as the title implies, black women are to blame for many of their problems finding a man. The Nightline special posed questions that begged for “experts” (including Steve Harvey, a comedian, whose “expertise” on black women and relationships remains unclear) to figure out what is wrong with black women. Are they too strong? Too powerful? Too aggressive? Too demanding? Of course, these stereotypical characteristics of black women are the same traits often attributed to successful people generally, regardless of race or gender. So the take away to black women is that the very characteristics that made you successful are the same ones that will keep you single, lonely, and of course unhappy.

Instead of being asked to make a choice between being either strong and independent or married, black women would be better served if our strengths were celebrated and not demonized, and if we were recognized as individuals. Black women would fare better if writers, experts and social scientists would take a break from hyper-examining and over-analyzing us to figure out what our “problems” are.

Read the Full Essay @ Feministe

Diane Lucas is a Attorney in New York City

Since We're Talking About Single, Black, Professional Women...again

Womanism is Not My Problem!

by Nicole Moore

Going through my blog I just realized that lately I’ve been largely writing in response to the shenanigans and ignorance that plays out on the Web and in the media. I’ve been playing defense and anyone who knows me, knows I appreciate the tackle, but personally I prefer to run the ball in. As a woman of color it’s so easy for us to find ourselves constantly defending our style, our politics, our culture, and our bodies, but as of today I’m officially over it! I’m tired of having to articulate my reasons for living a certain way, for having to defend the specific choices I’ve made about my career, about my hair and my love life. I have to reclaim my blog and myself from this insanity.

So starting right now I’m going to make a concerted effort to write more from an offensive point of view. I want to create spaces so tight, so authentically defined by my own womanness and Blackness, that only power, respect, and love can enter and reside. My body is a site of resistance, no doubt and that whole Nightline, CNN, Economist debacle reminded me just how much that it, along with my psyche, is still under siege. Furthermore I was stunned to see how I and other women, mostly women (and some men) of color fall into the trap of complaining, defending, venting and SMH’ing, and in turn we in a way become that “problematic” that the media makes us out to be.

Read the Full Essay @ theHotness

Since We're Talking About Single, Black, Professional Women...

How Does It Feel to Be a Black, Female, Single Problem?

by Farai Chideya

It’s open season on black womanhood. Nightline became the latest media outlet to tackle the issue of why black women aren’t married. The problem is not the topic, but the approach. Like a recent series of articles, books, and television segments (and one Nightline did last year), the show’s focus was on the purportedly low value of black women in the dating marketplace and the wisdom of black women’s choice to stay single versus marrying men who don’t fit their criteria.

Let’s get real for a minute here. Yes, black women are sometimes taken for granted by black men, and men of other races. (I’m thinking here of musician John Mayer saying he had a “David Duke c**k,” because it only responded to white woman. Black womens’ response, for the most part: awesome, dude! Less disfunction for us!) Black women also get oddly, back-handedly criticized for being too functional — for being the majority of black college graduates and growing old alone. In reality, black women with college degrees are more likely to have married by age 40 than those with high school degrees (70 to 60 percent). For white women, high school educated women are slightly more likely to have married than college-educated ones (88 to 86 percent).

Read the Full Essay @ FaraiChideya.com

What Does Five Dollars Mean to Black Women?

What Does Five Dollars Mean to Black Women?

by Renee Martin

What can you buy for five dollars? What if five dollars was all that stood between you and hunger and homelessness? Five dollars is not a safety net; it’s barely a bag of chips. Yet according to a study reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it is the median net worth of single Black women.

Single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600. That’s still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts, but married or cohabiting Black women are lower still, with a net worth of $31,500.

In other words, Black women continue to exist in a perilous economic state whether they are cohabitating or single. Instead of fixating on the marital status of Black women–a common media topic–we need to focus on the way that sexism and racism combine to form the basis of oppression.

Black men have a history of suggesting gender conformity, in the guise of racial uplift, that serves to oppress Black women. For example, comedian Steve Harvey wrote Act like a Lady and Think like a Man last year in the hopes of teaching Black women how to repair and hold onto relationships. The book is dependent upon many essentialist notions regarding gender to sell its point.

Following in Harvey’s footsteps, Jimi Izrael, a columnist for The Root, released his book The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find a Good Black Man this February. At The Root, Izrael wrote the following:

Eligible Black men, we think, can have their pick of educated Black women (assuming they even date Black women), as if merely having a job, an education and a pulse makes a woman ‘wife material.’ While there may be a lot of women available to Black men, MOST are not women you would want to spend your life with. I’m twice divorced, currently single and not taking applications because no qualified applicants have come down the pike. They are mostly variations on a few themes.

Responding to the report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Black Lunatic had this to say:

There is a notation that the median income for a married woman, or co-habitating woman, is about $31,000, so that’s proof that stable relationships improve finances. All I can offer is the idea that first step has to be increasing the number of folks getting and staying married.

It is hardly surprising that Black men would use this study as yet another excuse to inform Black women that marriage is what’s best, when they have invested so much time and effort in publicly supporting the institution in their recent writings. Of course, the fact that marriage increases the work load of women is not factored into their benevolent suggestions. This is hardly an unbiased suggestion. If we were to settle and be understanding, in the manner that Black men have suggested, we would be in an even more precarious position.

Read the Full Essay @ Ms. Blog