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 More »
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How Does It Feel to Be a Black, Female, Single Problem?
Open Thread: Black Women
I haven’t done this before, but there’s been a huge series of articles bemoaning the fate of the single black woman. Last night Nightline tackled the matter. I haven’t seen the tape yet but judging from the twitter traffic last night there’s some dissention on how useful the segment was. I even got a PHONE CALL from someone who needed a reality check moment–a, “um, I’m a black woman and may be single but I don’t feel desperate or unloved…what’s going on with the media” kind of reality check. That’s unusual.
Here’s a text piece with video clips from ABC’s website.
But I don’t want to make this all about Nightline. This black-women-are-too-career-functional-and-not-relationship-functual meme has been circulating in the media over the past couple months. The question the person who called me last night asked was why? Why is this such a hot topic now? What’s the investment in asking black women to be accountable for the low black marriage count, and not black men? Or structural discrimination in the jobs market that makes marriage a more economically fraught matter for whites than blacks?
Or, flip the question. The highest divorce rate is in the Bible Belt. Why aren’t white Southern Christian marriages being problematized? Too hard to hit that target; easier to see a black one?
Hit me up.
A “Tweachable Moment”: John Mayer’s Playboy Interview Riles Folks on Race, Womanhood
The singer John Mayer, @johncmayer on Twitter, put this 3-tweet post on his feed today:
“Re: using the ‘N word’ in an interview: I am sorry that I used the word. And it’s such a shame that I did because the point I was trying/
to make was in the exact opposite spirit of the word itself. It was arrogant of me to think I could intellectualize using it/
because I realize that there’s no intellectualizing a word that is so emotionally charged.”
Mayer had the bad luck to have his interview in Playboy (warning: NSFW) reach a wide online audience during a snow day, when the Twitterati were generally housebound and looking for something to talk about. And talk folks did. Among the, uhm, bracingly frank statements he made, two are getting the most attention. Read More »
