As we move toward the last decade of this century, the shadow of Du Bois’s prophetic declaration that the twentieth century’s problem would be the color line continues to extend itself in foreboding manner. The plight of black men, indeed, is a microcosmic reflection of the problems that are at the throat of all black people, an idiomatic expression of hurt drawn from the larger discourse of racial pain. Unless, however, there is vast reconstitution of our social, economic, and political policies and practices, most of which target black men with vicious specificity, Du Bois’s words will serve as the frontispiece to the racial agony of the twenty-first century as well.
Thirteen
ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT, OR HAVE ALL THE BROTHERS GONE TO WHITE WOMEN?
This is one of the most controversial pieces I have written. The title joins Sam Cooke’s lament of “Another Saturday night / and I ain’t got nobody”—the plea of many talented and beautiful black women—with a query many of them raise to me in seeking an explanation for the disinterest of many eligible black men: “Have all the brothers gone to white women?” In this chapter, from my book Why I Love Black Women, I explore the reasons given for why black women are alone—reasons of their own making and those having to do with societal forces. I conclude that black women are often unfairly stigmatized as overbearing and “too choosy.” Moreover, despite claims that their often superior education makes it difficult for black men to get along with them, black women often date and marry men with far less training. The most controversial aspect of this chapter is the contention that some black men, due to the racist cues they inherit from mainstream society, spurn their own and turn to white women as the ideal representatives of womanhood. I also argue that, in terms of socioeconomic status, many black men marry “down” when they marry white women. When I appeared on the ABC television talk show The View, most of the hosts charged that I was a racist for making this empirically grounded claim. They interpreted “marry down” to mean that I believed black men who married white women chose racially inferior women. Despite my vigorous attempts at clarification, the hosts—with the exception of guest host Kathie Lee Gifford—maintained their views. My only consolation is that I was able to publicly praise host Star Jones, about whom I had written in the book. Another host, Joy Behar, called me the “Barry White” of black romantic literature because of my appreciation for Star’s beauty. In light of the great singer’s death last year, it was the highest compliment I received that day.
“LOOK AT ME,” THE SISTER BLURTED IN EXASPERATION. “It’s Saturday night, and I can’t buy a date.”
I was at a black-tie event for Chicago’s 100 Black Men, an organization devoted to improving the lot of young black males. The event drew many of Chicago’s black elite, including prominent clergy, physicians, entrepreneurs, and politicians. After the ceremonies were over, my frustrated female had spotted me across the cavernous room in the Hyatt Hotel. She was a tall, statuesque woman, voluptuous in the way that sends black men hankering after something to hold on to because they’ve been waylaid by breathtaking beauty. Her skin was brown and smooth—all sweet chocolate dipped into sensuous ebony hues—and her sparkling eyes set like flaming candles above her arching cheekbones. Her hair was a stylish black splash, with her limbs elegantly gesturing and her hands delicately pointing as her painted, manicured nails punctuated her message.
As we talked for half an hour, it was clear that she was not only drop-dead gorgeous, but also bright as all outdoors, down-to-earth but schooled, witty and urbane but a true homegirl, used to the corporate game she played as an executive but wearing her status loosely. Highly intelligent, educated, perceptive, in love with her people, down for the cause, a lover of black men—and she was alone, by herself, without a date in sight on a Saturday evening that brimmed with romantic promise.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked me. “I’m not trying to get married tomorrow—I’m not pressuring black men that way. I just want somebody to spend some time with, someone with whom I can have a good discussion and a good meal, and somebody I can laugh with. I just want a date, for God’s sake, not a husband!”
She had nothing against husbands, should a relationship develop in that direction. My lovely interlocutor simply sought to underscore her lack of desperation, a desperation that she had to defend herself against because of the frequent complaint by black men that they feel the noose of matrimony tightening around their necks on the second date. Besides, an equally stunning Afro-Cuban executive who was barely five feet accompanied her. She was highly articulate and scrumptiously attractive. Her very pretty, cocoa-brown face was lit by a radiant smile. And her petite but exquisitely crafted figure pressed warmly against the soft fabric of her evening gown as her charismatic glow haloed her curly, flowing locks.
“I’m extremely fortunate,” my magnetic Afro-Cuban conversationalist enthused. “I found a wonderful man who recognized my worth. It’s extremely important to be with someone who appreciates and respects you, someone who’s comfortable with himself, and who’ll therefore be comfortable with you, a man who’s not threatened by a strong black woman.” As if by cue, he approached, and true to his wife’s word, he was a splendid symbol of black masculinity: tall, dark, and handsome, and like his wife, Ivy League trained, and from my hometown, to boot.
“Sister, I just don’t understand it,” I confessed. “’Cause you finer than the print at the bottom of a contract whipped up at midnight by a shady lawyer. You should have brothers beating down your door—or at least standing in line to take a number so they can catch five minutes of your time. I don’t know what I can do in your case, but I’ve got to think about this problem because if I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it thousands of times from incredible black women who simply want a little love.” It was true. I had traveled across much of the nation for the past decade, and beautiful, bright black women from every walk of life repeated her story with frightening regularity.
I was frustrated by my failure to adequately explain the painful mystery of why perfectly wonderful black women are often by themselves. Perhaps they are punished for their success, reviled for their strength and independence, feared for their security, hated for their heart, loathed for their determination to survive, and yet still loyal to black men. I didn’t have to romanticize black women to appreciate them. After all, I had married three black women with wildly differing results. But I knew the tough situation they confronted was not mostly of their own making, despite what social theorists or barbershop pundits concluded.
The statistics seem to reinforce the gloomy outlook for black women. In essence, black women are less likely than other women to marry in the first place, more likely to divorce, and less likely to remarry. Only 50 percent of black women are expected to be married by the age of twenty-eight, compared to 80 percent of white women. Black women are less likely to remarry after a divorce than white women. Only 32 percent of black women remarry within five years of divorce, while 54 percent of white women and 44 percent of Latina women get married again. As if to underscore how tight and complicated relationships are for black folk, even when marriages are broken, they don’t necessarily lead to divorce. Many sisters experience a marital breakup without having their relationships legally terminated. Just 67 percent of black women who were separated from their husbands were divorced three years later. Although this statistic might be interpreted as 33 percent of black women try to work out their relationships during separation, it is just as likely that the high percentage of sisters who don’t terminate their relationships suggests an inclination—perhaps the desperation—to hold on as long as possible.
When the Centers for Disease Control issued a report in 2002 highlighting some of these numbers, a journalist friend—I’ll call her Dorothy—shared with me her e-mail exchange with a black male colleague—let’s call him Henry—who had some interesting things to say about why black men over thirty-five find it tough to be in relationships with black women. Henry said that his college-educ
ated, high-professional male friends in their late thirties and early forties are quite comfortable being single and feel no compulsion to marry. Henry and his friends are wary of women over thirty-five who’ve never been married. They figure that any reasonably attractive woman who is bright and not angry at men is likely to have lived with someone or been married by thirty-five, even if the relationship failed and she’s in circulation again. When Henry’s women friends describe their negative behavior and attitudes toward men, he lets them know, when pressed, that “no man is going to stick around for that.”
Henry wrote that while we hear a great deal about men being the cause of women’s failure to find a mate, there is little discussion of how women are responsible for their fates. Henry tried to avoid discussions with his never-married, over-thirty-five female friends because the truth is painful, and only when they are pushed will they admit they have issues that keep them single. Moreover, Henry believed that “too many women view themselves as perpetual victims; the stories they tell about their previous relationships usually involve them as the victims of male treachery and the narrative doesn’t allow any possibility that maybe they had some personal qualities that would make a man not want to be in a long-term relationship with them.” Besides the decreased prospect of fertility for women over thirty-five, Henry said that many women are overweight, and that trying to force black men to find plus-size women attractive “is like trying to convince a guy who is indifferent to spectator sports that a baseball strike matters.”
In one of her responses, Dorothy, who is forty-something and married for the second time, told Henry that she could sympathize with many of his observations, though she was mystified by the double standard. “Perfectly acceptablelooking sisters sit at home on Saturday nights because they don’t look like Vanessa Williams (either of them!), Ananda Lewis, or Halle Berry—yet these same men who are insisting that they have to have fit and trim women have pot bellies, raggedy nails, and shoes that are run down at the heels. Maybe they think their Jaguars make up for it? Maybe they figure the numbers are so in their favor they don’t have to, in Archie Bunker’s words, “run to catch the bus.” It’s at the stop, doors open, motor running, waiting for them to hop aboard.’” Dorothy reminded Henry of the quote from journalist George Curry, who once told her “any brother could get over in D.C. long’s he can read, write and don’t have no running sores.” Dorothy confessed that were she single, she’d have to throw in the towel. “All I know is I’d be home by myself with a book before I’d allow myself to wait on some of these brothers to lower their impossibly high standards and ask me out!”
There are many social scientists, armchair analysts, ghetto critics—and some black women themselves—who believe that it is black women who set impossibly high standards for potential partners. To be sure, there are many other reasons besides high standards that keep black women from marrying, including their educational achievements and socioeconomic standing, both of which are higher on average than black men’s; the substantial mortality gap between men and women; the disproportionate incarceration of black men; the poor labor force participation of black men; black men’s lower occupational status; the dramatically decreasing rate of black men seeking higher education; and the increasing rate of interracial marriage among black men.
The incarceration of black men is a huge problem, especially when it is a zerosum game between brothers in prison or in school. In what seems an eon ago in hip-hop years, rapper turned actor/director Ice Cube proved hip-hop’s prescience when he asked the question, “Why more niggas in the pen than in college?” It’s taken more than a decade for social science to match the science Cube dropped when he was a bad-boy rebel, long before he became a mainstream media darling in comedies like Friday and Barbershop.
According to the Justice Policy Institute ( JPI ) report “Cellblocks or Classrooms? The Funding of Higher Education and Corrections and Its Impact on African American Men,” hip-hop has been on the money. And cash is precisely what is at stake in the booming prison industry that lusts to house more blacks in local penitentiaries. The more black bodies are tossed in jail, the more cells are built, and the more money is made, especially in the rural white communities where many prisons thrive. In 1995 alone, 150 new prisons were constructed and filled, while 171 more were expanded.
But money is also at stake when it comes to making a crucial choice: to support blacks in the state university or the state penitentiary. As the report makes clear, we have chosen the latter. During the 1980s and 1990s, state spending for corrections grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education. By the end of last century, there were nearly a third more black men in prison and jail than in colleges and universities. That means that the number of black men in jail or prison has increased fivefold in the last twenty years. In 1980, at the dawn of the prison construction boom, black men were three times more likely to be enrolled in college than incarcerated.
In 2000, there were 791,600 black men in jail or prison, while only 603,032 were enrolled in colleges or universities. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in jail or prison and 463,700 matriculating in higher educational institutions. In effect, the cell block or classroom choice boils down to a policy that, whether intended or not, is genocidal. We would permit no other population of American citizens to be locked away with such callous disregard for the educational opportunity that might help stem the tide of incarceration.
It is hardly a coincidence that, as blacks have become cogs in the machinery of the prison economy, their chances of being college educated have been drastically reduced. The engine of the prison-industrial complex is fueled by the containment of black upward mobility and the disenfranchisement of black citizenry. In many states, felons are ineligible to vote once they leave prison. First we deny these men a solid education, and then we deprive them of the right to help reshape the policies that have harmed them.
One of the tragedies of this state of affairs is that it undercuts the advances of black males in higher education over the last two decades. Between 1980 and 2000, three times as many black men were sent to prison as were enrolled in college or the university. In 2000, at least thirteen states had more black men in prison than in college, and from 1980 until 2000, thirty-eight states, along with the federal system, increased the prison population more than they swelled the ranks of higher education. If the planners of state budgets continue this destructive trend, they will compensate for a loss of revenue by cutting spending on education and social services, two critical means by which blacks escape poverty and the prison trap. If black men are in prison and not in college, they have two strikes against them in their bid to become viable partners to black women. Black male imprisonment has a double-whammy effect on black women finding mates among their male peers: it separates black men from society, and it severely erodes their prospects for higher education.
Even with these facts supporting the diminished choices faced by women, there is still the perception that they are just too picky. Ebony magazine has through the years addressed the issue, in articles such as “How Black Women Can Deal with the Black Male Shortage,” “Black Women/Black Men: Has Something Gone Wrong Between Them?” and “Do Black Women Set Their Standards for Marriage Too High?” The black male shortage article, from the May 1986 issue, cited Census Bureau statistics that there were at the time 6.4 million more females than males in the United States, and that there were 1.4 million more black females than black males.
According to the article, Dr. Ann Ashmore Poussaint and other experts suggested that black women stop blaming black men and society for their dilemma. The experts argued that women should take a closer look at themselves, their attitude about men, and their approach to finding a mate. “There are many single women who complain about loneliness, but when they do meet interesting men, they project a negative attitude or seem to always get into debates over feminist issues. Others aren’t shy about flaunting their professional and financial successes, g
iving men the impression that they either don’t need or have time for a meaningful relationship.”
These sentiments appear to be informed by the reluctance to embrace feminist principles as a viable alternative for black women, or by a presumption that female success is the catalyst for the downfall of black men. But Poussaint also argued that too many black women eliminated suitors for superficial reasons, including profession, skin color, height, weight, income, education, family background, and social graces or contacts. She said that if a woman felt she was lowering her standards by dating or marrying a particular kind of man, she should reconsider her priorities. Poussaint and others were not suggesting that black women lower their standards, the article said, but that they should broaden their outlooks, including, some experts said, dating men outside their culture, although other experts strongly opposed interracial relationships.
In the higher standards article, printed in January 1981, Ebony explored the black male complaint that black women are more interested in what black men do than who they are. It also grapples with the black male perception that black women are more concerned with professional stature, high income, college degrees, and good looks. They tested this perception—which was really a hypothesis about black female behavior put forth by black men—by engaging twenty-five young women at Spelman College in a group discussion. To the question, “Is a man’s status really important to a Black woman thinking about marriage?” Ebony reports there “was a resounding ‘Yes’ from the group.”
Some of the students claimed that they were attending college to better themselves, and thus, they seek mates who match their efforts and achievement. The gap between a black male bus driver and a black female attorney would be hard to surmount. Since the vast majority of black men in 1981 held blue-collar jobs—a statistic that remains unchanged to this day—and because black women’s route to professional achievement was not as difficult as that of black men, the magazine contended, the tensions between the genders would only increase. Many of the young Spelman women recognized that they might have difficulty in finding mates with comparable achievements, and hence believed they could afford to wait. The article explores the class rift between high-achieving, highly motivated black females, and black males hampered by persistent racism and differing socialization.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 25