Business and Community Partners: The media’s ongoing war on single black women - Sara Libby - Ill Communication

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I have amassed dozens of clips in which I protest whatever the day’s conventional wisdom tells us about my generation – whether it’s how we’re going to ruin the next election; how we’re using social networks to our detriment; or how we’re insufficiently religious. I have an almost knee-jerk reaction to such pieces, since the media has been weirdly fixated on Gen Y and what it perceives as our bizarre social habits and general outlook on life.

But that fixation seems paltry compared with the media’s recent obsession with black women and why, in their view, their love lives are so pathetic. I’m no black woman, but I can’t stomach this peculiar fascination much longer.

Today’s culprit is the New York Times, which announces: “It is a familiar lament of single African-American women: where are the ‘good’ black men to marry?” Again, I don’t intend to speak for black women, but given the crush of stories on this subject, I think that this supposedly “familiar lament” is among newspaper editors, and not African-American women. It goes on to document a recent survey finding:

1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.

Sociologists said the rate of black men marrying women of other races further reduces the already-shrunken pool of potential partners for black women seeking a black husband.

But the Times is, well, behind the times in uncovering this supposedly terrible problem plaguing black women. Back in December, the Washington Post profiled Helena Andrews, the author of a book about “successful but lonely young black women.” It says:

Andrews writes about what it is like for a young, black woman dating in D.C., trying to find a mate who seems ever elusive. The futile rituals are familiar: the dressing up, the eager cab ride over to the party, the hold-your-breath as you walk in, scanning the room quickly for any looks returned. The mantra sounding in the back of your head: “So-and-so found a man last year at a party like this. Maybe tonight is my night.” Then one by one, the men prove to be disappointments and disappointing: married, uninteresting or uninterested.

Just me, or is this unnecessarily over-the-top in its characterization of black women as somehow defective in the realm of love (as if it were a walk in the park for everyone else)? The Post was so concerned with this defection that it followed up with this piece, detailing how black women would be wise to look outside their race if they ever want to tie down a man:

Single black women with college degrees outnumber single black men with college degrees almost 3 to 1 in major urban areas such as Washington, according to a 2008 population survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. Given those numbers, any economist would advise them to start looking elsewhere.

It’s Econ 101 for the single, educated black woman.

“Black women are in market failure,” says writer Karyn Langhorne Folan. “The solution is to find a new market for your commodity. And in this case, we are the commodity and the new market is men of other races.”

“Nightline” does the Post one better: It not only echoes the paper’s observation that black women’s love lives are a cause for concern, but it offered a roundup of commentators on the issue that reduced what it insisted was a serious problem into a punchline – instead of interviewing sociologists and experts who might be able to seriously consider the topic, the producers trotted out comedians like Steve Harvey. Writing in The Nation, Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell had a characteristically spot-on critique of the program:

Given the distortions of or absence of black women in most mainstream media outlets we are skeptical that Nightline was primarily motivated by a desire to address the human needs of African American women. Instead, we suspect marriage is a trope for other anxieties about respectability, economic stability, and the maintenance of patriarchy. Which social issue appears on the public agenda is never accidental. In this moment of economic crisis, social change and racial transformation it is meaningful that black women are being encouraged to exclusively embrace traditional models of family and to view themselves as deficient if their lives do not fit neatly into these prescribed roles.

Ultimately, these stories do little more than echo each other’s insistence that black women are an object for our pity, instead of offering any substantive or valuable political or social commentary. But placing a unique blame and shame on black women says much more about the mostly older white men who continue to dominate media management than it does about the women they keep bizarrely attributing blame and shame to with these pieces.