One day late last month, I powered up my laptop and pulled up my Google reader to find post after post about what some of the bloggers I follow had decided was the latest in a growing assault on successful single black women: this ABC News Nightline piece exploring the low marriage rate in the African-American community.
Watch it and you’ll see a group of attractive, well-groomed ladies ”” an attorney, a chemist, a doctoral student, a payroll specialist ”” discussing what they perceive as their lack of marriage options. The reporter cites this statistic: “Forty-two percent of U.S. black women have never been married, double the number of white women who’ve never tied the knot.”
This report followed a Dec. 10 story in The Washington Post and one a few months earlier from MSNBC about the dwindling marriage prospects for black women. We discussed it here at NPR in September, UPI had its version in August, CNN covered it last year, and Oprah tackled it in 2007….
It is a well known fact, and borne out by my experience, that a great many–perhaps a majority–of black (African-American) women consider black men to be poor marriage prospects.
The most interesting book I have read on this subject is James Flynn “Where have all the liberals gone?” Professor Flynn looks at the gender balance in each community, allowing for the current revealled propensity to marry outside of each race, and he concludes that there is a serious deficit in the number of black males of marriageable age. The reasons seem to be:
– imprisonment rates
– a very much higher death rate (he examines the current rate and shows the young black male death rate in america is higher than the death rate for front line soldiers in the second world war — which I found staggering)
– a very significant rate of “missing” black men ie born, don’t die but not in the census. Unclear where these are.
He then goes on to show that the result of having a deficit of men is that men can set the terms of the relationship — and prefer to not be tied. He compares this to the Hispanic population where men significantly outnumber women — and finds here the opposite features — women set the terms of the relationship and prefer marriage and stability.
So I don’t think it is a small issue that is highlighted in this article — there are real underlying demographic pressures that individual women can do nothing about which seriously impact upon their lives.