'Is Marriage for White People?'
June 23, 2011 4:33 PM   Subscribe

A controversial new book is raising some hackles. Should unmarried African-American females who desire matrimony give up looking for Mr. Right within their race and marry outside?
posted by Renoroc (24 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Eh, kind of hotly charged topic, not so great sources -- mathowie



 
Your link to "Mr. Right" goes to an NPR audio transcript about black men in prison, which is .... kinda odd.
posted by Avenger at 4:37 PM on June 23, 2011


they actually made a book about this? (full disclosure - haven't read the link.)
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 4:39 PM on June 23, 2011


I am really uncomfortable with the framing of your second link.
posted by Think_Long at 4:40 PM on June 23, 2011 [9 favorites]


OK, I knew we were going kind of slow in the whole marriage equality thing, but are we seriously reverting back to wondering if maybe interracial marriage is ok?
posted by qvantamon at 4:41 PM on June 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


Man, I hope there's some amazing scooby doo answer for that link, Renoroc.
posted by boo_radley at 4:43 PM on June 23, 2011 [2 favorites]


This project reveals itself to be the latest in a seemingly never-ending conversation analyzing the prospects of unmarried, professional, African-American women.

AKA "What's wrong with black women, today!"

The narrative where even successful black women are failures, is pretty much played out. There's other layers, too, about what it says as a narrative about black men, and also issues of assimilation as the end-all, be-all solution, but you know, we can't even go there when we're still having black women as objects for misery porn.
posted by yeloson at 4:46 PM on June 23, 2011


A man could do some awesome threadshitting here.

If'n he was so inclined.
posted by fleetmouse at 4:46 PM on June 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


Doing a search for women in the second link revealed this exhange:
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Well, you know, every year, the Du Bois Institute and Skip Gates - Henry Louis Gates - organize this panel discussion at the Whaling Church, and we try to build on a conversation about race. It's still much-needed in this country.

We discussed, last year, race in the era of Obama, and this was a specific that just kept coming up. I talked to Bill Cosby. I talked to Harry Belafonte. I talked to Melissa Harris-Lacewell, one of the participants in another panel and an academic who studies the issue. And everybody I talked to pretty much reflected what human rights has pointed out, that having a disproportionate number of black men in prison actually saps the strength of the nation as a whole.

So I thought that this would be a good way to continue to drill down on this much-needed conversation about race in this country.

SEABROOK: Can you be more specific about, saps our country as a whole - in what way?

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, first of all, most of the black men are in prison. So what's happening to the black women who need husbands? I mean, that's one way to look at it.

But the other way to look at it is the potential for so many of these people. One of the panelists was a young man named Dwayne Betts. You've had him on NPR several times now. He was arrested when he was 16 years old for hijacking a car.

This kid was an honor student, and since he went to once he went to prison, he continued to study, he continued to read. And now that he's out of prison, having served something like nine years, he's teaching. He's a poet. He's a writer. He's teaching other young people literature and hoping to keep them out of the criminal justice system, out of the path of, you know, temptation.

But you can see when you talk to him - there's another young man who was singing here with Ben Taylor's band, and he was in the same boat. And now he's out. And Carly Simon had lobbied for years to get him out of prison, and he has amazing potential.

So you're losing the academic potential. You're losing the cultural potential, and you're losing a really vital element of the society. When the majority of your young, black men are in prison, what I mean, do you have to ask the question?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:50 PM on June 23, 2011 [2 favorites]


OK, I knew we were going kind of slow in the whole marriage equality thing, but are we seriously reverting back to wondering if maybe interracial marriage is ok?

We're not "reverting" to anything. Interracial marriage may be legal and condoned by the ethical code promulgated among the elite, but my feeling is that most people never thought and don't think now that interracial marriage is just as acceptable as intraracial marriage. As books like these show, there is at present at least an idea that marrying outside of one's racial or ethnic affiliation is a "step down" from finding a partner from within one's own race.
posted by Electrius at 4:50 PM on June 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


'Is Marriage for White People?'

In most of the US, marriage is for straight people. Race was removed from the marriage question with Loving v Virginia.
posted by hippybear at 4:50 PM on June 23, 2011 [5 favorites]


Does the book imply that all the black men are in prison, like the link sorta does? 'cause I'm pretty sure I just saw a black dude picking up is mail in my building this morning...
posted by Jibuzaemon at 4:51 PM on June 23, 2011 [5 favorites]


oh gawd, why is this even an issue.

look, INTERNALIZED RACISM actually leads to the "there are no good black men" meme. it doesnt mean we need to walk away from black men, but when the premise is that we can only marry/mate/love within our melanin range, then we have to ask ourselves long and hard why interracial coupling is a problem.

and let me take this even one step further: would the United States have so many black men in prison if the penal system was based on denying WHITE WOMEN their husbands and mates?

love is an act of militancy. as the daughter of a white woman and a black man born in the 60s, my parents biggest act of militancy was not just getting married but having 2 brown babies. has it been easy for my brother and i? of course not. but i can tell you, as someone who has suffered the bigotry from both sides of the color spectrum, my parents love and our family were our own little revolution.

we need more little revolutions in this country.
posted by liza at 4:52 PM on June 23, 2011 [8 favorites]


hm; the main link (while we're criticizing) is a pretty negative book review...

Remember, we're after the Best of the web...
posted by kaibutsu at 4:54 PM on June 23, 2011


to expand on that:
It could be that the NPR link is awesome, but if so, it would have to be a hundred times better than the main link. There's almost certainly a great post to be made on the expansion of the US prison-industrial complex and its relation to race and its reliance on US minorities to provide bodies. But as built, this is not that post...
posted by kaibutsu at 4:57 PM on June 23, 2011 [2 favorites]


So does someone want to imply that my wife, who is black, decided to marry me, a white man, only because she couldn't find a suitable black man and had to settle for a less preferable option? Because if someone really wants to imply that, go right ahead. I'm right here.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:58 PM on June 23, 2011 [6 favorites]


And, you know... the book review's summary of the point of the book... "that black women should shift the power balance by opening themselves to interracial marriage"... really rubs me the wrong way.

Marriage is about forging a life with the person you want to be with for the rest of your life. It's not about a power balance. It's not a political statement. It's when you find someone that you really click with and after a while you decide that you want to formalize your lives together in the eyes of your community and the law.

If you're approaching your search for a life-partner with an eye to shifting the power balance by specifically searching outside your race, then you're doing it wrong.
posted by hippybear at 4:58 PM on June 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


There's a weird trend where a book title or article will state that such and such "is for white people" when usually there are a lot more groups that easily fit into that class. In particular, Asian-Americans have similar marriage rates to whites. Asian Americans tend to get left out of the discussion pretty often in general though.

If you're really interested in finding "Mr./Mrs. Right", you probably shouldn't start out by disqualifying most people in the country based on race anyway.
posted by Winnemac at 4:59 PM on June 23, 2011


It always makes the world a poorer place when love is politicised.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:04 PM on June 23, 2011


HUNTER-GAULT: Well, first of all, most of the black men are in prison. So what's happening to the black women who need husbands? I mean, that's one way to look at it.

I was going to say. Hunter-Gault is a great reporter and has done some brilliant filing from Africa, but this is wrong in every possible way. The present picture for underprivileged black men in America is not a great one, but come on.
posted by mykescipark at 5:06 PM on June 23, 2011


A MAJORITY (meaning >50%) of young black males are in prison?

That is ludicrous.
posted by nathancaswell at 5:07 PM on June 23, 2011


you're losing the academic potential. You're losing the cultural potential, and you're losing a really vital element of the society

Is there anyone here who disagrees with this?

Maybe you think her answer is fucked up, but at least she's confronting the question.
posted by Trurl at 5:07 PM on June 23, 2011


"The likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 16% compared to 2% of white males and 9% of Hispanic males.[2]"

"According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009.[37]"

So, yeah, wrong any way you slice it.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:12 PM on June 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


According to this data, there are about 900,000 black males in prison, or about 5% of all black males.

A shameful number based at least on imbalanced sentencing, but a far cry from "most" or "50%."
posted by contessa at 5:13 PM on June 23, 2011


we need more little revolutions in this country.

Best.. pickup line.. evar.
posted by formless at 5:14 PM on June 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


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