The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (28 page)

“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-educated, 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.