The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (29 page)

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, giving 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.

If the issue of black women having higher standards for relationships was a concern twenty years ago, it is even more prevalent now. According to some research, black women have been less willing than white women to marry men with lower status and undesirable traits—those who are younger, previously married, less educated, or unattractive. In short, black women prefer attractive men who are near their age and who have a stable career. For those black women who have never been married, they prefer mates with no previous wives or children. The younger the black woman, the greater her expectation that her man meet the criteria she deemed important. Further, black women who have higher status are more invested in building careers and less urgent about finding a mate. The economic independence of high-achieving black women, and the deteriorating economic conditions of black males, severely depletes the pool of potentially marriageable black men.

In our nation, people tend to marry folk who have similar educational backgrounds. That poses a huge problem for black men and women, since the ratio of highly educated black men to women has been said to be as small as sixty men available for every one hundred women. There are nearly 400,000 more black women than men enrolled in higher education. Black women are now earning more than 63 percent of all college degrees awarded to blacks. There are nearly 4 million black married couples in the United States, and among them, just under 10 percent have marriages where both spouses have a college degree. Slightly more than 1 percent of them are marriages where both spouses had graduate degrees.

Moreover, black women with higher levels of education are disproportionately affected by the shortage of black men with similar levels of education. In the 1930s, only 11 percent of black women were expected not to marry; today, less than 40 percent of black women are expected to marry. One might conclude in analyzing these statistics that there is no shortage of black men for black women to marry, but that black women choose to remain single rather than marry partners who do not meet their expectations. Further, educated professional black women seek to marry only those men they find acceptable by high standards; thus, lack of motivation, not availability, is the critical issue.

But that would be extremely shortsighted. While it is true that such numbers might translate to black women being “picky,” the reality is that black women seek to meet and marry those men with whom they have the greatest degree of compatibility. Black male resentment of black female achievement, especially among black men who have not enjoyed the opportunity to succeed, may translate to unwarranted hostility toward black women. Many brothers feel that black women are the pawns of a white establishment that seeks to hold them down. As
a result, black female movement through educational and professional ranks is to some black men a symptom of black women’s complicity with a racist system. Rather than offer an astute analysis of our condition—that in a patriarchal culture, black men do represent a specific threat to white male power that black women don’t, and hence, in some instances, white men prefer the presence of black women in professional settings—black men often confuse the consequences of racism with a desire of black females to undercut them.

Further, for a black man to reach beneath his class station to embrace a black woman reinforces the status quo: as breadwinner, he can provide for his family, and thus remain “head of the house.” For a black woman to behave similarly upsets the status quo: if she makes more money and is better educated than her partner, the resentment of her man can become burdensome, sometimes abusive. I know a lot of brothers who felt they could take a woman making more money than them, but once the reality of her higher status set in, it usually took on social meanings beyond a paycheck. Issues of control inevitably arose, and the question of who was in charge followed in its wake. Since black men struggle with a society that sets up expectations for appropriate masculine behavior—take care of one’s family, be gainfully employed, be a financial success—and then undermines their attainment, black women are often the psychological scapegoat of our anger. The rise in black male domestic violence is poignant testimony to such tensions in the black home.

It would be hard to blame black women for wanting to be “equally yoked,” but that does not mean there aren’t sisters who are dismissive of black men outside of their income or educational bracket. In my early twenties, a young lady I had grown quite fond of and with whom I had become intimate, bluntly told me, “I’m attracted to you physically, and I think you’re very smart, but you’re a minister, and you won’t make a lot of money. I need a man who will be financially well-off, so I don’t think we can have a relationship.”

I was stunned and hurt, and from that day forward, robbed of any illusions about how poorly some sisters can behave. Still, the grim reality is that black men often despise women’s success as the unfailing predictor of domestic trouble. I will never forget a black man who told me that his wife’s education had hurt their relationship because she no longer understood her place. “She became a ‘phenomenal woman,”’ he declared with bitter irony, citing in his resentful put-down the famous Maya Angelou poem of the same name. I have heard similar comments repeated by brothers time and time again.

Despite all of this, many college-educated black women marry black men with significantly lower levels of education. In marriages where black women have a college degree, only 45.9 percent of their husbands also have a college degree. More than one-quarter of black women who have a college degree are married to men who have never gone to college. And 4 percent of black women with a college degree are married to black men who didn’t graduate from high school. By comparison, nearly 70 percent of white women with a college degree married men who
also had a college degree, and only 12 percent of white women with a college degree married men who never went to college. While black women may prefer mates who are educationally compatible, they have often chosen mates whose lower achievement makes their marriages vulnerable to divorce and spousal abuse.

Other black men complain bitterly that many black women prefer the hardcore, thugged-out brother, the bad boy, the player. A brilliant young Vanderbilt University professor of mathematics, whom this thinking victimized, wrote an essay about his experience for
Essence
magazine. Jonathan Farley is a tall, slim, attractive brown-skinned young man, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard who took a doctorate in mathematics from Oxford University and is an outspoken advocate for the Black Panthers. In his essay, he recalls a painful episode: a young lady with whom he fell in love only wanted to be his friend. But the worst of it is that she took him to dinner to heal his wounds by telling him why he struck out. “She outlined the difference between men like me and the men Black women preferred, between mere African Americans and ‘niggaz’: AfricanAmericans are safe, respectable, upwardly mobile and professional Black men. Niggaz are strong, streetwise, hard Black men.”

Jonathan pointed out that his erstwhile love had a question posed to her by a friend: if she was walking down a dark street at night, who would she want by her side, an African-American or a nigga? She told Jonathan that black women sought a strong protector. Jonathan writes that he “tried to explain that physical strength had ceased to be a survival trait back in the Stone Age.” Further, he warned her that women who prefer niggaz to African-Americans were making a costly mistake since African-Americans, by virtue of their “higher social and economic status”—and wasn’t this what black women wanted?—could better protect them and give them the security they desired. Since many young black women grow up without fathers in the home, even college-educated black women often settled for dropouts and drug dealers.

Because of his experience, Jonathan found himself “resisting my own impulses to open a door, start a conversation or even say hello to many young black women I meet, for fear of appearing too gentlemanly and hence unworthy of their attention.” Jonathan argued that even black men who were “raised in the suburbs don the attire and attitude of street thugs so that they, too, will be chosen.” He concluded his essay by admonishing sisters to “leave the players in the playground. . . . Knights in shining armor don’t have to have gold teeth.”

Many black women have admitted that this is far too frequent a flaw among their sisters. Many sisters claim to have outgrown such an inclination, chalking it up to their youth and their failure to know what kind of man would really be a good partner. Once they mature, many black women are attracted to brothers whose stability and substance are prized above the flashy danger of destructive black men.

If some black men chafe under the restrictive mythology of the ghetto tough, many more black women are passed over for an equally nefarious reason. Recently, when I lectured at a northeastern college, a young lady approached me
after my lecture. As we chatted about a number of issues, we began to discuss the dating situation at her college for black women. That’s when she dropped the bombshell on me.

“Professor Dyson, my boyfriend broke up with me earlier this year,” the attractive chocolate sister told me.