Another article on the black marriage issue. BTW, I met the writer a couple of years ago.
http://www.nynewsday.com/entertainme...,4304738.story
Trapped in a Trend
With the rate of black marriages tumbling, young people ready to wed face a dearth of willing partners
By Erin Texeira
STAFF WRITER
March 19, 2003
Twenty-two black women - perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed, smiles at the ready - were seated along a wall at the Sugar Bar in Manhattan. It was 20 minutes after an African- American speed-dating event was scheduled to begin, but only a handful of black men had arrived.
The women waited, and their smiles stiffened. They waited more; smiles fell. The event finally began 45 minutes late, with 18 men. The off-kilter ratio left several women alone, staring into their cocktails or examining their manicures during the rotating, five-minute chat sessions.
Ninety minutes later, a few had made potential matches.
"So many of the guys said they were forced to come," said Tavia Smith, 35, an advertising executive who works in Manhattan. "The last person who sat down, actually he just sat there [and didn't speak]. I was through at that point.... The smiles were gone, the energy was gone."
More than a few women admitted they went home disappointed.
In many ways, the evening was emblematic of a trend that has been slowly building over the past 50 years.
Black women who earn more than $75,000 a year - are, 2000 census figures show, more likely than any group in America to be single. It wasn't always like this.
Marriage rates for whites and blacks were nearly identical in the 1950s, but today about 60 percent of all African-Americans 15 and older are single, compared with about 40 percent of whites. Six in 10 black children are born to single parents.
Such numbers reflect a startling reality, particularly for black middle-class women, many of whom are frustrated and confused because they lack life partners.
"These women feel like they've done everything right. They've gone to the right schools, got the great jobs, they're dressing fabulously - but what happened?" says Sonia Banks, a clinical psychologist who ran a support group in Washington, D.C., for black women who were single and looking. "It just didn't happen for them."
The numbers, experts say, also demonstrate how social forces - welfare, incarceration rates, the legacies of slavery, interracial marriage and gender gaps in education - have helped to drastically alter black families within just a few generations.
"Among Afro-Americans, marriage is simply losing its appeal," says Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson.
Enter into a discussion on the sorry state of black relationships and you must use extreme caution: Typically, one of the first sentiments that spills over is blame.
The men say black women, often taught from infancy to be self-reliant, can be critical and demanding and tough to love. Women burst with retorts, saying that black men can be commitment-phobic, skirting marriage and its responsibilities - even as they're eager to have superficial relationships.
Wendy Petties, 35, of East Elmhurst hears the harsh accusations all the time. For six years, she and her sister, Daria - both single - have hosted parties for black singles to play board games and meet potential mates. But soon after the gatherings were begun, the Petties shifted gears to rein in the conversations more "because the game nights turned into 'Guys all do this' or 'Girls all do that,'" says Petties, whose e-mail listserv, called SistaConnection, includes 400 single women.
For most African-Americans in the current generation, the two-parent household is the exception to the rule, Patterson says. It is more common to hear young unmarried blacks speak of their children's parents - called "baby mama" and "baby daddy" in slang - than about making public vows.
By 2000, 60 percent of African-Americans 15 and over were single, either never married or divorced and not remarried. The national average is 37 percent, 2000 census data show.
One in five black women earning $75,000 or more a year is divorced and has not remarried - double the national rate.
"I don't know how to fix it, but it's sad, very sad," says Petties, who is an executive with AIG Insurance. She believes the patterns among African-Americans are rooted in slavery.
"We come from a history of people who were not encouraged, were actually discouraged from forming relationships," she says. To this day, she says, "you don't get too close to people or bond in an outward manner. I know people who love very deeply, but behind closed doors."
Her observations are borne out by academic research.
"There has always been a marriage crisis among Afro-Americans, and that goes back to slavery," says Patterson, who explored the issue at length in "Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries" (BasicCivitas Books, $13) published in 1998.
"No marriage was permitted, parents had no custodial rights on children and spouses - whether they jumped over brooms or not - had no spousal rights. This was reinforced in the sharecropping era, with the undermining of black manhood." Here, he points to lynchings, which overwhelmingly targeted black men and often involved castration.
After slavery, Patterson maintains, African-Americans married in great numbers, but his research shows that the unions often were weak as families struggled to overcome centuries of emotional damage
"The essence of it is that there's tremendous distrust and misunderstanding and different sorts of expectations by Afro-American men and women," he says, adding that the stresses and strains of racism and poverty create immeasurable burdens for many black families.
Before the divorce boom of the 1970s, many Americans of all cultural backgrounds remained married because social pressures, tough divorce laws and economic burdens made it the best option for survival, particularly for women, says Melissa Barfield, a sociologist at California State University at San Bernardino.
But as women increasingly worked outside the home - something black women have historically done much more than white women - marriage began to decline as they gained more independence, financial and otherwise, she says.
At the same time, new social assistance options implemented during the War on Poverty in the 1960s provided alternate economic safety nets, another factor that drove families to dissolve unhappy marriages, says Barfield, a welfare expert.
"The welfare system has taken on a role as a provider for the family," she says. "If someone is faced with, should I stay married or should I get divorced, they have some economic security in the welfare system. If that system wasn't there, they might stay there [in the marriage] for that additional income."
This societywide pattern seems to have hit African-Americans hardest.
Even as welfare became an option in the 1960s and '70s, thousands of the urban, blue-collar jobs that sustained black families were disappearing, pushing many families toward government assistance for the first time.
Another social reality that impacted black families was the growing prison population, made up overwhelmingly of black and Latino men. That number has quadrupled since 1980, according to the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
For many marriage-age blacks, the forces keeping wedded bliss just out of reach are easy to see in their everyday lives.
"Look, this is purely a political, economic and sociological issue," Sean Broadbelt, 32, a jazz guitarist whose band played at the black speed-dating event in Manhattan, says during a music break. "There has been a breakdown of the family."
He outlines myriad problems, blaming men and women. Then he adds: "It's difficult to find someone who can develop a long-term, committed relationship. That's what I want, definitely."
Experts say marriage has increasingly become more of an emotional endeavor than an economic one - for men and women.
"I don't need a man" is a common refrain for black women, particularly middle-class women, says Sheila James, who leads co-ed singles retreats through St. John the Baptist Church in Hempstead. "These days, a woman wants a man to come to the table with as much as or more than she's bringing to the table."
But data show that has become a tough order to fill because many more black women than men are getting college educations and post-graduate degrees. Between 1976 and 1997, the number of black women completing professional degrees jumped more than 200 percent, compared with 27 percent for black men, according to a study published by the National Urban League. Taken another way, according to the Current Population Survey (an annual Census/Bureau of Labor statistics survey) there were 1,460,000 black men and 2 million black women with bachelor's degrees.
"When I was getting my PhD, my girlfriend's mother said, 'You get this doctorate and you'll never get married again,'" says Ella L. Bell, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, who, at the time, was recently divorced. "I was 31 years old."
More than a decade and a half later, that prophesy has proved true so far.
"Never before have we had the access [to opportunities] that we have now, believe it or not, but never before have we paid such a price," Bell says.
Sabrina Lamb, founder and director of FlirtingTime, the black speed-dating service, says her events fill up with single, professional women as soon as they're publicized, and many women arrive with high expectations. Although the events are popular and have resulted in some solid matches, many women leave disappointed.
"I've had no complaints from the men, not one," she says. "The complaints come from the women."
To be sure, professional black women are not the only high-earning women drifting away from marriage, census data show. The more money any woman earns, the less likely she is to marry. On the other hand, for men of all races, the higher one's income, the more likely a man is to get married and stay married.
Indeed, nearly 70 percent of black men who earn $75,000 or more a year are married, and millions of African-American marriages are flourishing, experts say. James of Hempstead says she often works with married couples who are not in crisis but simply looking to improve their relationships. "A lot of men want to know: How can I make her happy? What can I say to make her feel fulfilled."
Still, many black men aren't knocking on black women's doors proposing marriage en masse. So, where are they? "In prison, homeless, dead or not trying to get married at all," quips one 34-year-old Philadelphia native who puts himself in the last category but declined to be identified. His statement, though an oversimplification, is telling.
There is a factor he left out: Census data show that black men are about twice as likely as black women to date and marry mates who aren't black - a gap that seems to be slowly evening out. In 1998, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 330,000 black-white couples, two-thirds of which were black men married to white women. In 1980, there were about 167,000 such couples, almost three-fourths of whom were black men-white women unions.
The silver lining to all this, single black women insist, is they are building networks among themselves that are stronger and more fulfilling than ever. Throughout the country, formal and informal support groups - workout clubs, book groups, church circles - filled with black women are flourishing.
Many unattached women say they are having the time of their lives, traveling, pampering themselves, buying and maintaining their own homes and achieving their professional goals. In many cases, they also are raising children on their own quite happily.
"We have learned to make family and supplement for the [romantic] relationships," Petties says.
Last Sept. 11, she said, at the last minute, 11 of her girlfriends gathered in a Manhattan restaurant to commiserate over the turmoil of the previous year. "No one wanted to go home and watch the memorials on TV," she said. "We've learned to sort of date each other, in the PG-sense of the word."
She added, "I'm glad and feel lucky that we have that."
Marriage In America
Percentage of black adults (15 and over) who are married
1950
MEN 64.4%
WOMEN 62
1980 48.9
WOMEN 44.6
2000
MEN 42.8
WOMEN 36.2
SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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