I'm pretty sure black women are one of the least likely demographic groups to be in interracial relationships, at less than half the rate for interracial marriages as black men. Obviously black lesbians in interracial relationships exist, some of whom should really start that promised load of laundry any minute now, and other setups not accounted for by marriage data. But certainly many, many more of my black female friends are unwilling to date outside their race than my friends in any other demographic.
Actually, I just saw a Slate article arguing that black lesbians in interracial relationships shouldn't start the laundry any time soon. You should look into it.
The framing was made explicitly somewhere in the article -- there's a line referring to heterosexual black women seeking partners of the same race. Which is better than leaving it as an unstated assumption, I think.
Once you go white, you'll never feel right.
But it's definitely a topic that needs to be handled with great sensitivity.
We're here to help.
2: She said she'd like to give a TED Talk someday, but starting with a slatepitch would probably make more sense.
3: It doesn't actually say heterosexual, but this is the quote:
The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce, while men, who face an abundant supply of potential mates, don't need to compete as hard to find one. As a result, Mr. Charles said, "men seem less likely to commit to romantic relationships, or to work hard to maintain them."
That actually seems to imply it's only talking about same-race relationships, which I don't think makes sense with the scarcity hypothesis.
The high rate of black male incarceration is a real problem. I think this is the right framing rather than the regular framing of injustice (racist police killings, inequitable laws). The real problem is justice. Too many people put in jail for the actual crimes that they commit. We just need to set a reasonable ceiling of people per 100,000 in jail and make the hard decisions about who those people should be.
7 is right.
Also, men are excludable but non-rivalrous goods, so technically you can't run out of them.
And too many black men are moving to Spokane. And Cape Cod.
At the root of my disquiet is what I believe is our collective incapacity to value black men's liberty for its own sake. The impacts on communities are real and I don't discount them but I think the article illuminates the gaping void in the social and political discussions we can even conceive of having.
10: I don't think it's even "Think about the black women!" at play, because who gives a shit? It's more "Do you really want your tax dollars going to feed and clothe the children of deadbeat black dads?"
Oh Thorn you are depressing soooo right.
Huh. I swear the world heterosexual was in the print edition, but I can't find it online.
Actually, I'm a little weirded out -- I swear there was an article derived from the Upshot post, but expanded or something, in the print edition that I can't find at all online.
Setting aside the underlying issues, am I right that the 83:100 ratio understates the situation? Per the quoted bit in 6, you basically have .8 potential [same-race] partners for each het black woman and 1.25 potential [same-race] partners for each het black man. That's a huge disparity in choices and potential selectivity. Add in the apparent fact that black men have more access to/interest in interracial partners, and now you've got an absolute gulf between the respective experiences of identifying desirable/achievable partners.
11, 12: I don't think that sort of framing is at all unusual or particular to race stuff. Take this piece from MoJo the other day about how taxpayers subsidize poorly paid employees of Olive Garden and such. I don't think the author is genuinely saying that's the only reason to care about what OG pays; she's just using every argument at her disposal to make the case for raising the minimum wage/change distribution in general.
Sure, it sucks that you need to appeal to interest in order to get people to care about other people (especially those unlike themselves), and it's definitely proof that we're not all perfect, but I really don't think it's some sign of immoral writers or especially selfish readers.
In fact, I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find any political argument that doesn't proceed along these lines: Issue X is a problem, because it's immoral/unfair/impure/whatever. Furthermore, you should care/act/vote because it directly affects you, possibly through a kind of complicated mechanism. Even ostensibly pure moral arguments, like anti-abortion, always pull in "What if Beethoven had been aborted?"
16 and 17 are right, but I read "MoJo" as "MoDo" and was annoyed anyway.
The problem with the framing is that as framed, the obvious solution is to incarcerate (or have police shoot) more black women.
It is a sign of immoral and selfish readers -- that is, the mass of humanity.
I've been thinking all morning about whether to (buy and) read the new Krakauer book. From reviews and interviews, he blames the prosecutors and police -- and it's fair to say they weren't as aggressive as victims had hoped -- but what if they are acting from an accurate understanding of where juries are likely to go?
The poster thing, though, I cannot condone. (A local artist [with whom I'm friendly and who is very close to a lot of people I know) has taken the book cover and selectively blanked out enough letter in the author's name to leave "o ur" and then totally blanked out the subtitle 'Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.' Covering up rape and the problems with the justice system doesn't seem like the right road to fixing the problem.
Was Is Marriage For White People ever discussed ATM?
14: Ha ha, because gays control the internet now! Some are even doing laundry, in case anyone wondered.
21: So he's turned it into a solidarity thing? That seems... gross.
1: Here is some relevant data based on a Facebook dating app. It confirms your idea that African American women are least likely to want to date outside their ethnic group, but it also shows that Black men are least likely to want to date *inside* their ethnic group. In fact, men of all ethnic groups are least likely to show interest in dating Black women.
You can also find other depressing facts about race and dating there, like the fetishization of Asian women.
25 is super depressing and infuriating. I mean, maybe it's good for people who got to their late 50s without ever having thought about rape to decide to write a book about rape, but what on earth was he doing for all those years when he wasn't disregarding his college girlfriend's experience and wasn't yet being the great rape detective? I'm sure he's right and lack of empathy and insight is fairly normal, but also Christ, what an asshole, right? Am I being unfair?
27: Way back in the dawn of the blog, Ogged linked to some piece in Salon by a black woman talking about how black women are portrayed in the media/by society as undesirable romantic partners. I can't find the post, but if someone else can it seems relevant.
Article in 16 reminded me of this apt passage from Nickel and Dimed. (Which had come through my Twitter feed recently--not something that I recalled form years back.)
When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
Seriously, the title referenced in 23 is an entire book on the subject, which addresses the issue from lots of angles. I'm surprised it hasn't come up already in this discussion.
ISTR this issue coming up before in a discussion of an article by some black chap bemoaning the absence of suitable (i.e. black female) romantic partners in his 97% nonblack home town. He was willing to drive up to 100 miles to try to meet women in other towns rather than consider dating a white or Hispanic woman.
I already read the book in 31. I'm not sure I'm ready for a whole different book.
29: Here's the blog post LB mentioned. Here's the article which does look quite good from my quick sample of it. A scintillating 32-comment discussion follows.
26 As another friend had in her FB feed, the tone deafness is deafening.
28 The problem is real, though, and so banging on the messenger doesn't feel right either. (Not meaning to single you out -- there's a whole lot of it going on, as you can imagine. We live on tourist dollars and enrollment numbers -- a lot of people are afraid of the [earned?] consequences of being the poster child for this issue.)
27 is, indeed, depressing, but click through to the original, Quartz writeup, which makes a lot more clear what's going on. I kind of hate the infographic, which leaves out enormous amounts of data in order to make very clear one thing.
So the 6.7% arrow from white women to white men means that, when white men expressed interest in white women, 6.7% of the white women expressed interest back, and that was a higher rate than they expressed interest back to men of other races.
But we don't have a sense of the spread, nor of total response rate. We do get the floor of the rate - in this case, that white women respond to black men at only 2.8% - but there's so much missing info. For instance, do any of the categories express initial interest at higher rates than others? Also, the spread between most and least likely to respond seems fairly consistent - in the neighborhood of 2:1 - but I'd be very curious about the shape of the curve: do e.g. Asian men greatly prefer Latinas to all others, or is it a mild preference over Asian women?
None of which is to change, in any way, the incredibly depressing facts that Rob outlines.
A full compilation of the commenters on the post in 36.
Joe O
Tripp
L.
ogged
Ezra*
JP (not me)
ac
Michael
Gary Farber
Donnie
Joe Drymala
aretino
benton
eb
*Who provided this perspective:
I don't know if the famously conservative Orange County, CA works as a "hippy haven", but I dated a gorgeous black girl (easily the best looking girl I've been with) there for about five months and never had a problem. The thought of her brother, a 290 pound noseguard for Northwestern, might have scared me, but I always considered potential societal disapproval, well, cool. I was a cocky high school senior, sure, but my attitude was very much, "if people have a problem with it, then good, those kinds of people deserve problems". It was never, notably, my problem, at least not in my head.
ISTR this issue coming up before in a discussion of an article by some black chap bemoaning the absence of suitable (i.e. black female) romantic partners in his 97% nonblack home town. He was willing to drive up to 100 miles to try to meet women in other towns rather than consider dating a white or Hispanic woman.
32: We might not have talked about the book, but we have talked about marriage as a middle-class, if not specifically white, entitlement.
Again, I have no idea how to find the thread, but I remember finding the conventional explanation (too many men are unemployed or unemployable, making them unmarriageable) unconvincing -- there's a lot of unpaid domestic labor an adult can contribute to a marriage, which is very economically and emotionally worthwhile even in the absence of paid work, and it seems odd to me that a model of marriage where "unmarriageable" men are doing the SAHD thing hasn't arisen.
Banks came to the conclusion that the only way out was for black women to consider other partners than black men, often incredibly unsuitable due to class, education and culture—and he had lots of sad statistics and anecdotes.
He also conducted a large number of interviews with black women, exploring why they didn't consider anyone besides black men. The answers were amazing, and sad when taken as a whole.
He thinks women beginning to look beyond would have positive effects on the community, and on relations between black men and women.
You can probably read a lot of this book in preview on Amzn.
"Because clearly the only people who can be fathers and husbands to black children and women are black men and their scarcity to fulfill those functions is the big hook why the readers should lament their staggeringly disproportionate incarceration?! Yuck."
Yes, clearly the rest of America is sprinting for the ghetto to try and fill that gap. Jesus Fucking Christ.
Obliviousness. Yuck.
(Also, devaluing the possible role of AfrAm men in the lives of Afram children is clearly the right thing to do, because obviously there isn't at least a forty-sixty chance of someone from outside that community having massive fucking racial issues. DQ should have included a link to that old "Free Your Mind" song from Sisters With Voices for extra "I don't even see race" points.)
Were you just "JP" then?
I'm guessing that's another JP.
I'm pretty sure that JP is neither of the above two. Language teacher/BitchPhd friend JP showed up later.
Not Jacqueline Paisley?
She's a regular at MetaFilter. She seems remarkably sane these days, particularly given where she was coming from, but it's still a little weird to see her comments.
44, 45: This seems harsh.
I'm pretty sure the point DQ was intending to make is that we should be caring about the incarceration/early mortality rate among black men primarily for their own sake, rather than for their social utility as available marriage partners and parents, and that's there's something disturbing about talking about the wellbeing of black men as a purely instrumental good.
Thank you, LB, you are exactly right re my intent.
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Kermit: SB137, those tougher regs on provider directories including weekly updates, was passed unanimously last week by Senate Health. The health plan association didn't even officially oppose it, they just noted concerns.
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This isn't something I'm going to argue over, but rereading the original post, I don't think it treats the well-being of black men as a purely instrumental good at all. It treats the well-being of black men as both an intrinsic and an instrumental good. The criticism in the OP seems like an uncharitable reading.
On that, I agree with you -- I didn't have DQ's reaction at all -- but while I think it might be wrong about the Upshot post, I don't think it's wrongheaded in the way LC suggests.
41: I probably bitched about this at the time because I remember being unsympathetic to him, but people who talk about "Franciscan bishops" should STFU about how so totally intimidatingly smart they are.
49 is weirdly comforting. As Rocky says to the Russians, "If I can change, and you can change ... everybody can change."
50: there's something disturbing about talking about the wellbeing of black men as a purely instrumental good.
Fair enough. Since this has been endorsed by the OP as a correct interpretation of their motives, I'd say it's wrong to imply that the role of AfrAm men in their families and communities is a "purely instrumental good" that is somehow icky to bring up because it goes beyond the pure appreciation of their rights as individuals. The community issues matter and should be discussed, and people should be able to see those discussions happening without derailment, avoidance or (especially) condescension.
DQ should have included a link to that old "Free Your Mind" song from Sisters With Voices
En Vogue, not SWV.
Is JQ the weird libertarian woman who was briefly internet famous some years ago?
Not Jacqueline Paisley? Y'all remember the thread where she showed up drunk? Good times!
Oh man, I forgot about Jacqueline Pansy Paisley Posey.
She was always pleasant to me, once sending me flowers to apologize for a comment that might have hurt my feelings. I am not surprised to hear that she's become sane now that she's out of the dating milieu.
I like the framing in the linked article, a lot, I think for the reasons stated in 7. By way of comparison, the "missing" group of black men in Ferguson, MO, in comparison to black women is (if I'm reading numbers in the NYT piece correctly and doing a correct quantitative comparison, not at all a safe bet) roughly similar to the "missing" contingent of men in their 20s in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. In other words, at least from the perspective of black women who want to date black men, incarceration and violent deaths have created a generational gap roughly comparable to the effects of fighting the bloodiest war of the 20th century.
Because the lack of men to choose from drove her nuts?
66: In her case, it was probably more a "the odds are good, but the goods are odd" situation.
once sending me flowers to apologize for a comment that might have hurt my feelings
This is a thing? I'm not made out of money, people.
I don't have the address of hardly anybody here anyway.
Fuck it, everyone gets an Edible Arrangement. The kid doesn't need to go to summer camp.
everyone gets an Edible Arrangement
But that might hurt Eggplant's feelings.
I sent CC an edible arrangement. It seemed the Mineshaft Appropriate way to say "thanks for discovering my grandpa's crazy secret identity and double life and hope your foot feels better soon."
That's a check box they have on their order form.
It was lovely. People (as in, I) should do stuff like that more often.
Well, there should be more mysterious grandfathers.
60: Yikes, how mortifying, you're right of course.
Late to the thread, but 28 is right on all counts. Wow. Dude, maybe the reason you're suddenly finding out people you know have been raped is because they never felt safe telling you before.
I get DQ's original flinch at the OP article. It reads as weirdly surgical and abstract/removed in the way that Upshot articles usually read to me. I like data and even I can't escape feeling as though they are pinning things under a microscope and deluding themselves that the the view through the lens is the only way of looking at the world.
That said, the issue is important on many levels, and I guess anything that gets more people talking/acknowledging is good.
The real problem is justice. Too many people put in jail for the actual crimes that they commit. We just need to set a reasonable ceiling of people per 100,000 in jail and make the hard decisions about who those people should be.
God, no. This smacks of an approach that black people are just going to be committing a lot of crimes but we're only going to jail a certain number of them, because principles. Which is not to say there doesn't need to be a pulling back on the drug war thing and such but there's still the very real fact that blacks really are committing crimes out of proportion to their representation in the overall population. The real problem is how and what are we going to do to improve the lot of black people.
"Which is not to say there doesn't need to be a pulling back on the drug war thing and such but there's still the very real fact that blacks really are committing crimes out of proportion to their representation in the overall population."
We had a rate of 100 per 100,000. It jacked up to 450 per 100,000 because of a very real rise in the crime rate:
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/overviewincarceration.html
that crime wave is gone now so maybe drop the rate to a ceiling of 200 per 100,000- get rid of probation, just let people out early- cut sentence lengths for non violent crimes- drop all the drug bullshit.
Blacks commit violent crimes at about 7x per capita more than whites and property crimes at about 3x per capita than whites. Any reasonable prison reform will lead to prisons becoming blacker. I don't think that is a problem.
"Which is not to say there doesn't need to be a pulling back on the drug war thing and such but there's still the very real fact that blacks really are committing crimes out of proportion to their representation in the overall population."
We had a rate of 100 per 100,000. It jacked up to 450 per 100,000 because of a very real rise in the crime rate:
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/overviewincarceration.html
that crime wave is gone now so maybe drop the rate to a ceiling of 200 per 100,000- get rid of probation, just let people out early- cut sentence lengths for non violent crimes- drop all the drug bullshit.
Blacks commit violent crimes at about 7x per capita more than whites and property crimes at about 3x per capita than whites. Any reasonable prison reform will lead to prisons becoming blacker. I don't think that is a problem.
"Which is not to say there doesn't need to be a pulling back on the drug war thing and such but there's still the very real fact that blacks really are committing crimes out of proportion to their representation in the overall population."
We had a rate of 100 per 100,000. It jacked up to 450 per 100,000 because of a very real rise in the crime rate:
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/overviewincarceration.html
that crime wave is gone now so maybe drop the rate to a ceiling of 200 per 100,000- get rid of probation, just let people out early- cut sentence lengths for non violent crimes- drop all the drug bullshit.
Blacks commit violent crimes at about 7x per capita more than whites and property crimes at about 3x per capita than whites. Any reasonable prison reform will lead to prisons becoming blacker. I don't think that is a problem.
It was failing to update for me I swear.
It's almost certain that black people commit violent and/or property crimes at a greater rate than other groups (unsurprisingly given their non-representative poverty rates). But I'm pretty suspicious of any specific numbers (e.g., 7x, 3x) because "are convicted of violent crimes at a higher rate" and "commit violent crimes at a higher rate" is a pretty clear case of a necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition*. This is especially true given what we know of (1) the effect of poverty on conviction rates for basically identical crimes and (2) the effect of race on conviction rates for basically identical crimes, both of which also involve a strong (and more or less identical) disparity.
*When reasoning practically - it could be that they're completely distinct, but even given the flaws in our system that's unlikely enough to be irrelevant.
Obviously, we need to not only end the drug war, but also end institutionalized racism.
I'm busy grading right now. Maybe one of you guys can get on that?
Dude, maybe the reason you're suddenly finding out people you know have been raped is because they never felt safe telling you before.
Even worse, their teacher may have been trying to keep them from talking.
(It's like Election, but worse and not in Omaha.)