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Harsh prison sentences are fucking over black families big time.
Perpetual
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http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15867956
Basically what is going on here is a self-perpetuating cycle. To begin with, the dating pool among blacks is seriously skewed in favor of men because of an extremely high incarceration rate among black men. If someone is locked up, they are out of the dating game, and even when they are released this usually doesn't change.
In addition, most black babies are born out of wedlock, which means they most likely grow up without father figures. Because of this, they never really understand the role of man in a marriage. Women expect to be in charge, and men resent it and as a result are more likely to either a) not marry b) cheat or c) commit a crime. As a result, they become incarcerated and the cycle continues.
The statistics in the article are incredibly
. I don't even know how to "fix" this problem. It's so messed up.
The Economist wrote:IMAGINE that the world consists of 20 men and 20 women, all of them heterosexual and in search of a mate. Since the numbers are even, everyone can find a partner. But what happens if you take away one man? You might not think this would make much difference. You would be wrong, argues Tim Harford, a British economist, in a book called “The Logic of Life”. With 20 women pursuing 19 men, one woman faces the prospect of spinsterhood. So she ups her game. Perhaps she dresses more seductively. Perhaps she makes an extra effort to be obliging. Somehow or other, she “steals” a man from one of her fellow women. That newly single woman then ups her game, too, to steal a man from someone else. A chain reaction ensues. Before long, every woman has to try harder, and every man can relax a little.
Real life is more complicated, of course, but this simple model illustrates an important truth. In the marriage market, numbers matter. And among African-Americans, the disparity is much worse than in Mr Harford’s imaginary example. Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.
Removing so many men from the marriage market has profound consequences. As incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%. Why this happened is complex and furiously debated. The era of mass imprisonment began as traditional mores were already crumbling, following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the invention of the contraceptive pill. It also coincided with greater opportunities for women in the workplace. These factors must surely have had something to do with the decline of marriage.
But jail is a big part of the problem, argue Kerwin Kofi Charles, now at the University of Chicago, and Ming Ching Luoh of National Taiwan University. They divided America up into geographical and racial “marriage markets”, to take account of the fact that most people marry someone of the same race who lives relatively close to them. Then, after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr Charles and Mr Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.”
Learning and earning
Similar problems afflict working-class whites, but they are more concentrated among blacks. Some 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock. The collapse of the traditional family has made black Americans far poorer and lonelier than they would otherwise have been. The least-educated black women suffer the most. In 2007 only 11% of US-born black women aged 30-44 without a high school diploma had a working spouse, according to the Pew Research Centre. Their college-educated sisters fare better, but are still affected by the sex imbalance. Because most seek husbands of the same race—96% of married black women are married to black men—they are ultimately fishing in the same pool.
Black women tend to stay in school longer than black men. Looking only at the non-incarcerated population, black women are 40% more likely to go to college. They are also more likely than white women to seek work. One reason why so many black women strive so hard is because they do not expect to split the household bills with a male provider. And the educational disparity creates its own tensions. If you are a college-educated black woman with a good job and you wish to marry a black man who is your socioeconomic equal, the odds are not good.
“I thought I was a catch,” sighs an attractive black female doctor at a hospital in Washington, DC. Black men with good jobs know they are “a hot commodity”, she observes. When there are six women chasing one man, “It’s like, what are you going to do extra, to get his attention?” Some women offer sex on the first date, she says, which makes life harder for those who prefer to combine romance with commitment. She complains about a recent boyfriend, an electrician whom she had been dating for about six months, whose phone started ringing late at night. It turned out to be his other girlfriend. Pressed, he said he didn’t realise the relationship was meant to be exclusive.
The skewed sex ratio “puts black women in an awful spot,” says Audrey Chapman, a relationship counsellor and the author of several books with titles such as “Getting Good Loving”. Her advice to single black women is pragmatic: love yourself, communicate better and so on. She says that many black men and women, having been brought up by single mothers, are unsure what role a man should play in the home. The women expect to be in charge; the men sometimes resent this. Nisa Muhammad of the Wedded Bliss Foundation, a pro-marriage group, urges her college-educated sisters to consider marrying honourable blue-collar workers, such as the postman. But the simplest way to help the black family would be to lock up fewer black men for non-violent offences.
Basically what is going on here is a self-perpetuating cycle. To begin with, the dating pool among blacks is seriously skewed in favor of men because of an extremely high incarceration rate among black men. If someone is locked up, they are out of the dating game, and even when they are released this usually doesn't change.
In addition, most black babies are born out of wedlock, which means they most likely grow up without father figures. Because of this, they never really understand the role of man in a marriage. Women expect to be in charge, and men resent it and as a result are more likely to either a) not marry b) cheat or c) commit a crime. As a result, they become incarcerated and the cycle continues.
The statistics in the article are incredibly
. I don't even know how to "fix" this problem. It's so messed up. Perpetual on
0
Posts
End the three strikes law.
End the "War on Drugs".
You just either solved the problem, or a big chunk of it.
So yea don't jump to conclusions.
And I'd rather have people locked up if they need to be locked up instead of having them blow more semen into the genepool.
The only solution is for black women to marry men of other races more. Perhaps give a stronger tax incentive or something. But as I said before, even decent men today see black women as undesirable for marriage.
Alternative: put people in jail for saying "oh no you di'in't."
So basically you're saying that:
???
So basically an affirmative action, but for marriage and with money.
Got it.
My personal solution is to not give a fuck and let the problem resolve itself over time. Perhaps you would like to subscribe to my newsletter.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/
or we could ignore the obvious troll
Are you kidding me?
You naively believe all races are found equally attractive in equal proportions, in the United States of America?
If anybody else actually believes that, let your name be known.
Seriously, the guy suggested we should pay people to marry black women.
I think this will happen to white women as well, to a degree. Fewer men of all races are getting college degrees compared to women, and it seems to be the beginning of a shift in gender politics. We may see a higher number of women that either have to 'settle' for someone that is not of their social-economic class (which is another thing people tend to do - marry their own class) or remain alone.
mandatory minimums?
mandatory minimums
add that to your list and we're wrapped up and good to go
Seriously, Mandatory Minimum Sentencing is one of the greatest socio-economic evils of our time.
This happened whether I was looking at white guys, Hispanic guys, Asian guys, Indian, whatever. The funny thing is it would be less irksome if the people only checked off their own ethnicity, or one or two "ideal" ethnicities. But to explicitly go in and check off every single one? There's a message to be had there.
Anyway, I'm eating a big fat piece of interracial relationship pie right now, but then again, I never felt any compulsion to date within my ethnic group, anyway.
Edit: I think the proposed incentive for black women to date interracially is ridiculous FWIW. We do, however, need to stop drumming into their heads that they're bad women if they marry out or whatever, because black women get this "issue" that they're the keepers of black families forever omg. If black women felt less like they'd be ostracized for dating whoever, and if the guy is white and treats her well, go the fuck for it, then to hell with whatever oblique feelings about our attractiveness that we get from anyone else.
I will look up some articles that I read that discussed this, but the long and short of it is: we're considered unfeminine/manly, and our hair sucks.
Well didn't Chris Rock's "Bad Hair" movie bring up that point, that black men like white women on the basis of the hair alone?
In reference to your above post, I read somewhere ages ago the same thing that you mentioned: That black women are expected to be the keepers of the black family and so on. As well as reading that with more and more black women getting degrees and holding professional jobs; the high rate of unemployment among black men makes them unappealing as mates to a black woman with a masters, for example. So they look around, and go for what they see a majority of: white men.
Yeah, unfortunately and disappointingly, he then went on to explore hair care options that involve making black hair more like white hair (weaves, relaxers, etc.) so that black women (and by proxy, his daughter) could benefit from those results, rather than endorsing a satisfaction with black hair the way it is naturally. A lot of black women were ... unhappy with Chris's conclusions.
while black women are certainly considered the 'other' from a social standpoint I think the phenomenom of people dating within their own racial group is at least as big a problem.
it's not just race either, people marry the same nationality, class, religion more often than they don't
I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say that the unfeminine thing is true. Black women (in the US at least) are way less feminine than other women. They're also a lot less submissive- they'll have no problem telling you to your face that you're an idiot. And yes I'm stereotyping here, not all women are like that, but more often than not it's the truth.
I'm probably overlooking something, but I feel that nationality, class, and religion can serve to affect the quality of a relationship far more than ethnicity/racial group, so I have less of a problem with people sticking with those things.
I don't mean in the sense that I consider people who share those groups with me to be my "equals" vs. those who are not, but that when I list my interests and passions (say: blogging/internet forums/gaming/fanfiction, sci-fi/fantasy, Anglophilic tendencies, anime, etc. etc.), I feel I am more likely to find someone who shares more of them within those categories than outside them.
Probably grossly overlooking something in your point, though, so feel free to set me straight if I'm being a goose.
A) Feminine as defined how? Especially since you separate submissive behavior from feminine behavior.
oh i think sticking to your own race is pretty foolish, but that doesn't meant it's not the norm. most of the time we hang out with people that are similar to us and often relationships arise from just being around people. There's a lot of subtle and sort of unspoken pressure to date with a race too in the united states.
in my (anecdotal) experience, people from the indian subcontinent are very, very conscious of dating a certain race, although their conception of race is quite different from our own (a bengali dating a pashtun? the scandal!). I think in the states people are less comfortable being outwardly racist, so they tend to use 'soft' powers to discourage interracial pairings.
I lived in a little border town for a time where everyone was white, hispanic, or indian. I dated a black girl from Phoenix, and when she came down people reacted very stereotypically towards her. Watching her in stores, ignoring her at restaurants, etc.
A little while later I had a black girl from the UK living with me. After she opened her mouth (very posh English accent) it was the total opposite. People always wanted to talk to her, she would go out to the grocery store and get hit on, people asked her how she did her hair, where she got her clothes, on and on. I had my bosses at work specifically tell me to bring her to a work function. After she left, people were always asking me "When is she coming back?"
So again, is this a global problem or is it more America's racial issues?
Oh, it's verrrrry much America's racial issues. Race in the West Indies, for example, is extremely permeable as well.
I was going to address your statement about female accessories/dressing up (I don't know where you live or what black women you've been meeting, but that's... atypical), but I thought the bolded statement was more odd. Having larger bodies (if that's a true representation of what's going on) or being obese is unfeminine?
Yeah, I thought as much, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
It threw her for a loop too, and she was surprised about it all. I remember her telling me that she was always told (growing up as an African immigrant in the UK) that African Americans were THE ideal that all black people should strive for. And then she comes over here and its very obvious that she her skin color didn't matter the second it became apparent that she was not "American black" but "Foreigner black" and that was acceptable to most people across all the major racial lines. They treated her like they might treat a white girl from the UK, pretty much.
All in all it was a bit of an eye opener for me too.
Actually dude's right, this is a fairly accurate model of people's racial preferences vis-a-vis dating
don't you think so? I think it's pretty safe to say that larger women look less feminine than small, delicate women. I know there's plenty of small delicate black women, I've just noticed that they're more rare.
It's hard to talk honestly about this though. I can't really give any evidence, and I feel like whatever I say people are going to jump on me for being racist and sexist.
Unfeminine? Yeah it is, just as it is equally emasculating to be a fat, disgusting goose