Polly Wanna ...

Last Sunday, my ex text-messaged me from a Superbowl party. At this point, I don't remember what she wanted. I wasn't watching the game. I have little interest in football. That said, if the Lions ever make it to the big game, I'll probably watch it. Admittedly, that is unlikely to happen within my lifetime. So, I had no vested interest in who won. However, I love New York City. The ex and I have been there many times, even since our divorce. Our kid, having grown up watching "Friends," (paraphrasing Woody Allen) romanticizes Manhattan all out of proportion. I suppose that's true of me too. So, when I replied to her text, completely as an afterthought, I wrote "Go Giants." To my surprise, she responded indicated her unequivocal support for The Patriots. This puzzled me. Detroiters and black people typically loathe Boston. This stems from both the bitter Pistons/Celtics rivalry of the 1980s and the quite common impression that Boston is a very negro-unfriendly city. The Patriots, of course, lost to the New York Giants. I didn't even know the outcome of the game until she sent me another text, which said "So what." When I called her back to inquire as to what that meant (I had already forgotten about the game) she informed me that NYC had indeed prevailed against the odds. As Mercury Morris said shortly after the game, in the NFL, on any given Sunday , any team can beat any other team... except in 1972. When I asked her why she'd thrown her support behind a team associated with Boston, she admitted that it was only Tom Brady that she was routing for. I pressed her as to why she would give a rat's ass about Tom Brady. Her reply was that he was sexy. This took me aback, as I have never heard her express any interest in any white dude; not Clooney, not Pitt , none of them. Her type is more typically exemplified by DMX... if DMX was taller and had an 11" penis. So, I asked her if she would screw Tom Brady, and she replied in the affirmative. That led me to think about all of the black women on the internet who blog about their preference for interracial relationships...
Quite a few black women in the blogosphere who express an interest in having a sexual relationship with a non-black male justify their predilection with the claim that black men have long since abandoned them in preference for white women. That is counter-factual. It's a ridiculous assertion to suggest that African-American men don't have an overwhelming preference for black women. The numbers of black men, who marry non-black women, even when restricted to African-American men of considerable financial means, are quite low. Black men, especially in the racist United States, who have white wives or girlfriends, are merely more conspicuous. For instance, no one takes notices of that the majority of NBA basketball players marry some girl who grew up in the same church that their grandmothers attended. However, when a high-profile black male athlete—fully inculcated with the white American beauty ideal through a lifetime of having been beaten over the head with the white media’s ubiquitous insistence of the aesthetic preeminence of bony yellow-haired white women—dates or marries a white woman, it garners an inordinate amount of attention from all quarters, most of it negative. Moreover, is rather hypocritical that black women, who claim their autonomous right to date whomever they please, would feel it necessary to espouse this sort of fallacious rational. I would suggest that there are more pragmatic reasons why black women are beginning to “date-out” in increasingly large numbers. All of this “black men don’t appreciate black women” business is a subterfuge for the reality that black women are now in a position to date/marry way up from a socioeconomic perspective.

Black women express an embracement of the white beauty ideal to a much larger degree than black men. This is strongly hinted at in the disparate grooming styles commonly employed by black men and black women. Black men go out of their way to distinguish themselves from whites. Black men typically groom themselves in opposition to the white male aesthetic, e.g. shaved heads, facial hair, braids, colorful suits etc. Black women, on the other hand, tend to groom themselves in imitation of whites. This is especially true with regard to their hair, which they often either chemically damage or cover up with weaves so as to appear straight. Additionally, there is an increasingly prevalent tendency for black women, whose bodies exhibit a more voluptuous goddess-like sexual dimorphism than any other group, to starve themselves into the emaciated and slightly androgynous body-type preferred by whites. This is particularly noticeable among young black women, who have been brainwashed from birth by the white media.

For the record, I have almost zero sexual interest in white women. That said, I have to agree that it is probably in the interests of college educated professional black women to widen their pool of potential mates, given sistahs' rather bourgeois priorities. With black women graduating at much higher rates than black men, for any number of reasons, there simply aren't going to be enough black men who are what a professional black woman would consider marriageable. Moreover, many black men who are educated professionals, myself included, don't necessarily want to commit themselves to domestic incarceration at the same stage in their lives that most black women do. If you're a black man with a halfway decent job, you're in a target-rich romantic environment. There is an argument to be made for staying single into one's late 30s... or perhaps even early 40s.

On the other hand, in my purely anecdotal observations of white guys with whom I went to school and work with, they are hell-bent on getting married and buying a house way out in the middle of nowhere the very second that they graduate from college. And, again in my purely anecdotal observations, if marriage doesn't work out for them, they're ready to jump right back in there, over and over.

This is going to be a bitter pill for some black men to swallow, but it is likely that the numbers of black/white interracial unions, which are at present overwhelmingly between black men and white women, will shift to the opposite end of the spectrum. As previously mentioned, black women are graduating from universities and entering the professional ranks at higher rates than black men. This creates an environment where black women are surrounded by white males, with rarely a black man to be seen, for most of their child-bearing years. Patriarchy and racism are other factors that will contribute to this shift. As interracial unions become more socially acceptable, white males will find that they have less to lose by crossing the color-line than white women. Perhaps this wasn’t true a generation ago, but in contemporary society a white man who marries a black woman suffers no loss of social status. He is still a member of that most privileged of groups, Oprah notwithstanding, a white man in a white man’s country. Whether one wants to accept it or not, in this racist white-male-dominated society, white women do suffer something of a loss of social status when they choose a black male partner. One needs only to consider the disparity between the paucity of white female celebrities in relationships with black males as compared to the much higher number of black female celebrities involved with white to see this played out. Even white female celebs who shamelessly appropriate black cultural affectations—Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Amy Winehouse, Fergie, Gwen Stefani etc.—rarely ever become seriously involved with black men.

The only bright spot in this cloud of apparent black male obsolescence is that this may strike a blow against America’s innately racist nature and the de facto segregation that persists to this day. Whites show an overwhelming disinclination to live in proximity to black people, even black people of a similar socioeconomic stratum. But, no one is going to tell Robert De Nero or George Lucas that their black wives aren’t welcome in the inner sanctums of white privilege. Even if these black women completely reject all things black, and I’m not saying that they do, their very presence forces whites in their husband’s circle, many of whom have likely never had any social contact with black folks, to confront their racist mythologies. Moreover, most of these marriages, as with most of all marriages, are going to end in divorce. This will have the effect of creating a more equitable distribution of wealth by transferring vast sums of assets out of the hands of white males. And, whether or not these marriages last, they will, more often than not, produce children. A white man with a child, whom he would presumably love above all else, who would be considered black by society at large is likely to use his power to combat the institutional racism that would impact that child’s life… Strom Thurmond excepted.